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.
It's mostly covers, all sung flawlessly, and most of them sit honestly. "Queen of the Silver Dollar" is an obvious character piece, "The Bottle Let Me Down" is honky-tonk costume, and "For No One" is a polite interpretation, for whatever that's worth. None of them pretend to be confession. "Boulder to Birmingham," her own grief for Gram Parsons, is the real thing, and you can hear what it cost.
That contrast is why "Coat of Many Colors" jars. It's Dolly's childhood, and nothing in Harris's life taught her what it's like to be mocked for being poor. The closer she gets to Dolly's emotional pitch, the eerier it sounds, less like tribute and more like borrowed testimony. Earlier on the record she shows us what presence sounds like. Here she can only give us a portrait, in tones that make it clear she was never inside that coat herself.
It tainted the album for me, and that's probably unfair. Honest isn't the same as meant, though. Outside the one song that's truly hers, it feels like a performer rather than an artist, and that uncanny valley is unpleasant in songs built on emotion. I suspect I'd have liked an album that was more hers more, and I notice there's another on the list. Hopefully she matures.
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.
There's No Place Like America Today hit hard. 1975, three years after Superfly, and it feels like the album Mayfield wanted to write as a person rather than the more commercial previous one.
This isn't your feel-good soul record, and that feels right to me for the subject matter. It's subdued funk, stripped back and deliberate. Hard Times was my obvious highlight, and it takes a lot for me to have space for a religious song
What makes it work is the restraint. Mayfield could have gone big, but he went deep and slow instead. IMO, that works. The cover is unsubtle in the same way as the general vibe. On looking, t’s a 1937 photo of Black flood victims.
Some tracks drag slightly in the middle, but I enjoyed the album and admired the message and the lack of padding.Again, so real it doesn’t have to tell you that, and relatedly a fascinating slice of history that works as oral telling as much as musically.
My first reaction to this was a slightly frustrated liking. That feels odd because I do like Sullivan in general, and I can see why this record has received so much critical love. There's clearly a thoughtful idea behind it: the spoken interludes and songs build a kind of collective testimony about sex, relationships, money, insecurity and self-worth. I like that they're allowed to contradict; Sullivan allows those perspectives to be in dialogue with one another and with the songs rather than forcing them into a conveniently tidy empowerment narrative. I appreciate that.
Lots of credit for ambition. I just don't find the individual songs particularly compelling as pieces of writing. A lot of them feel familiar rather than revealing, and the lyricism strikes me as similarly conventional; the framing gives the material a sense of importance that the writing itself doesn't always sustain. The record is conceptually more interesting to me (and it is interesting!) than it is musically or lyrically, which isn't quite enough to overcome how little of it actually sticks with me.
Pick Up Your Feelings is good, though, and I wanted more of the album to live up to it. Sit on It was, frankly, trite. I noticed on Genius that Sullivan described Heaux Tales as an EP rather than an album, and I'd probably agree with that. It feels like a really interesting concept that I wanted to see developed a little further.
It's a 3 I really wanted to be a 4.
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.
A soundtrack to a film that doesn't exist. I liked it as a soundscape, and I could see it in a movie. The issue I have is slightly that it's designed to be background music, and it is. It's not striking by design, and so it's an implementation of something that sacrifices impact. It's good, but it's good in a genre that isn't world-shaking. It is what it is.
This is, in short, very much my jam.
It's fun. Scholockly, schlocky fun.
Two Rod Stewart albums in a fortnight. My word. It's barely passable soft rock with just a little more guitar. Maggie May okay, first song really agonisingly racist by today's standards.
I liked this more than I thought I would - as with Simon and Garfunkel, the songs do actually have things to say, and the arrangements are indeed often pleasingly intricate for a pop album. I like a lot of Divine Comedy, and I can hear the traces of that future (and a past of music hall crooners) in this music. I particularly liked the light and shade in Hero of The War and The Old Man's Back Again, but I'm a sucker for cheerfully melodied bleakness.
It's a baroque pop album with a little rock, country, psychedelia and folk in there. It doesn't always work, but it's almost all at least a bit interesting. He wrote it, he sung it, and he chose that. I'll forgive a lot for that, even though the pacing is often a little slow for me.
Split between a three and a four, but I'll give a three because it's patchy.
When I listened for the lyrics, it was awful. When I relaxed and listened to the vibes, it was foot tappingly good with some pleasant-on-headphones little spine tingle effects. It's alright if the voice is just another instrument, and then it was just kind of fun. A bit vapid, but maybe I'm not inebriated enough. I think even in desert rock I can have the same quality of sound and a bit more thoughtful lyrics.
Technically good, but possibly horrifically I'm going to call it too much of a dirge for me. Gets foot tappy later on, though, and the lyricism is undeniable in parts. One of those albums that rewards actively listening when he isn't bitching about the Beatles.
`it is absolutely not what I listen to music for, but it is also undeniably significantly relaxing and, if you are going to do background music then this is excellent ambient music. My relationship with music is very much active listening, but I'll allow it. It's a pleasantly odd experience; I can as much picture it during a study session as during a massage or utter solitude. It has almost no substance to cling onto, and I admire how much it dedicates itself to that; by the goals of the album, it's a complete success. And, crucially, musically good for what it is; it doesn't annoy in the way muzak does to me generally.
Totally not what I expected out of a 1001 albums list, and for that reason delightful. Slightly to my astonishment, I'm going to give it five stars.
Can't spell slightly cheesy fun without fun. It's a vibe and I have a lot of time for it. That’s Not Me is obviously a banger.
I was interested in listening to this after the listening notes and not having listened to ZZ Top in any meaningful way. It was not what I would have guessed based on the look of the band at all. I expected relatively intense blues rock and lyrics. What I got was more or less an early MTV playlist, all shine, sheen, bops and not too much to say.
Musically, it’s OK. Pop rock is going to pop rock, and it feels very precisely designed and produced for that. It’s also not really an album in some respects so much as a playlist of songs - there’s no links or anything, and it’s so poppy that it’s hard to critique it as more than was it a bop? And yes, it kind of was. Polished and disposable in the same way that gym t-shirts are; OK, but you wouldn’t miss a specific one. I keep getting an internal A&R man telling me, well, you can sell it. And yes, it’s accessible and unchallenging. Would I put it on by choice or think of it again? Probably not. Would I be annoyed if someone else put it on? No.
It’s a low 2 to 3, ending on a two.
A delight of an album. Energy, verve and musicianship.
I have, without looking but for the same reasons as everyone else, given this a 5. It is very obviously a 5. I don't know why I'm writing this note for me or anyone else. Considered giving it a 4 to be contrary but I won't because it's obviously a 5.
Thank you for your time, future me.
