My 1001 Albums Journey

Album	You	Global	Diff
Suicide Suicide	5	2.46	+2.54
Oar Alexander 'Skip' Spence	5	2.46	+2.54
Bitte Orca Dirty Projectors	5	2.69	+2.31
Djam Leelii Baaba Maal	5	2.79	+2.21
Arular M.I.A.	5	2.83	+2.17
Gris Gris Dr. John	5	2.88	+2.12
Kala M.I.A.	5	2.91	+2.09
The Sun Rises In The East Jeru The Damaja	5	2.92	+2.08
Very Pet Shop Boys	5	2.93	+2.07
The Gilded Palace Of Sin The Flying Burrito Brothers	5	2.93	+2.07

Album	You	Global	Diff
2112 Rush	1	3.39	-2.39
Pyromania Def Leppard	1	3.13	-2.13
The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway Genesis	1	3.07	-2.07
Tarkus Emerson, Lake & Palmer	1	2.79	-1.79
Basket of Light Pentangle	1	2.76	-1.76
Hot Fuss The Killers	2	3.74	-1.74
Brothers In Arms Dire Straits	2	3.74	-1.74
Dire Straits Dire Straits	2	3.72	-1.72
Californication Red Hot Chili Peppers	2	3.7	-1.7
The Joshua Tree U2	2	3.67	-1.67

Artist	Albums	Average
Beatles	4	5
David Bowie	7	4.43
Stevie Wonder	4	4.75
Bob Dylan	3	5
Van Morrison	3	5
Talking Heads	3	4.67
Black Sabbath	3	4.67
Simon & Garfunkel	3	4.67
Beastie Boys	3	4.67
Miles Davis	2	5
M.I.A.	2	5
Steely Dan	2	5
Bob Marley & The Wailers	2	5
The Rolling Stones	2	5
Public Enemy	2	5
Creedence Clearwater Revival	3	4.33
Pink Floyd	3	4.33
Neil Young	3	4.33

Artist	Albums	Average
Emerson, Lake & Palmer	2	1
Rush	2	1.5
U2	4	2

Led Zeppelin III

Led Zeppelin

4/5

Cosmo's Factory

Creedence Clearwater Revival

4/5

Bryter Layter

Nick Drake

4/5

lyrics are beautiful and suggestive, production is tight, orchestration adds rather than detracts, something uplifting here tho we all know the tragedy of the artist.

Machine Head

Deep Purple

2/5

Some of the instrumentation is inspired, like the drumming at the end of ‘Space Truckin’,’ but quickly gets repetitive. The songwriting is weak, and Ian Gillan’s voice does not do it for me. This defines generic rock music - without soul, try-hard lyrics that get you nowhere, blues riffs without true blues intensity that the likes of Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath manage to incorporate into their albums. ‘Lazy’ is the best song here - at least the harmonica has some oomph.

Ramones

5/5

Not often does the idea behind an album or a band affect how much you enjoy the music. It may change your perception/understanding, but not the quality. This is an exception. Once I realized the Ramones were a goofy and violent rewriting of rockabilly, a Buddy Holly in free fall, I could listen freely and enjoy the shit out of them.

3 Feet High and Rising

De La Soul

5/5

It remains a peak of all hip hop, not just the alternative brand. It’s murky and creative and affirmative b/c it is engineered by thinking and is immensely enjoyable to listen to.

Heartbreaker

Ryan Adams

3/5

Could be an album I like a lot, it’s an album I like some - good voice, bad person. Never felt like it quite got going - the rawest moments don’t endure. It is palpably better than so much pop country, but I don’t feel compelled to return to it. I have to trust this is mostly because the music is ultimately unimpressive and incomplete. ‘Shakedown on 9th Street’ is a believable thing, tho, and the harmonica is there for real. I might return to it…

Youth And Young Manhood

Kings of Leon

3/5

3.5/5. Underrated. This one has a coherent energy and gives me authentic joy. Have other artists done a better job with this sort of thing? Yes - but it is distinct enough to be an enduring effort.

Pink Moon

Nick Drake

4/5

Sparser and shorter than Bryter Layter, just as poignant and original. I do bemoan who he must have been an influence on - quiet, depressed, and tedious singer-songwriters. But he’s a thing-in-itself. He’s far from boring and wants life as sad as he may have suffered. He wants things to work out. That’s what makes it so sad.

I See A Darkness

Bonnie "Prince" Billy

4/5

Most people will focus on the lyrics, which makes sense, since they are poetic, oblique, and uniquely literary. Yet they wouldn't function as effectively as they so often do if weren't for the efficient and compelling instrumentation. See 'A Minor Place,' 'I See A Darkness,' 'Death to Everyone,' 'Knockturn,' 'Madeleine-Mary,' 'Today I Was an Evil One.' It's not all sombre piano, but big guitars too. I'm not too down having heard it. Maybe that's b/c 'by dread I'm inspired.' It has sweetness and tenderness, needed components of downcast forms. Possibly he has managed to weaken the attack.

Paul Simon

4/5

It’s Paul Simon but not the best. This has less to do with the individual songs and more to do with the feel of the album as a whole, which seems a bit scattered. Still some great songs: "Mother and Child Reunion," "Run that Body Down," "Armistice Day," "Peace like a River," "Papa Hobo," "Congratulations." "Me and Julio" is not very good, however, tho it sticks around, and "Paranoid Blues" works as a homage to the American blues but not a fantastic rendition.

War

U2

2/5

The drums stand out, not quite the dynamics of the Pixies, but have power nonetheless. The rest is preachy and hardly vital. Not for me. Is it for anyone? I really can’t tell. ‘Drowning Man,' perhaps, but even this I most likely won't have on rotation.

21

Adele

4/5

Honestly, pretty fucking good. It’s overplayed, but I’m happy that I never listened fully when it first came out so I can enjoy it more now. It’s not the songwriting, that’s clear, but I can’t be deaf to the singing. It’s on a level not often heard.

Suicide

5/5

If you find this album too weird, I don’t know what to say. It's ahead of its time in that it manages to brilliantly negotiate languor and energy. ‘Cheree’ is gorgeous while ‘Frankie Teardrop’ predates mucho.

Da Capo

Love

4/5

Fantastic - L.A. before its Doors were opened, tho Arthur Miller's voice can be even more rangy and dynamic than Morrison's. It's all and that's everything at once, with flutes too ('Orange Skies,' '¡Que Vida!,’ ‘She Comes in Colors’) and I like that loads. Where'd they hide from me all these years? This one comes in colors.

The World is a Ghetto

War

4/5

This album is a four-cornered room, maybe a regiment to be exact, the funk being tight and ordered, tho it’s tapestried with flow too. It’s rich, man, and spatializes itself in its four-angled ghetto, just good enough for moi.

California

American Music Club

2/5

Not remembering this one, I predict, it’s not doing it for me. It’s fine-fine but not enough. ‘Blue and Grey Shirt’ has got something, at least, and, okay, ‘Bad Liquor’ came as a surprise. All the good songs on the backend. It’s the ‘Western Sky’ that I like, and ‘Last Harbor,' too. But not much, honest.

Django Django

3/5

It has bop, but does it have muscle? It may, since the drummer is indeed the MVP (Rolling Stone magazine). It may not, since vocalist Vincent Neff does not have enuff oomff. Production and percussion wise tho, very cool. Check out ‘Firewater,’ Hand of Man,’ ‘WOR’ and ‘Storm.’ The Cairo one, too. Yep.

Horses

Patti Smith

5/5

I've nothing to add. This is a permanent one.

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

Kanye West

5/5

Incredibly nostalgic album for me, and upon listening again, it holds up remarkably well. It's an eerie and uncomfortable foreshadowing of the special brand of opulence and egotism that defines the 2020s, the artist that engineered this album, and several of its featured musicians. Instrumentally and texturally brilliant, but it's the atmospheric and cultural implications the album imparts that give it its uncanny quality. To those who heard it when it first appeared, listen now - it’s even stranger, and far sadder. It has too little innocence.

Another Green World

Brian Eno

5/5

Production quality is this album's chief statement. How good is it? Listen to "In Dark Trees" and "Everything Merges With The Night," and see for yourself. The whole thing has the simplicity, compactness, and beauty of Pet Sounds, which makes for a rich, complex experience. Somethings are gorgeous, and this is. I'll come running back.

More Songs About Buildings And Food

Talking Heads

4/5

There are ‘smart’ albums you’ll have to be in a heady mood to enjoy (TPAB, Trout Mask Replica) - at the very least they require taking time out of the day to absorb. Then there are albums like this, which are ‘smart’ but don’t in the same way demand an investment. Not the best Talking Heads, but it endures. And what an opener to send it off.

Dusty In Memphis

Dusty Springfield

5/5

Dusty, surely dusty, her voice is air, gravel, and reality. She does it better than almost everyone. This album, like her, is a book I'll always be reading.

...Baby One More Time

Britney Spears

4/5

I can’t not like this, so I’ll go ahead and dig it. Reputations aren’t at stake. A great opener, ‘Soda Pop’ is fantastic, the whole thing makes me feel good. Fuck it. The beat goes on…

Hot Buttered Soul

Isaac Hayes

4/5

‘I got another gang story to tell, peep...’ - perhaps like others, I know this from Compton’s Most Wanted and the classic they spawned. This one is soulfully and richly produced. What makes it even better is Hayes’s choice of songs to cover. By the Time I Get to Phoenix - like Bowie doing Wild is the Wind.

The La's

4/5

Apparently a major influence on Oasis and Britpop, you can hear it, but hear something else too. If this's a revival, it's also a 'hey now, I'm here' sort of thing. And for those seeking a restoration of The Beatles, go back and listen to your Kinks. Yeah, this list is too British, but this is a good find.

Seventeen Seconds

The Cure

2/5

'Strangers / Nobody knows we love' (from 'Secrets') is a moving summary of this album's evocation of loneliness. But that triumph doesn't persist. It's not that it's too dark - it's that the darkness is uninteresting and finally w/o the quality of what makes dejected art a buoy for a suffering mind and body. The storytelling is weak, the production feeble. Maybe their other records are more developed, but this stagnates w/ no howl - not for me.

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars

David Bowie

5/5

This and Station to Station seem to me to be Bowie's major peaks. This 'hazy cosmic jive' has a lot going for it, but I'd like to think it abides b/c it has the humor and vitality that 'conceptual' projects do not always carry. This never crumbles under its own pretensions - no tedium or inanity here.

Twelve Dreams Of Dr. Sardonicus

Spirit

4/5

This had a much more soulful sound than I expected, and was lighter on its feet than I assumed. The album art and pretentious title didn't excite me, but the instrumentation is often creative and the songs have a sweetness to them. Unfortunately, the lyrics are frequently wanting, and overall there is something unrealized, which other LA groups at the time, like The Doors and Love, didn't suffer from. I'll give it a 4, tho, considering their influence on subsequent artists - again, Americans got there first (sorry Zeppelin...).

Dummy

Portishead

4/5

This album deserves its critical acclaim, because it's inventive and yielded a new sort of musical experience. Much of it I really enjoy. But I'm not all that convinced by Beth Gibbons's vocals, which sustain a monotony that I find frustrating at times and do not always believe in. And yet, and yet, it so cleverly incorporates Hip Hop (in 1994!) that I'm left unsure what I feel. I guess I kept longing for a spark, and I only got ashes, tho beautiful ones.

The Atomic Mr Basie

Count Basie & His Orchestra

5/5

This is killing. And Basie plays with so much space, and spacing, so sparse ('Midnite Blue') I’m full to the brim with pleasure. Who’s that trumpeter on ‘Duet’? Man, this is good - not quite the last of the big bands (Thad Jones/Mel Lewis, Joe Henderson), but a great selection here - especially for a list so wanting of jazz.

A Christmas Gift For You From Phil Spector

Various Artists

3/5

The songs are what they are (and Phil is who he is), but I do love that 'wall of sound' style, especially featured on classics from girl groups like The Ronettes and The Crystals. I'd take Nat King's Christmas album over this - I'm not all that into these jingly Holiday tunes - but this is worth a listen.

Pearl

Janis Joplin

5/5

Her voice doesn’t merely come from a real place - it takes you there as well, which can’t be said about many ‘real things.’ It wobbles and clouds over, tho it’s also so clear, sound, and solid. Does she push it? Not as much as you may think. So give me Janis. Then I’m good, and in that special way, I can live all over again.

Birth Of The Cool

Miles Davis

5/5

What's cool is this is as much the birth of an idea, an aesthetic, a posture, as it is superb music. Not much to say here - Miles inventing again.

Very

Pet Shop Boys

5/5

'I wouldn't normally do this kind of thing' - also, I wouldn't normally like this kind of thing. But I do. Because it's more than the sum of its heartstrings - and it has lyrics like 'to free in me / the trust I never dared.' It takes balls to feel good - and the music got those in droves. 'Then, when I was lonely / I thought again / and changed my mind.' That's good. 'Looking for love and getting / nothing that's worth regretting.' And so is that. 'Together.' Why not? Whitman's Calamus, I hear it, read it, happily, finally, all over again.

Grievous Angel

Gram Parsons

4/5

‘I can’t dance / I guess, I’m just one of the unfortunate few,’ sings Parsons. I guess we’re some of the fortunate many who have discovered this artist. I’m not so sure I care that it’s a fusion of rock and country - big deal - that’s not his (or hers, Emmylou's) genius. It’s that it’s got soul, humor, voice, pluck. And he can sing, just enough, intimately, consistently, quietly. These songs story so much really - for that, it gets my appreciation.

Black Sabbath

5/5

Hard rock/heavy metal seldomly holds my attention for more than, say, thirty seconds, before it falls apart under its pretenses, inanities, tediums. Zeppelin and Sabbath are the formidable exceptions. It must be that the music Bill War, Geezer Butler, and Tony Iommi orchestrate is authentically blues-inspired, regularly funky, always improvisatory. It doesn't even feel particularly 'heavy,' at least no heavier than its progenitors - congrats to them for that. I can listen to Sabbath's enduring riffs often and gratefully.

The Wall

Pink Floyd

4/5

'No dark sarcasm in the classroom' - that'll stay with me, as will much else. But. This is a sometimes pretentious, not always profound, album with quite a few unpretentious and profound songs. It was conceived ambitiously, so it ought to be judged that way, and I'm not moved by its conceptual frame. It can be puerile, it can be surface, it lacks intellectual stamina. But it has 'The Thin Ice,' 'Mother,' 'Hey You,' 'Comfortably Numb,' and some others ('Goodbye Blue Sky'), that are permanent and real expressions.

Dub Housing

Pere Ubu

4/5

'You should hear how we syllogize / You should hear / about how Babel fell and still echoes away.' All of this, and the rest, is very, very good - original, dynamic, not too deep in strange land, and off kilter enuf - but founded on the pleasure principle, I'll not return as often as I do to others. For sure, it's an unforgettable listen, not that demanding, a pleasurable thing in the end. 'Caligari's Mirror' and '(Pa) Ubu Dance Party' prove it's so. Maybe a bit too cool for school. And not as perfect as Marquee Moon.

The Age Of The Understatement

The Last Shadow Puppets

3/5

‘The fairytale was climbing up / A mountain far too steep.’ That's a rare, inspired lyric moment. Musically impressive because lush and adequate but never honest, hardly a big deal. I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt b/c the songs are short and the production is good enough to overcome some of its shortcomings. But not that many of them. 'My Mistakes Were Made For You' is the strongest single - and 'I Don't Like You Anymore' has got punky oomph - but it's all a bit blandish, and the legitimately sexy orchestration ('The Meeting Place') isn’t merited.

The Stone Roses

5/5

I love this album, not because it communicates tension, but b/c nothing feels like it's going to fall apart. This isn't adolescence's final stand, or last day of summer, but a continued expression: 'I wake, I still look, I feel loose.' ‘Still’ is the operative word. Even on 'Made of Stone,' which approaches Tom Verlaine's impressionism, the philosophy is a subdued trust in the process: it's all gonna be okay. And that works for many a night out, or in, or here, or there.

Back To Black

Amy Winehouse

5/5

'You made me miss the Slick Rick gig.' This brilliant album (and artist) is a cultural and musical amalgamation you rarely get - a jazz vocalist with r&b perceptiveness laced with footnotes to hip hop. And a voice as seductive and creative as the things she sings about, aspires to. Honest, something special.

All That You Can't Leave Behind

U2

2/5

'You elevate my soul / I've got no self-control / Been living like a mole now.' That's bad, as is much else here, never quite reaching the heights (and how high are those heights, really?) of 'Beautiful Day.' There appear to be authentic moments of poppy breakthrus, but they persist for even less than a chorus. 'I don't know / which way the wind will blow.' It's difficult to write that and get away with it. U2 doesn't. Their best and most soulful ('In A Little While,' by far) unfortunately can't save this album from itself, which manifests most dreadfully on 'Peace On Earth.'

Strangeways, Here We Come

The Smiths

4/5

'Do you really think she'll pull through?' 'And the pain was enough to make / A shy, bald Buddhist reflect / And plan a mass murder.' 'And if you should die / I may feel slightly sad, but I won't cry.' That's Morrissey alright - that's his invention, of which I can't think of a proper imitator/reverential copycat. How'd you do it? I had, for some reason, evaded The Smiths's final album. Shame on me - tho not quite their best, b/c it's not their most definitive, it might be their most consistently colorful and vigorous, even approaching something soulful at times: Morrissey finds his growl ('A Rush and a Push,' 'I Started Something'); I find myself chuffed, snaring this thing that's theirs, that only they've ever done.

Bummed

Happy Mondays

3/5

'Although our music and our drugs stayed the same.' Sorta how I feel about this one - while I can admire Shaun Ryder's lyrics (at times), and the music has an edge (certainly Stones-influenced, more sixties than you'd initially figure), there's little variety here. If there's a joke, I don't quite get it; if it's about capturing a scene (rave culture), I'm not taken there. And it's weird when I don't know why: 'We're all food, your cake / We're all the food, your weirdo's cream.' I know what to do with impressionism, with the strange and the grotesque, but I don't know what to do with that. Nor do I want to. I do like the more straightforward stuff ('Country Song,' 'Wrote for Luck,' 'Lazyitis') tho - it negotiates The Stones well enough. But mostly, I’m a bit bored, a bit wanting more, or less.

Electric Prunes

The Electric Prunes

4/5

Again, short songs redeem the whole. This is a well-produced album with creative percussiveness, rich, impactful guitars, and a compression to save it from going too far, too dreamy, too heady. The lyrics are the weak point, not difficult or pretentious, but in fact unmemorable, too steady, not wordy enough. But this is a good find, and in the end, I’m down with it. Especially beautiful: 'Onie'; especially tasteful: 'Train for Tomorrow' and 'Luvin''; heavy lifting in LA: 'Try Me on for Size'; not good: 'The Toonerville Trolley.'

1984

Van Halen

2/5

His virtuosity aside, I can’t get into this - when it’s quietest, I’m happiest, like at the beginning of ‘Top Jimmy’ or ‘Drop Dead Legs.’ When it’s off, when it’s over, I’m really most pleased. I don’t mind dumb, or even fake, but a dud ‘tis, especially the squandering of ‘Hot for Teacher’ and ‘Girl Gone Bad.’ By the time ‘Jump’ (the best song, by far) starts soloing, there’s nothing left that I can remotely enjoy, it’s all so thin and, like so much hard rock, so soft. If he shreds, well, I can do w/o that verb.

2112

Rush

1/5

Rush doesn't tell interesting stories, be they fantasy or science fiction, tho Geddy Lee may think he does. This isn't weird, it's boring, and when there is a reprieve of satisfying, even at times superior, instrumentation, you’re reminded of lyrics like: 'I stand atop a spiral stair / An oracle confronts me there.' 'Atop' and its kin are bad for music, unless its The Smiths and the literary is somehow properly negotiated. And when it's more stripped down (e.g. 'Tears'), it's unbearably saccharine, evincing a no-win situation.

Truth

Jeff Beck

5/5

If this isn’t excellent, it’s close to it. If it’s the beginnings of heavy metal, it’s early enuf not to be overwrought or to neglect its origins. Unsung heroics: Micky Waller, a put-together of Mitch and Ginger (got the fluidity of the former, uses the toms like the latter). The rendition of Ol’ Man River is more than up to snuff: it’s sincere. And I don’t know much about guitar chops, but Beck sure does seem to live up to the hype. I'll go w/ excellent.

Fifth Dimension

The Byrds

4/5

This one starts with two beauties, especially the opening track, which does manage to express the joy and realness of psychedelic experience: 'Oh, how is it that I could come out here / And be still floatin' / And never hit bottom and keep falling through / Just relaxed and paying attention?' That is precise, and superb. But then it drags quite a bit. Tho I admire the austerity of 'I Come and Stand at Every Door,' nothing impresses until the still innovative 'Eight Miles High.' Up next, the speedy and frantic rendition of 'Hey Joe' doesn't do it for me (it's admittedly hard for any to 'do it' after Hendrix), and the rest is good, but not great. When psychedelia snubs melodic variety, it can fall flat - this has that handicap. But it was widely influential and has some greatness in it. For that, I go higher.

25

Adele

3/5

All-time voice; not an all-time album. Talent may speak for itself, but so does craft, subtlety, a diversity of sound, and expressive language, all of which this album has only some of the time, and not all that convincingly. But she can sing so damn well that her underachievements are now and then compensated for. She'll go down as an all-time great b/c her vocal abilities are, in fact, incredibly rare, and she has composed some pregnant, memorable songs. On this one: 'I Miss You,' 'River Lea,' 'Love in the Dark,' 'Million Years Ago,' 'Sweetest Devotion.' And yet, the whole gestalt lacks.

Ellington at Newport

Duke Ellington

5/5

Duke's a persuasive composer; there's a preternatural uplift that all of his compositions share, a surety, a swagger, a candid sense of self and others. Nothing breaks down b/c everything's a great run into the center of life and its particularities. This live recording famously attains that sensibility with genius. Quite literally, Duke and Louis (who's unforgivably absent from this list) invented our music. And a special shout-out to Cat Anderson, the best of all muted trumpeters I've heard. Sam Woodyard too on ‘Skin Deep.’

Viva Hate

Morrissey

3/5

This Morrissey is more sincere than ironic, which is odd tho not necessarily a bad thing. He croons, 'Where the world's ugliest boy / Became what you see / Here I am, the ugliest man,' and I believe him. More often than not, I am in the mood to take things as they are rather than with a grain of salt, but this sincerity fails to hold my attention. Morrissey certainly has his moments here, especially on 'Suedehead,' 'I Don't Mind If You Forget Me,' 'Dial-a-Cliché,' and 'Margaret on the Guillotine,' but for the first time, I'm not all that keen on hearing what he has to say next. Just a bit tired of the pouting and yearning, which is leaned on as a crutch rather than explored and developed. The music, stringy, plucky, and at times acoustically flush, does perdure however, and does vitalize this not-as-effective grumbler.

Pornography

The Cure

4/5

'Cover my face as the animals die.' Does this mean that Robert Smith has finally gotten over the notion that death and the expiration of flesh can be flippantly sought after? Sure, the whole album commences with 'It doesn't matter if we all die,' but this is far more vital than the gloom-gets-me-nowhere Seventeen Seconds. Perhaps they were so on the verge of falling apart as a band that a will to live implicitly permeated their program. I still struggle to listen to a Cure album all the way thru - it's just not my way of dealing with distress - but this is far from bad. 'My memory in a fire, and someone will listen / At least for a short while.' That has a quiet aspiration in it I admire. And the keeper of the sudden fire: Lol Tolhurst (drummer).

With The Beatles

Beatles

5/5

‘All I’ve Got To Do,’ ‘All My Loving,’ ‘Don’t Bother Me,’ Till There Was You,’ ‘Please Mister Postman,’ ‘Hold Me Tight.’ Some great originals, some enduring covers. It’s a copycat league and they copied as emulators and admirers. Do I prefer Chuck’s maiden recording of ‘Roll Over Beethoven’? You bet. Is Smokey’s ‘You Really Got A Hold On Me’ the better one? Uh-huh. Is this still a milestone album and essential listening? I know it is.

I’ve Got a Tiger By the Tail

Buck Owens

4/5

This really gets rolling with 'Let the Sad Times Roll On,' tho the title track does hit with humor and joviality, most notably continued on 'Wham Bam,' a hilarious promotion for the rejection of matrimony. In terms of country voices, I prefer the likes of Marty Robbins, Tom T. Hall, Townes Van Zandt, and Blazes Foley, not to say anything of Patsy Cline or Johnny Cash. But even tho I sometimes feel like I'm being slammed with a festivity I'm not exactly invited to be a part of, there are enough wistful songs - 'If You Fall Out of Love With Me,' 'The Band Keeps Playin' On,' 'Streets of Laredo' (an all-time favorite), 'Cryin' Time,' 'A Maiden's Prayer' (instrumental) - to keep this album honest, and to satisfy my penchant for a mournful affect. And in terms of influence (the Bakersfield sound), this is a true topper.

Ace of Spades

Motörhead

4/5

This isn't really metal, and Lemmy doesn't really have a metal voice, more like an explanatory rasp, loud and heavy b/c he wants to talk thru the noise and tell us what's up. Popular among the punks, and self-proclaimed to be nothing more than a rock-n-roll band, Motörhead wore a not-quite-metal aesthetic that isn't exactly news. But it is significant. It even borders on hardcore sanguinity on 'Live to Win,' venting the noble lines: 'You mustn't shout it out loud / Don't create a scene / Don't indulge in being proud / It only feeds their scheme.' That's excellent and true. (If only other metal acts would listen to this sage and sensible advice, ahem, Marilyn Manson.) What this album lacks is variety, however, and what it unfortunately boasts is the dreadful 'Jailbait.' Mainly tho, it has a palatable and honest aesthetic. I can't say it's entirely my thing, but it sure the hell blows AC/DC out of the water, and I can imagine myself returning to it, if only to feel a bit mucky.

Eagles

2/5

This ain't it. It's so adequate that it's essentially no good. And we already have an excellent country/roots rock act from California (see Creedence). This isn't that mastery, or close to it. 'Most of us are sad / No one let's it show' is about as good as it gets. At least that has a sincerity to boot, not an inauthenticity to bear. But truthfully, this album has no haunting power, and no quiet successes. An all-around blah.

The Pleasure Principle

Gary Numan

3/5

Lyrically, this is a bit conspiratorial and paranoid, all to do with a 'them' one would confront in a Pynchon novel, or a 'we' we don't really know: 'Don't let them see / Don't let them know' (from 'Films'); 'All that we are / Is all that we need to be' (from 'Engineers'). Musically, I get it, but I'm not sure I like it or that it gives me P-L-E-A-S-U-R-E. On principle tho, I can't say it's bad. Some genuine darlings: 'Complex,' 'Tracks.' Numan's voice gets stale, however, and it's all shot thru with a false sense of profundity. 'You are not reg-u-lar' (from 'Conversations'). The problem is this album is reg-u-lar. But not an everyday people kind of regular. That kind, I'm all about.

This Year's Model

Elvis Costello & The Attractions

5/5

He rhymes like a rapper: 'Those disco synthesizers / And those daily tranquilizers / Those body building prizes / Those bedroom alibis'; 'We're all going on a summer holiday / Vigilante's coming out to follow me / Heard somebody said they're out to collar me / Anybody wanna swallow me.' He has the courage for half-rhymes, internal rhymes, multisyllabic rhymes, like 'cheek to be' and 'weaken these' ('Little Triggers'), 'silent' and 'hydrant' ('You Belong to Me'), 'cuddle,' 'waddle,' and 'model' ('Chelsea'), and these bangers: 'movements,' 'amusements,' 'choosy,' 'above me,' 'shoes' ('Lip Service'). This is to say nothing of the music, which is authentic pop that tenders a punky dynamism (check out rhythm section on 'Lipstick Vogue'). And the best: 'I wanna bite the hand that feeds me / I wanna bite that hand so badly.' So yeah, I couldn't say enough. This is superb.

Power In Numbers

Jurassic 5

4/5

Quality Control (2000) is the better release, but this is still a strong record. The production is hard and addictive, the flows and rhymes are effortlessly intricate, especially on 'A Day at the Races,' the harmonized choruses are tasteful, and the partitioning of verses is uniquely lucid. But it also trots out cliché lines like 'My pen drips / As I scribble my thoughts on thin strips of emotion.' It sometimes feels like this album was made for people who never 'got' hip-hop, and needed a record that's blatantly 'conscious' to get over their disapproval of the gangsta genre. But anybody who really understands hip-hop knows there's no De La Soul w/o NWA, no Black Star w/o 8Ball and MJG. Still, this is a classic listen, partly b/c it's great pop, tho Q-tip would resist that dubbing: 'Rap is not pop / if you call that then stop.'

The Gershwin Songbook

Ella Fitzgerald

5/5

A top-five vocalist of the twentieth century: stably inventive, focused and uncrowded, tho perfectly full, somehow dry w/o drying out, emotive w/o being lachrymose, and a technical mastery that's formidably faultless. She is, simply put, one of only so many crucial artists of her time, and any time.

Red Headed Stranger

Willie Nelson

4/5

'Now the preachin' is over / And the lesson's begun'; 'Now the lesson is over / And the killin's begun.' Willie is a pure storyteller, and no moralizer. He lets things be, and like the great painters of precarious minds coming to their ends, he passes no judgement. I'm reminded of Orlando and Don Quijote, Othello and Leontes, and several characters who populate Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska. Structurally, this record is brilliant, no song doing more or less than it needs to: four instrumentals, three tracks less than a minute long, one over five. And his voice, tho high and feeble, carries this album's impressive fire.

Modern Kosmology

Jane Weaver

4/5

'Following charts but the threads would just dissipate / Modern Kosmology let my love resonate.' This album, mainly due to its excellent production, tho also b/c of lyrical moments like that, is an unexpected pleasure. Tho not quite as brilliant as comparable acts such as Julia Holter and Cate Le Bon, this possesses a palpable optimism that I very much enjoy: 'Let's go outside when it doesn't feel right.' It also successfully sustains a Byrd-like psychedelia on tracks like 'Loops in the Secret Society.' She loses me a bit on 'The Architect,' which is neither sonically nor conceptually attained, but wins me back with sweetness on 'The Lightning Back' and 'Valley.' Are the echoey vocals and abstract lyrics entirely irreproachable? No. I can surely do w/o the 'open your eyes' at the end of 'Ravenspoint,' for instance. But I don't want to do w/o: 'there's a rhythm to march to this undisputed mood.'

Thriller

Michael Jackson

5/5

The best-selling album of all time has most likely become a tough sell to many people, myself included. And yet, its nine songs stick around for good reason. Most ingenious is 'Billie Jean,' which fronts a literacy viz-a-viz creative rhythms and inventive melodies. Even 'Beat It,' which I never loved, is 'funky and strong' enuf to endure. Human nature is real, however, and as much as you'd like to separate the art from the artist, it would seem that appreciation at a distance is the most sustainable approach. But that distance is hard to preserve knowing 'PYT' is out there, a perfect track.

Deja Vu

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

4/5

'And so, become yourself / Because the past is just a goodbye' ('Teach Your Children'); 'In my mind, I still need a place to go / All my changes were there' ('Helpless); 'They stop by to die because / It's faster than sinking' ('Country Girl'). Moments like these show just how excellent this album can be, but it's mostly a vague excellence, fleeting, not fully realized. The four seem to know what they are doing but not quite where they are going. Emotionally, 'Helpless' has it, I do enjoy the parodic (or is it sincere?) 'Our House,' and the driving 'Carry On' is a superb entry. But I'm not all that proud to wear my 'freak flag' listening to 'Almost Cut My Hair,' and 'Woodstock' isn't nearly Joni's best. A very good record, but in love with it I am not.

Now I Got Worry

The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion

4/5

'I'm always a few minutes wrong.' This is indeed a blues explosion, mainly b/c it's an explosion of the uncool. It's not weird, it's not downcast, it's not edgy, it's not at all cool, but it's also not up for debate. The blues can't be itself when it's knowingly chic - it has to have some uncool about it, some awkwardness, some untidiness, some real deal marring and scarring. But, as Albert Murray advocates, the blues is also dance music, party music, a genre for the clubs and late night believing. Every song on this album doesn't stun, but the whole thing fosters a cool uncool - a mixture of the festive and gawkish - that I admire thoroughly.

Here, My Dear

Marvin Gaye

4/5

When Gaye sings 'Cry cry cry, do you cry about me / Do you every think about the kind of love we had?,' it's so devastatingly beautiful that alone it makes this album an invaluable listen. But it's the raw one-sidedness, the self-serving but somehow generous storytelling, the free-associative honesty and concreteness, having to do not only with flowers, bluebirds, and sparrows but attorneys, child support, and millions of moola, boasting lyrics like 'This is a joke / I need a smoke,' that take this record to a unique place aesthetically. It rambles, but the music doesn't ever tire, and tho you may not be left a fan of Marvin Gaye the person, so deeply rooted is his egoism at times, your appreciation for the singer/writer can only grow. And you gotta relish: 'Let's touch each other / let's feel each other's ass.'

Bridge Over Troubled Water

Simon & Garfunkel

5/5

This one 'keeps the customer satisfied.' Any album that proposes 'Bridge Over Troubled Waters,' 'The Boxer,' and 'The Only Living Boy in New York' is a perennial knockout. 'Half of the time we're gone / But we don't know where / And we don't know where.' It's the 'but' and the 'and' that make that a masterful and emotive line. The whole thing exhibits a pensive and cheerful vibe, a simultaneity not easy to attain, but one that's essential to experience. And I love hearing their live cover of the Everly Brothers, the duo's principal influence, at least vocally.

There's No Place Like America Today

Curtis Mayfield

4/5

According to Mayfield, yesterday's 'America today' was 'scufflin' times': 'A lot of scars - that kind of scare you to remember.' It's more like collapsin' times in today's 'America today,' but this record remains timeless. Mainly, this is political music that gets going b/c it negotiates the mundane with sweetness and honesty: 'Waking up now in the morning / A little morning sigh / Ready not to get it together.' This is truth music b/c Mayfield is attuned enuf to appreciate that 'Truth is not the whole question.' Musically, this is a funky cry, and a crying funk: 'The way you do it - is to get right to it.' Amen. And even an atheist like me can get down w/ 'Jesus.'

Blood On The Tracks

Bob Dylan

5/5

From start to finish, this is Dylan's greatest achievement. It's his most literary record b/c it's his most confessional, his most sustained, his most motivated and focused. I guess love will do that to you - will exalt a writer to brass tacks. Featuring a vindictive storyteller getting his get back ('Idiot Wind'), and a nearly nine min interlude about Big Jim and the Jack of Hearts, the album tells it like it is by telling his version of it. As much as I revere 'Blowin' in the Wind,' 'Like a Rolling Stone,' and 'A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall,' I love those records b/c they speak to something culturally or societally universal. Here, Bob jettisons the cultural and societal for the personal - and he may just be a tad deeper b/c of that.

Low

David Bowie

5/5

'I will sit right down / Waiting for the gift of sound and vision.' That's how I think about this album: you can sit right down, waiting for its gift of sound and vision. B/c that's what it is - an aural and visual affair, bravely vibrant, firmly in its own world. I've said before that Ziggy Stardust and Station to Station are his peaks, and I still believe that to be true, but this is Bowie's most interior, self-contained, and self-justified album. In many ways, it's also his most beautiful. It's a true conceptual piece to the extent that the 'concept' is the thing-in-itself. It doesn't allegorize or symbolize, it doesn't create a world for the sake of pointing out the ills of ours. It's a world of its own, plain and simple. And one I'd like to (re)enter whenever I can.

The Downward Spiral

Nine Inch Nails

2/5

While I admire the production to some degree, Trent Reznor's abrasive whisper has a one-dimensional flow, and his flimsy allusions to Nietzsche ('God is dead / and no one cares') don't even excite this hardened atheist. 'Closer' is a miserable ode to rough animal sex: 'I drink the honey / inside your hive / You are the reason / I stay alive.' His junky and unimaginative philosophizing is incredibly tedious, and tho the instrumental moments can sustain an authentic energy, too much of it sours from Reznor's annoying poetry: 'And nothing comes bleeding out of me / Just like the waterfall I'm drowning in.' In Romanticism, the child is revered. Reznor, however, is only childish. There is a huge difference.

Stand!

Sly & The Family Stone

5/5

One of the smartest records of the 20th century, and one of the tastiest to listen to. For me, it ever so slightly edges out Curtis Mayfield's and Marvin Gaye's socially aware masterpieces b/c it incorporates gravity w/ humor, and connects our psychic lives with upfront realities: 'shady as a lady with a mustache'; 'You're in trouble when you find it's hard for you to smile / A simple song might make it better for a little while'; 'I am everyday people.' You gotta etch out a special place for albums that make you feel good like no other. This is one of those informed blisses; groove-daring answers to our problems. You throw it on and may as well have a great day. Why not? You may also pick up a copy of Das Kapital and scold a landlord. Hell yeah.

S&M

Metallica

3/5

The fact that this pairing 'works' doesn't foment in me a new appreciation for a band I don't know particularly well, or a genre of which I'm honestly suspicious. If anything, the orchestral potentialities of Metallica fortify my aversion to a music I already find to be wearyingly epic and conceptually overwrought. Lyrically, it smacks of a bad interpretation of a verse play by Goethe: 'Drain you off your sanity / Face the thing that should not be.' The instrumentation is 'big,' and I guess therefore symphonic, but Wagner gone electric (or is it the other way around?) is not my jam. For fans of the band, this is most likely a treat, and I don't know their music well enough to really judge the collaboration. As an idea - as a project - it certainly succeeds. It doesn't, however, satisfy or convert. With that, I'll go w/ middling.

Abraxas

Santana

3/5

Santana's performance at Woodstock is all-time stuff. Their studio albums aren't the stuff of the gods, however, and tho this has classic rock staples, I'm no more convinced by it than I am by the Eagles. To be fair, it's better than the Eagles b/c the percussion - the principal Latin import - does give it a rounded and foxy sensibility. But the songwriting is mediocre, and the instrumentation is mostly thin, with the exception of 'Incident at Neshabur,' an effective nonvocal track, and 'Se a Cabó,' which is short and persuasive. But this one doesn’t crescendo when I’d want it to, tenderize when it ought to, or complicate when it needs to. Suffice to say, there's better out there.

Heroes

David Bowie

5/5

'Though nothing, will keep us together / We could steal time, just for one day.' That has the joyous, fall-up-the-stairs desperation of Marquee Moon, the night so young and carefree it may as well be the end of time. Tho not quite as profound as Low, it's just as complete as the trilogy's first, and is structured the same: vocal dance tracks to start, pensive instrumentals to conclude, with the exception of 'The Secret Life of Arabia.' Where it takes me is vaguer than I'd like, but I'm still moved, I'm still awed by the play-it-cool but make-it-strange aesthetic that defines Bowie's output. You could say it's the best of the trilogy - you wouldn't be wrong. I just prefer Low that little bit more.

Imagine

John Lennon

3/5

'And no religion too.' That's a breakthru in pop and rock's political and cultural messaging. It fits right in, you don't gotta say anything more, and I'm relieved someone had the nerve to say it. The song is therefore rightly iconic, but the rest of the album consists of songs that are good but never great, with the exception of 'How Do You Sleep,' which as a putdown track ranks with Dylan's 'Idiot Wind' and 'Positively 4th Street': 'The sound you make is muzak to my ears / You must've learned something in all those years.' 'I Don't Wanna Be A Soldier Mama' is thundering and grand, but also confirms that Lennon is often a better chanter than lyricist. When the chanting gets into my soul, I'll be there for the picketing. Otherwise, it's a bit truthy for no reason.

Moon Safari

Air

3/5

This record is effectively laidback but I find myself wishing it was more off to no good than it is. The synth takes away from the treble and the vocals diminish what could otherwise be a powerful and urgent experience. 'Air' and 'Moon' are apt descriptors of an album that is too spaced out, too ungrounded, too up in the air, and too over the moon. The production is certainly inventive, and while I admire the coherence of the project as a whole, its suave sensibility, exacerbated by Beth Hirsch's singing, serener and even more full of it than Beth Gibbons's, is not one I naturally gravitate to. Perhaps that's just it - I don't want to gravitate - I want to be pushed and pulled and then made whole again. With this, I only hover, or is it drift?

In Rainbows

Radiohead

4/5

'Don't get any big ideas / They're not going to happen.' I'm not sure if this album qualifies as a 'big idea,' but it by all means 'happens.' Explosively subdued and gorgeously produced, this record is like a bargain that keeps on giving: I'll offer Radiohead the benefit of my doubt and they'll exchange that for something that's rich, that's immense, that's really quite special. I shouldn't like it is as much as I do, mainly b/c Yorke teeters dangerously on the pretentious: 'I get eaten by the worms / and weird fishes.' Yet, for all like that, there're also these: 'I am all the days that you choose to ignore'; 'I only stick with you because there are no others'; 'I love you but enough is enough, enough of that stuff.' And yeah, 'Reckoner' is prolific, it's superb.

Isn't Anything

My Bloody Valentine

4/5

I caught: 'your wasted space is mine, too.' Ironically, MBV can't be said to waste space, instead filling every second w/ a sonic entirety. It's one that seems to be emptying, however, so minor and drowned out is the reality the album portrays. I'm not sure I'm in love with the aesthetics, but I know that I don't want to stop listening to it, which must count for something. I wish I knew what they were saying, it would be nice if it didn't drone as much as it does, but I also know that if it were any different it would be far less interesting, that it'd hardly be the creative statement that it is. I don't think I would throw this record on any chance I get, my mood normally not inclined to gaze or shoe, but I'm happy enuf to attend when it is on.

Dry

PJ Harvey

4/5

'I'm spilling over like a heavy loaded fruit tree'; 'Fig, fruit, flower myself inside out for you'; 'Gonna wash that man right out of my hair.' This one grows on you b/c you start believing it, whatever it is that warrants belief. Not as obscure as Patti Smith, Harvey's also not encumbered by feminist messages or cultural critique, tho they're there and good for her for being involved. Angry, not angsty, she's full of details, stories, and memories, which is more than you can say about a whole lot of artists doing similar things but far less impressively. Musically, the drums are the unsung hero while the strings on 'Plants and Rags' are heavy and sensible. As 'Oh My Lover' started, I didn't think I'd be down. By the end, I very much was.

Hard Again

Muddy Waters

5/5

Not the greatest blues master - that'd be Robert Johnson, Howlin' Wolf, or a live B. B. King for me - but most likely the greatest exponent of the genre: 'I'm a man / I'm a rollin' stone.' We know where the Londoners got it. 1977: amazingly, this is not a throwback or nostalgia trip, but a profound barrage of raw deals and comedy, i.e., the real deal - the blues: 'I be troubled / I be all worried in mind.' A music about the psychologically downtrodden did more to describe our societal malaise than mucho sociology and theories of economic nadirs. Muddy Waters effectively gets that vision across on this album, a perfect entry point into the music that had a baby we named Rock and Roll. Essential for its history, so it is also for its pleasure/urgency.

Kenza

Khaled

3/5

I found a playlist on YouTube for this album since neither Spotify nor Apple Music streams it. I don’t know enuf to judge it, not merely b/c I don’t speak Arabic but b/c I can’t calculate its influence. Musically, I’m not moved, but I’m not repelled either. In other words, I conclude benightedly that it’s middle of the road.

Bitte Orca

Dirty Projectors

5/5

'And what hits the spot, yeah, like Gatorade?'; 'Please don't defend a silver lining / Around the halo of what is already shining'; 'Maybe you meant no intention.' Hard to describe, sure, but not hard to feel. Lyrically is where this album has every opportunity to break down, but it never does, saved not only by the stunningly balanced instrumentation, but by the words themselves, which are authentically poetic, drifting enuf into outer space for me to want to do the work to ground them, a challenge that pays off in the end. Longstreth can sing all he wants about a 'fluorescent half dome' and I'll trust that there is, indeed, intention behind it. And not that intention is all what matters when the music is sheer pleasure - guilty if anything.

From Elvis In Memphis

Elvis Presley

4/5

An excellent album for many reasons, but mostly b/c it shows us who Elvis is and who he is not. The 'first rock star,' he was a star but not necessarily a rocker. Prolific as a balladeer and a country western crooner, at least on record, he seems hardly to have a sense of humor, which isn't a failing, but can hardly be considered the appropriate stance of one who rocks, i.e., see Chuck Berry and his ding-a-ling. His business was in being austere. When that's understood, it gives a whole new dimension to tracks like 'I'll Hold You In My Heart,' 'In The Ghetto,' 'Don't Cry Daddy,' 'Kentucky Rain,' and 'Mama Liked The Roses.' I'm not so sure he cared about getting us to shake our asses or to move our hips - I think he just wanted us to listen.

Kala

M.I.A.

5/5

'I'm a world runner.' She means it: 'When you go Rwanda, Congo / Take me on a genocide tour / Take me on a truck to Darfur / Take me where you would go.' I can't think of a better album about moola. Foregrounding war-sponsored capitalism, Maya triumphs as few rappers do: not only is she smarter than most, she avers proudly that she doesn't read, that she just guesses ('The Turn'). Those 'guesses' figure into precise and luminous choruses that catapult M.I.A. from a 'conscious rapper' to our conscious feeler - our very own funky, can-do-no-wrong t'cha: 'I put people on the map that never seen a map.' Inimitable; unstoppable. What she doesn't do is preachify; what she does do is dig and inform. And make bangers.

Debut

Björk

4/5

No who w/o Bjork? Probably loads, tho such a unique and daring artist may not be the progenitor of many - that's fine, even enviable. Anyway, this is a helluva debut, otherworldly but corresponding to ours as well: 'But then we'd have to rush back / To the town's best baker / To get the first bread of the morning.' If that's the soul of provinciality speaking, I'd like to request a bundle of that old world bread. But she's clearly a figure of the future in other words: 'This small town hasn't got room / For my big feelings.' She sings of 'big sensuality' too - I guess big, not love, has got to do with it. It is a bit sappy at times, which wanes ('Like Someone in Love' averages out), but not to the degree that I forget: 'It takes courage to enjoy it.'

White Ladder

David Gray

2/5

It's a truism that period pieces sell a lot of records. This one sold mucho and periodized a piece. The more Gray belts, the more generic the music; the more powerful, the more insignificant. He can sing, but he can't be for real: 'Seems these days I don't feel anything / 'Less it cuts me right to the bone.' This isn't soul-baring, it's barely soulful - and proof that if it's big in England, it may be a big flop elsewhere. To make it worse, the songs are twice the length they ought to be. 'I put my heart in your hand' - and I've given it right back. No thanks!

Licensed To Ill

Beastie Boys

5/5

'Deliver Colonel Sanders down to Davey Jones' locker'; 'I got a girl in the Castle and one in the pagoda / You know I got rhymes like Abe Vigoda' (or is it Phyllis Diller?); 'Now your mom threw away your best porno mag (busted).' The Beasties spend a fair amount of time rapping about 'girlies with the def behinds,' and really girlies of all shapes and sizes, but that doesn't take away from the fact that this album remains sonically fresh and persists as a cultural touchstone that few other records approach. Behind the boasting, rhyming, and stealing is the inception of the hip hop avant-garde, persevered by Kool Keith, MF Doom, etc. Sampling is a form of cultural allusion, and when the lyrics are equally, hilariously allusive, you get something that is truly sui generis. And fun as hell.

Paranoid

Black Sabbath

5/5

I know they get credit for initiating metal - that thematically, there wasn't much like it, and their riffs established something heavier than Zeppelin or Jeff Beck - but I can't help but feel they're magnitudes richer and more pleasurable than most metal, not merely b/c they came first, but b/c they're really another sort of thing entirely. They may sing of Iron Man, electric funerals, and hands of doom, but they can hardly be said to embrace the make believe, so realist is their ethos, whereas much metal as I see it is Halloween w/o recreation. For instance, this isn't fantasy, but portentous: 'Burning globe of obscene fire / Like electric funeral pyre.' And the riffing is an impossibly sustained adventure - so luxurious it's nearly unfair.

Young Americans

David Bowie

3/5

As much I appreciate this album for the versatility it displays - Bowie can sustain a basic soul/pop record w/o weirding out all that much - I find it thin if I'm being honest, as well as incoherent: 'Fascination, takes a part of me'; 'Fame bully for you chilly for me / Got to get a rain check on pain.' It's not that he can't be soulful - he certainly can be - it's that if he was going for 'plastic soul,' he got something closer to the real thing, and just didn't quite make the cut. 'Young Americans' has an undeniable chorus, his cover of 'Across the Universe' is capable, and 'Fame' is a justifiable favorite. But I don't know what to do with: 'Can you hear me? / Can you feel me inside? / Show your love, love.' If it's sincere, it's bad; if it's ironic, what's alleged?

Automatic For The People

R.E.M.

3/5

'Oh I need something to fly over my grave again'; 'A candy bar, a falling star, or a reading from Doctor Seuss'; 'The movies had that movie thing / But nonsense has a welcome ring.' While I still think Murmur is R.E.M.'s most remarkable statement, I by no means disparage their more pop orientated albums released during the early nineties. But I do think this record is slightly overrated. Even comparing it to the album released just after this one - Monster - I prefer the pop ballad 'Strange Currencies,' one of the all-time R.E.M. singles, to the ubiquitous 'Everybody Hurts.' Tho a band's most lauded album is not necessarily their best, it is self-important to prefer only the deep cuts. Yet, besides 'Nightswimming,' this is ordinary.

Fly Or Die

N.E.R.D

3/5

'Well god forbid / Something goes wrong / You call / The police'; 'Shit happens, hey, just blow it off, whooo'; 'You must think you're Orson Wells / And this is 1954.' Pharrell really is a genius, and there are a plethora of artists who'd never have come around if weren't for this mishmash of rock, rap, and funk: Anderson .Paak, The Internet, Tyler, to name a few. But the genre is inventive, and influential, while the album leaves me wanting more. There's no song here I'm in love w/ - not even 'Thrasher,' which boasts the get-you-going chorus 'Fuck him up!' Is it lacking perspective to say that I wish this album was 'braver'? It feels like an irrational demand, but it's all I can come up w/ - if not 'braver,' at least less trivial, more bound to realize.

Groovin'

The Young Rascals

5/5

This one is far more than its title track, tho 'Groovin'' is one of the most profound feel-good tracks of all time. The album is all positivity: 'I'm so happy now'; 'I feel a strange, exciting thing about to be'; 'Life could be ecstasy / You and me endlessly.' Even on a song like 'I Don't Love You Anymore,' assertiveness is the name of the game: 'It's like my life had just begun.' Their cover of 'A Place in the Sun,' which more than equals Stevie Wonder's 1966 breakout, maintains the record's sanguinity. Susan Sontag once wrongly criticized Gertrude Stein for being 'all affirmation,' for not being 'where there is an adversary, a problem.' How we explore happiness constitutes an artistic conundrum, a 'problem' if you will. Felix Cavaliere and his fellow New Jerseyites are enthralling explorers of joy: 'You'll never see me complaining / 'Bout love - I'm in all the way.' Same.

Punishing Kiss

Ute Lemper

3/5

This one features proficient lyrics written by other artists: 'And I glow with the greatness of my hate for you' (Nick Cave); 'If sex were an olympic sport / we'd have won the gold' (Neil Hannon); 'St. Mary's prayers, / Houdini's hands, / And a barman who always / Understands' (Tom Waits). It also features the voice of an actress who starred in Cabaret and Chicago, a voice very much suitable for those outlets but uninteresting on a bistro-inspired cover album. It's not that it's pretentious, since she does what she is good at. It's that the theatrics don't offer a reason why - why here, why now, why the passion, why the atmosphere? Her best covers are of Waits, since he favors the performative, but the rest are drab and tiresome.

Tapestry

Carole King

5/5

Has 'easy listening' ever been as soulful, as confrontational, as well-put together, as vibrantly thought-out? The only 'easy' thing about Tapestry is that it deserves infinite replays - otherwise, King is as hard as nails and a good kick in the ass. She's wise, she's aspirational, she's realist, and she's genuinely supportive on 'You've Got a Friend,' which I can only imagine has been the source of many saved lives and healed sorrows. It's also a snap shot of an America of another time: 'But if you wanna live in New York City / Honey, you know I will.' Remember when NYC was synonymous w/ urban decay? Finally, this record gets me back listening to The Shirelles, Smokey, Aretha, even James Taylor, which must be any songwriter's dream effect.

Calenture

The Triffids

3/5

I listened to the original 12 track set from 1987, and came to the conclusion that The Triffids (a triffid, I learned, is the plant from John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids) achieved what U2 never did: make inspired pop music that, perhaps to their own chagrin, is deep down a melange of Christianity. Much of this is religious saccharinity, w/ lyrics negotiating 'one less soul on your fiery list,' 'holy water,' and 'your secret delight in vice.' And yet, David McComb's voice is strong and convincing, I genuinely enjoyed tracks like 'A Trick of the Light' and 'Jerdacuttup Man,' and memorable lyrics like these have something true to offer: 'How can I put it in between words?'; 'I was beating on her like an anvil / Beating her out of original shape'; 'Steal it all.'

Microshift

Hookworms

3/5

In one way, there's nothing truly powerful here. MJ (the band members all have abbreviated names - don't ask me why) sustains a high register and can, in his own manner at least, belt, but he doesn't blow me away, and the blend of rock and techno is competent but not out of this world. In another way, the nine songs that comprise this record are indeed powerful, b/c they get you moving, they are bound by an authentic sweetness, and they exult in some impressive lyrical statements: 'My father waited for hours just to hear me play a note'; 'There's nothing wrong with being fragile in life'; 'Peeling out and high in the reasons you're worth knowing.' Their project exceeds what I'm assuming it had been on paper - & thus, it has success.

Talking Book

Stevie Wonder

5/5

You know you've broken thru when the first two lead vocals you hear are not the main guy’s: Jim Gilstrap and Lani Groves speak this masterpiece into existence, and from there 'perfection is perfected,' as Snoop'd put it. Not only does Stevie give us flawlessly produced tracks - songs that have no choice but to occupy our collective unconscious - but he has us thinking about the weirdness of language too, like who the 'it' is in this line: 'Will it say the love you feel for me, will it say?' One of his requests: 'Catch your baby, catch up with my dreams.' We're still 'catching up' w/ Stevie's visions, inner or outer; his genius isn't a superstition, but a mere fact of life. And if his complex melodies 'keep me in a daydream,' there I'll gladly stay.

Let It Be

The Replacements

5/5

Five songs into this album, and the record goes from not giving a shit to very much giving one; from the bravado of 'Yeah I hear, I think, I know / Rock don't give a shit, you know' ('Favorite Thing') to the reserved optimism of 'One more night to get it half right' ('We're Comin' Out') to the ahead-of-its-time negotiation of the gender spectrum of 'Mirror image, see no damage' ('Androgynous'). There's authentic wisdom here: 'Your age is the hardest age / Everything drags and drags.' I love the sense that Paul is having a heart-to-heart w/ a young kid going thru it. This one's over in a blink, and by the end, I'm more than satisfied. If it's not quite sublime, it's still perfect, it's still exactly what I'd want out of a record. Bravo to that.

The Soft Bulletin

The Flaming Lips

3/5

Wayne Coyne's voice is reminiscent of Neil Young's, but otherwise, there's nothing to compare this record to, really. The Flaming Lips are psychedelic pop w/ a handful of scientific realism. I want to like this album more than I do, mostly b/c I admire how it sounds - the production is absorbing and musically I'm at ease here - but the lyrics are ultimately too pretentious to overcome: 'To lose your arm would surely upset your brain'; or this: 'The summertime will make you itch the / mosquito bites'; or: 'Putting all the vegetables away / That you bought at the grocery store.' Besides 'Waitin' for a Superman,' no song here is w/o flaw. I get that they're going for the rapture in the mundane, but these fuckers are in band. They're not Joyce.

She's So Unusual

Cyndi Lauper

5/5

'We think we know what we're doing / We don't know a thing.' So sings Lauper on the opening track (the lead single from The Brains' 1980 debut), a song about money troubles of all things, a realism I wasn't necessarily prepared for but in no way rejected. After that, each song contains even more truth bits for us to chew over: 'girls just want to have fun'; 'I love you more than I did when you were mine' (Prince); 'You said, "Go slow," I fall behind.' That's just the first side. Sure, time after time, we've heard that tune, but that doesn't make it any less powerful. And the album in toto is well worth your ear. Lauper rebels by kissing you, and even gets avant-garde w/ a 45 sec cover of Helen Kane's 1920 'He's So Unusual.' A classic.

Get Behind Me Satan

The White Stripes

4/5

The thing about the White Stripes is that they're not exactly heavy w/ riff but they are heavy w/ groove. That's a major shoutout to Meg White. I'm not convinced by every song here, but heralded by 'Instinct Blues,' which feels like a reworking of Cole Porter's 'Let's Do It, Let's Fall in Love' - now: 'well, the crickets get it, / And the ants get it'; then: 'Birds do it, bees do it / Even educated fleas do it' - this album is a successful amalgam of bookish resolve and bare power: 'The one that you're trusting suspiciously dusting the sill'; 'And the truth, well you know there's no stoppin' it / And the boat you know she's still rockin' it.' And vulnerability on 'As Ugly As I Seem' and 'I'm Lonely (But I Ain't That Lonely Yet).' Doorbells, too, ringing or unrung.

Queen II

Queen

2/5

Freddie Mercury is an LGTBQ icon. He's also a remarkable vocalist, and all I've heard indicates that he was a kind, generous, gentle person. But Axl Rose is a prodigious singer too (tho a dick, which makes him easy to hate), and I can't stand Guns N' Roses. I think it must be the structure of their songs that drives me crazy - so often there's a cliché crescendo, or a drop of some sort, that's unjustified and wholly unheroic. No song here besides 'Some Day One Day,' which nurtures an ethical quiet, deserves the size it wears. And far too many forevermores and nevermores: 'It's forevermore that I wait'; 'Ogre battle lives forevermore'; 'Don't send me to the path of nevermore.' I guess it's the British and Tolkien in them. Not for me.

A Walk Across The Rooftops

The Blue Nile

4/5

This record is an inventive and imaginative accommodation of 80s pop, and its general aura, given the group's name and the album cover, was something I was prepared for. What I wasn't primed to appreciate was the extent to which its seven songs all deal w/ 'love' in one way or another. 6/7 of the tracks contain love in the lyrics. For an album like this, that seems to me a significance: 'I am in love, I am in love with you'; 'Do I love you? Yes, I love you'; 'I am in love, I am in love with a feeling'; 'The love theme for the wilderness'; 'For the love King, out in the morning air'; 'You are pretending love is worth waiting for.' The final track is an exception, but the thematics have been inculcated by then. A bit sleepy, but mostly wise and peaceful. And 'Stay' is a masterwork: 'Stay, and I will understand you.' That's love.

Pretzel Logic

Steely Dan

5/5

'We hear you're leavin', that's okay.' That's Donald Fagen's entry point into this record, to whom I'd like to say: 'don't worry, no one is leaving just yet. It's only just begun.' It's a good thing I didn't leave, b/c I'd have neglected a singular album due to my suspicion of its neatness and sterility. But by the time they cover Duke and then pay homage to Bird, I was all the way in. If it ever feels too smooth for school, just remind yourself of what any major dude'd tell you: 'Any minor world that breaks apart falls together again.' Tho they may hide it, for all the best reasons, Steely Dan is always breaking apart and falling together: too weird to be entirely on kilter. 'Won't you turn that bebop down.' I will not. Nor will I quit this rugged tidiness.

Legalize It

Peter Tosh

4/5

You'd have to be a fool not to see that this album is about far more than the legalization of marijuana. Tho Tosh is dead serious in that regard - he does indeed advertise the benefits of the plant, the specifics of which we can for sure doubt - 'good for tuberculosis, even umara composis' - this record is at bottom a profound meditation on colonialism and the mess that sort of domination engenders: 'Mama, mama, dem hold papa / Seh dem charge him fi smoke ganja.' It's about the absurdity of a system based on nominal distinctions of power: 'Them claim say, them claim say / Them are the general.' And it happens to be incredibly enjoyable to listen to - especially when Tosh goofs and frolics, i.e., check out 'Ketchy Shuby.'

Chore of Enchantment

Giant Sand

2/5

Howe Gelb's voice is too glib and casual for this to be an impactful record, and the lyrics are never not pretentious, tho they don't always approach the following prattle: 'It's w/ great human OP8 for a headachy nation.' It's too bad, since a track like 'Temptation of Egg' has authentic groove, and 'Shiver' sustains a driving energy, but I can't deal w/ a title like that, and the latter harbors this drivel: 'The deliver of shiver.' More empty poetry: 'And I would ponder this disease like a peeling onion skin striptease.' Above all, the blues and country should never be whispered. Seeing that Gelb is only intent on whispering, it all collapses into something fiercely boring and has few saving graces. No 'furtiva lagrima' for me - just prominent irritation.

Africa Brasil

Jorge Ben Jor

4/5

Jorge Ben apparently went electric on this, tho I doubt he generated as much dissent as Dylan when he plugged in during the mid sixties. As for the music, the merging of American funk/jazz with Afro-Brazilian modes works brilliantly well. What seem to be specific allusions to the American scene, but which may be entirely native to Brazilian expression, aggrandize this album to further heights. For instance, the incorporation of cute and drunk yelps (instrument unknown) on many of the songs parallel the ones heard on Herbie's 1973 'Watermelon Man.' Unfortunately, the Spanish and Italian I have can only help me a bit in recognizing what he's talking about lyrically - but as for a sonic experience, it's all excellent.

I Should Coco

Supergrass

3/5

Like all pop singers, Gaz Coombes reminds us to never lose our heads: 'I'd like to wake up in the middle of a dream w/ you'; 'We wake up, we go out, smoke a fag / Put it out, see our friends'; 'I have a little smoke to pass the time of day.' But he's also a killer, a lover, and a 'strange one.' Unlike other Britpop acts, Supergrass returns to the punk scene of more recent memory rather than sixties rock (Beatles, Stones, Kinks). Unfortunately, they're not as convincing as they could be since Gaz doesn't have a memorable, vital voice. The best tracks here are 'Alright,' the most successful single, as well as 'Time' and 'Sofa (Of My Lethargy).' They're slower, more poignant, less frantic for the sake of fast. B/c otherwise, this bears empty calories.

American IV: The Man Comes Around

Johnny Cash

4/5

It's no small success that Cash has me appreciating a Trent Reznor song, but this album is far more than a qualification of my aesthetic preferences. That's b/c American IV is such a powerful and strange cover album, hardly feeling like one in the end. Not only does Cash make other's art his own - he universalizes his selected tracks, and each song seems to be no one's in particular. The democratic choice to disperse a few of his own songs throughout gives the sense that he is merely one of so many conduits thru which art is expressed. The whole world is the writer of poetry in the end, as Emerson reminds us: "For poetry was all written before time was." But this is also Cash qua Cash, the voice being so recognizable, so ineluctable.

Golden Hour

Kacey Musgraves

3/5

Musgraves exhibits a radio country voice, which I can't say I'm in love w/ or would ever feel the need to return to. The soft, gossamer affect leaves me wanting more, and instead of floating I feel like I'm parachuting thru a dull lecture on something pop. Some of the instrumentation, especially as the record gets going, is effective (strings, synths), and lyrics like these are at least up to snuff: 'Plants that grow and open your mind'; 'Coming thru the melody when the night bird sings'; 'I know my place, and it ain't w/ you.' But excited about this I'm not - too innocuous, too tame, not necessarily sterile, but never massively alive, never turbulent or usefully grungy. Saved by 'Happy & Sad' and 'Velvet Elvis,' Kacey suffices but doesn't floor.

Hot Fuss

The Killers

2/5

Spewing four massively successful singles, and 'Jenny Was a Friend of Mine,' Hot Fuss is Hot Mess at the same time that it's cultural touchstone. Primarily 'Brightside,' tho really the overall texture of the record, is etched in our subconscious whether we like it or not. I don't like it, since Brandon Flowers has got me missing Robert Smith, his voice even more gratingly loud and uninteresting. The lyrics are nowhere in particular, and misspend the potential of the best song: 'I got soul, but I'm not a soldier.' Pop music doesn't have to mean anything, but it shouldn't propose empty signifiers. So for this one, it never started out w/ a kiss, but it sure did end w/ an upset stomach. Really, it should always be on the back burner.

Remain In Light

Talking Heads

5/5

Polyrhythmic, Remain in Light is also poly-lyrical: 'Sharp as a knife / Facts cut a hole in us'; 'The world is near, but it's out of reach'; 'There is water at the bottom of the ocean.' Many albums pontificate, may even sermonize, inspire, and theorize, but I can't think of a record that philosophizes like this one, that prompts abstract reflections on 'facts,' 'the world,' and the ocean's bottommost water. 'Time isn't holding up, time isn't after us.' On More Songs About Buildings and Food, Byrne generates interest in objects and stays at their level for a funky, quirky trip into everydayness. On this, actual ideas are spawned, new notions, maybe a metaphysics even. Yet, the music remains light, danceable, wholly unburdened by the intellect.

Getz/Gilberto

Stan Getz

5/5

Bossa nova, especially on this record, is a way of life, something that, like the Girl from Ipanema, passes but is entirely memorable, in fact longingly so. This doesn't pass into oblivion or homogeneity, but only strengthens by virtue of its fleetingness, a transience that somehow sticks around and perpetuates something permanent. That may just be the magic of a 'cool' that's not too cool. Getz/Gilberto successfully negotiate the potential dull and hazy atmosphere prompted by a smooth and superficial experience. It relinquishes smoothness for the sake of easygoingness, superficiality for a momentary suspension of depth. Thing is, it is deep - just not woefully so.

Fire Of Love

The Gun Club

4/5

'We can fuck forever but you will never get my soul.' Ten years the senior of the Jon Spenser Blues Explosion, this is the OG coming together of punk and blues music. Not that punk isn't always already indebted to the blues, but The Gun Club is a particular marriage of sentiments. What I love about their record is how much history you hear - Robert Johnson, of course, but also The Velvet Underground, New York Dolls, Suicide, The Modern Lovers, Patti Smith, not to mention early rockers and auras of American culture in general. It even gets poetic: 'In the stillness of the mosquito sunset.' But points are deducted for racial slurs. Tho Pierce was of mixed race, he fails to harness these words effectively or authentically. Still, a revelatory listen.

Natty Dread

Bob Marley & The Wailers

5/5

‘and don’t be no drag.’ Opening w/ what could only be called kinky reggae (see Catch a Fire), Bob Marley’s first record w/o Tosh and Bunny is a clear triumph. If he’s not comforting you w/ ‘corn meal porridge,’ he’s a reminder of basic human facts: ‘a hungry mob is an angry mob’; ‘a hungry man is a angry man.’ If Marley is not some sort of prophet, especially for those of us who doubt that kind of thing, he’s still an indispensable artist, a realist who satisfies the old adage: ‘show don’t tell.’ No song here is not worth your time - and quite a few are inevitable classics, e.g., ‘Them Belly Full,’ ‘No Woman, No Cry,’ ‘Rebel Music,’ ‘Natty Dread.’ ‘Talkin’ Blues’ takes first place tho, w/ this unwonted violence: ‘Cause I feel like bombin' a church / Now that you know that the preacher is lyin’.’ If that’s not what I’m talkin’ about, it’s what I should be talkin’ about.

Done By The Forces Of Nature

Jungle Brothers

5/5

A somewhat neglected group from the Native Tongues, Jungle Brothers epitomize the best of nineties creativity in the hip-hop format. It's party music, in its own way, but it also swaggers a literariness that could be called poetry, but in fact resembles something older in quality: 'Shake your butt but don't break your back / Tap your feet and let your fingers snap'; 'All you read about is slavery / Never 'bout the Black man's bravery.' It's the combination of body-positivity and mental-positivity that makes this album an exemplar release - whether they're rapping about 'Belly Dancin' Dina' and being 'junglistically horny' or how 'the oppressed will be saved from oppression,' their pedagogy is inseparable from the dance floor.

Surrealistic Pillow

Jefferson Airplane

5/5

Grace Slick has one of the more unique voices in popular music, but what sets Jefferson Airplane apart is the heaviness of their psychedelia. While The Byrds at times grow thin, this is all about booming soul and textures of freedom: ‘I’m so full of love / I could burst apart / And start to cry.’ Even ‘Comin’ Back to Me,’ the track on which you could most easily call bullshit, evades that evaluation since its poetry, which is authentic, never diminishes the music, which foreshadows acoustic Zeppelin. They may sing of ‘purple pleasure-fields in the sun,’ but you never get the feeling that they’re treading on mushy or imprecise grounds, only that they’re exactly as they should be expressive.

Guero

Beck

4/5

'Hammer my bones on the anvil of daylight.' Something about this record is certainly 'hammering,' since the first thing you notice are the drums: heavy but tasteful and illuminating. Having never heard a Beck album before, I wasn't expecting rhythm to lead the way, but I sure wasn't bitter that it did. It's a record w/o genre tho not exactly w/o focus. A legitimate criticism to extend, however, is along the lines of: what is it all about? where is it all going? It's not competence w/o substance, but w/o vision or intention. But sometimes I feel: who really needs those qualities? I guess what I'm looking for is believability, that sticky thing. What we get is more hammers: 'I prayed heaven today / Would bring its hammer down on me.'

Basket of Light

Pentangle

1/5

'But when I awakened I found it not so.' When this record began I found it was not so. As it kept up, I found it was still not so. And as it came to its conclusion I found it was wholly not so. 'To purgatory fire thou com'st at last / And Christ receive thy saule.' Edmund Spenser was ridiculed for his employment of antiquated language in The Faerie Queene. If Spenser is old-school, Pentangle is grotesquely prehistoric. 'I have here a magic horn to deliver.' What's worse, you know exactly the influence an album like this had on subsequent groups stuck in the bullshit of Britishness: Jethro Tull, Deep Purple, Queen, Uriah Heep, Gryphon.

Close To The Edge

Yes

2/5

'A dewdrop can exalt us / Like the music of the sun.' Musically, Close To The Edge is decent, approximating Steely Dan at times, tho less jazzy and far less immediate. 'For the crucifixion of her own domain.' Lyrically, it's all pseudo-literary. Even the refrain 'I get up, I get down' - sung w/ what Jon Anderson would like to be soul but is in reality just taciturn geekiness - is supposed to ultimately mean something DEEP but in fact means they read books (Hesse) and thought they were COOL. 'Emotions revealed as the ocean maid.' I'm not sure what they're getting at, but it seems to me that Yes pooh-poohed 'emotions' and went straight for the cerebellum instead. 'Even Siberia goes through the motions.' The fuck?

Brown Sugar

D'Angelo

4/5

Voodoo and Black Messiah are far more realized and inventive than Brown Sugar, but this is classic neo-soul grooviness and sex-positive spunkiness. Raw is the word, but so are honed and rounded b/c D'Angelo not only sings his heart out - he cruises, covering the Smokey classic for track seven, and gets his magic from empowering the beat to go on just a little longer. That is also the foremost scarcity of the record - it has a one-note strike against it, not enuf variety or new positioning. But that's a small price to pay when it's largely a joy to bliss out to. Running imaginations, i.e., Temptations: 'Is it just that you're the finest little thing / That I ever saw, or is my imagination running too far?'

The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill

Lauryn Hill

5/5

This is a long album that's framed conceptually and has numerous skits, and yet no part of me believes it should be abridged. 'Consequence is no coincidence,' raps Hill on 'Lost Ones,' and neither is success in vision or in voice. Presumably, this album is about L-O-V-E, but Lauryn Hill cut class and missed the relevant seminars. In that way, w/ an all-over-the-place intellect, Ms. Lauryn raps and sings herself into an education that carries religious themes ('Zion'), rap history ('Hip-hop started out in the heart'), relationship advice ('Baby girl, respect is just a minimum'), and her own regretful sacrifices ('Gave all my power ceased being queen'). She raps as well as she sings, and has a doo-wop soul at bottom. A necessary classic.

Paul's Boutique

Beastie Boys

5/5

'It's the joint.' Paul's Boutique is the logical continuation of License to Ill, which sets the standard for witty rhymes and sample-based production. Tho this goes full throttle in the direction of an avant-garde explosion, it's still dedicated to 'all the girls,' and the three white boys are in no mood to be overly serious: 'A strapped shoplifter, a pirate on cassette'; 'Well, me in the corner with a good-lookin' daughter'; 'I love girlies, waxin' and milkin'.' Musically, things culminate most brilliantly on 'High Plains Drifter,' 'The Sounds of Science,' and 'Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun,' all of which contribute to a sonic experience that is equally brash and temperate. No other Hip-hop record is as unorthodox or as hilariously smashing as this.

You Want It Darker

Leonard Cohen

4/5

'There's a lullaby for suffering / And a paradox to blame'; 'I'm angry and I'm tired all the time'; 'My lost, my lost was saying found / My don't was saying do.' As a lyricist, Cohen is one of the all-time greats, better than Dylan to a degree b/c he's as profound as he is direct. This record is an outstanding howl to a god that may or may not be listening, a final and sonorous cry. It doesn't matter to me that his cadence hardly changes or that his voice remains in the gutters of despair. It's a record that negotiates the layers of epiphany, dark tho always gentle, not one that flaunts excessive variety, tho the instrumentation provides more than enough soul, beauty, and diversity for it never to get old. 'We were broken then but now we're borderline.'

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

Beatles

5/5

For good and for bad, it's the first of its kind, and someone had to go there. The Beatles went there, and did so w/ flair, wit, humanity, and McCartney-mastered basslines ('Fixing a Whole,' my god). Chic isn't necessarily pretentious, but it's a far cry from Chuck Berry and Little Richard. So something died w/ this one, tho birthed as well was a willingness to authenticate weirdness w/ a thought-out edge and memorable lyrics like: 'She's leaving home after living alone / For so many years.' An influence that is nearly impossible to calculate, heck, 'Lovely Rita' even portends Lil Wayne's 'Mrs. Officer.'

Time Out

The Dave Brubeck Quartet

4/5

Renowned for its odd time signatures and cool, west-coast grooves, Time Out is one of the most recognizable jazz albums of all time, and its lead single, 'Take Five,' has sold more records than any other jazz song ever. This makes sense, since the album has a songwriting element that most other jazz records don't possess - it boasts memorable hooks and one-two punches that hardly miss. But those 'other' jazz albums, the less singsong ones, are by and large more impressive than this, tho in no way is Brubeck uninteresting or uninspired. I see his influence ranging from jazz's inner circle to instrumental rock/blues like The Allman Brothers. And w/ a record like it, you have to remind yourself that the guy most likely killed elsewhere.

Meat Is Murder

The Smiths

3/5

'Belligerent ghouls run Manchester schools / Spineless bastards all'; 'On the day that your mentality / catches up w/ your biology'; 'Happening in mine, happening in mine.' Only the final song, which is an experimental gem, has anything to do with vegetarianism, but the themes of cruelty and empathy run powerfully thru the entire record. It's not an album that I look forward to returning to, however, even tho Marr is incredible on 'What She Said,' and Morrissey's lyrics are no less impactful. It may be that it's too dark, too despairing in the end, not joyfully cynical. W/ the exception of 'Barbarism Begins at Home,' which vigorously bears witness to the catch-22 of a vicious school system, no track here properly gets me going.

Raising Hell

Run-D.M.C.

5/5

'Not bad meaning bad, but bad meaning good.' Run-D.M.C. was the first cross-over hip-hop act, not only b/c they collaborated w/ Aerosmith but b/c they were three things at once: hard, as in street, heavy, as in rockin', and cerebral, as in geeky and allusive. Raising Hell is remarkably self-aware, a deliberate admixture of nerdy programs and a tough sensibility. Taking these qualities not as opposing forces but natural allies, D.M.C. essentially defines the genre w/ these two lines: 'I got prescription glasses and my eyes are correct'; 'It's called gangsta hard rock, non-stop hip-hop.' Not many albums begin w/ four certified and infectious classics, but this one does. The rest is just as brilliant, especially 'Perfection' and 'You Be Illin'.'

Live At The Harlem Square Club

Sam Cooke

5/5

‘Don’t fight it, we’re gonna feel it tonight.’ Noted for its raw sound, a quality not as prevalent on the singles (tho if ‘A Change is Gonna Come’ is not raw, then what is?), this is one of the great live albums. A soulful romp, it does exactly what a live record should - not only make you feel that you are there but make you wish so much that you were. Cooke’s voice has a bit more rasp here, but no less uncanny control or sweetness, and the music, w/ King Curtis on sax, swings, shakes, and drives. In a deep sense, it’s rock and roll, it’s Chuck and Bo and Little Richard. Yeah…what I would give to have been there. ‘Keep on having that party.’ Remember it.

Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle

Bill Callahan

2/5

I know what he's getting at, but Bill Callahan, much like Howe Gelb, is not a a vocalist who endures soulfully or feelingly: too wispy, too quiet, and too deliberately mellow and inoffensive. Nature and the American West are his muses, but he fails to be as expansive or as explosive as the aesthetics inherent to that part of the country. There are certainly some moments of instrumental beauty, like the luscious strings at the end of 'Too Many Birds,' but Callahan's lyrics do not carry out the music's elegance or energy. 'The leafless tree looked like a brain / The birds within were all the thoughts and desires within me.' That's bad. 'It's time to put God away.' As true as that is, it's sung sleepily when it should be harangued w/ gusto and w/ guts.

Tusk

Fleetwood Mac

2/5

Long and eclectic but focused and mostly painless, Tusk ought to be far grander and stranger than it is. 'When you build your house, I'll come by.' Lyrically, that's about as impressive as it gets, and while 'What Makes You Think You're The One' and 'I Know I'm Not Wrong' have a great deal of pop oomph, I'm not really feeling any track here - not in the gut nor in the head. Somewhere between the White Album and Exile on Main St., but not nearly as successful as those seminal releases, the record can't seem to make up its mind. Is it from the heart or the brain? While you'd most likely want it to be both, Tusk is not soulful enuf to have me moving unreservedly or clever enuf to have me thinking uninhibitedly. In short, it's immensely boring.

Ten

Pearl Jam

3/5

Tho the genre has virtually lost all meaning in the thick of far too many subgenres, 'rock' is the aptest descriptor of this record. Vocally, Eddie Vedder sings w/ a powerful and drawling attack, a register that has now achieved classic status. Musically, it seems every track features a guitar solo, which is at times eventful and justified, others not so much, while the drumming is mostly straightforward and ordinary. I guess what makes it a 'grunge' breakthru is the sensitivity of the lyrics: 'She's been diagnosed by some stupid fuck / And mommy agrees'; 'Clearly I remember pickin' on the boy / Seemed a harmless little fuck.' That 'sensitivity' is mostly believable but at the same time leaves me doubtful and surfeited w/ mawkish honesty.

NEU! 75

Neu!

4/5

The wave sounds notwithstanding, tho even those I'm inclined to embrace, there's something unforgivingly real and reliably peaceful w/ this record. It doesn't blow you away, but then again I'm not so sure that it's supposed to - and one way or another, you learn to speak 'bye, bye' into existence, okay w/ quieter steps into spaces larger than yourself. That's until 'Hero' (David Bowie?) comes on and an unexpected jolt of energy provides the backbone of a moving display of confidence and wit: 'And you're just another hero trying to lose your fight.' After that, the music continues to be playful and driving, ethereal only in moments, concluding w/ a cry for true nurturance: '... help me through the night / Help me see the sun / help me to get up.'

Duck Rock

Malcolm McLaren

3/5

'Impresario' of the punk movement, promotor/manager of bands like New York Dolls and Sex Pistols, and register of the 'hip new thing,' McLaren, I gotta give it to him, 'put together' a remarkable album of world music and Hip-hop. For me, 'Double Dutch,' 'Punk it Up,' and 'Jive My Baby' are the standouts. So from an aesthetic point of view, it triumphs. Historically, it's also fascinating to hear what was up in '83. The outtakes from The World's Famous Supreme Team, a Hip-hop radio show active from '79 to '91, are especially immersive. But morally, 'impresario' in my mind is no different from 'poacher' and 'opportunist.' As much as I enjoy a track like 'Soweto,' appropriation w/o credit spawns an ugly, colonial atmosphere. No good.

Urban Hymns

The Verve

2/5

'And I'm a million different people from one day to the next.' Ashcroft has a bit too much of the Bono affect, - melodramatic, laying into something that doesn't exist - the songs are too long, and the music is often prosaic. 'The Rolling People' boringly channels Oasis. Listen: 'And here we ARE the rolling people' directly lifts Liam Gallagher's characteristic cadence. 'The Drugs Don't Work' is properly earnest but poorly written: 'The drugs don't work they just make you worse.' Obvious much? The best song here is the short 'Neon Wilderness,' but even that can't save the record from being a dispiriting drag. Dreariness is a necessary theme of our best art, but it's not a productive quality. 'We have existence and it's all we share.' Yecch.

If You Can Believe Your Eyes & Ears

The Mamas & The Papas

5/5

'And I pretend to pray.' Whatever the '60s were really about, this captures that sensibility, one that we've all grown accustomed to have nostalgia for, tho many of us were never actually there. One of the great vocal records of all time, w/ Phillips and Elliot leading a sweet and soulful charge, it no less boasts instrumental surreality and a hustling, bustling rhythm. From Spanish Harlem to L.A., you get the sense that the moms and dads may've dug this as much as the rebellious, new-dimension-seeking kids. In other words, the 'in crowd' is what you make it - whether you're dreamin' or you retrospect and wear your influences on your sleeve. However it is, 'I need somebody groovy.' My fill of grooviness is more than satisfied w/ this one.

Sex Packets

Digital Underground

4/5

'I use a word that don't mean nothin', like looptid.' For a goof, they get real on this one, conceptualizing the basic integration of sex and commerce: 'Yeah, one big stupid butt nest / And I'm'a get mine at Gutfest.' Shock G is not quite Lewis Carroll, but unlike other alternative rap outfits at the time (De La, Jungle, Tribe, etc.), he doesn't just know how to affirm w/ off-color rhymes, but he employs nonsense to make a whole lot of sense. 'The Humpty Dance' and 'Doowutchyalike' are funk classics, but the ingenuity of the record clarifies on the second track, which samples Hendrix's 'Who Knows' from Band of Gypsys. Not quite a perfect album, since it's too long and plods in moments, but it's an enduring product: 'it's so real - it is real.'

Neon Bible

Arcade Fire

4/5

'Mirror, mirror on the wall / Show me where them bombs will fall.' Unlike a bomb, this record takes its time to hit, tho the drums are powerful, strings provide orchestral bigness, and Win Butler's voice generously reaches out to the listener. Things finally explode on 'Intervention,' w/ this immediate and prescient indignation: 'Been working for the church while your life falls apart / They're singing hallelujah when defeating your heart.' I admire so much Arcade Fire's refusal to let up while at the same time going all out in the beauty department: eruptions fly w/ tranquil eloquence. '(Antichrist Television Blues)' is an awesome echo of Bruce, and while I wish the lyrics were more cogent/coherent thruout, the album is an undeniable success.

Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire)

The Kinks

5/5

'If he dies we'll send a medal to his wife.' Ray Davies effectually carries on the efforts of World War 1 poets like Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg, while also telling a story of Australian emigration and composing catchy, blues-heavy songs (check out Dave Davies's guitar work on 'Australia'). I have always found it ironic that the British band that in my opinion most aptly aped American music, w/ classics like 'You Really Got Me,' which did more than copy and paste African American artists, but actually presaged punk, came to export more Britishness than any other B Invasion clique. Conceptual after Sgt. Pepper but before The Wall, Arthur succeeds chiefly b/c, tho it's worlds from mine, you get the sense they really lived this thing.

The Libertines

4/5

'Oh, I won't take you anywhere / I'll take you anywhere you wanna go.' Carl and Pete, the frontmen of The Libertines, may not be 'shy,' and they're all about - how should I put it? - 'liberty,' w/ a punky answer to life's problems, but they're also melodic as hell. They opine w/ 'arbeit macht frei,' German for 'work makes you free,' but that does not mean they can't at the same time revel in the vocal greenness of: 'Shoop shoop, shoop de-lang-a-lang.' Where that effective naiveté comes from - 'You won't need money / (You won't need money)' - I don't know, but I'm fully on board. Points off for lack of variety, but unlike the Arctic Monkeys, who never actually sing, The Libertines attack things w/ strength and obliquely, since melody matters.

Bookends

Simon & Garfunkel

5/5

I wasn't expecting S & G to be quite as experimental as they can be on this record, but here they are quoting 'The Sound of Silence' on the second track and creating an audio collage of old home conversations on 'Voices of Old People.' Instrumentally too, this is far more than strumming a guitar. But the star of the show is Simon, who is simultaneously at his most playful and his most heartfelt, producing a stunning meditation on old age thruout: 'There's no times at all / Just the New York Times'; 'How terribly strange to be seventy'; 'Orangutans are skeptical / Of changes in their cages.' Mixed into the whole thing is the perennial 'Mrs. Robinson.' When encountered here, it's an iconic blast.

Jazz Samba

Stan Getz

4/5

Notable is the fact that this record is about the music itself: 'Desafinado' (Out of Tune), 'Samba Dees Days,' 'Samba Triste' (Sad Samba), 'Samba De Uma Nota So' (One Note Samba), samba being the Afro-Brazilian rhythms that comprise their music. Otherwise, it's about a duck ('O Pato'), luxury ('E Luxo So'), and one of the 26 states of Brazil ('Bahia'). Albums that are known for popularizing a foreign music are less than comfortably a quality export of that music, but Getz, here with Charlie Byrd, appears to have a clean record in this regard, and the musicianship, especially Keter Betts on double bass, is masterful enuf, and the rhythms infectious enuf, to have me coming back. Well done, white guys.

Beggars Banquet

The Rolling Stones

5/5

It may be that this is the great Stones album, even more than Exile. Mick is at his most historical on 'Sympathy,' his most amusing on 'Dear Doctor,' his blusiest on 'Parachute Woman,' and timeliest on 'Street Fighting Man.' It's more upfront and immediate than about anything else you'll hear b/c, while it takes no short cuts, it never drags and, taking no prisoners, it frees you from all that's not in your face and epiphanic. Released after their try-hard (tho not awful) 'Their Satanic Majesties Request,' Beggars Banquets sees the group rediscovering who they were all along, messengers of sensuality that may fade but inspiration that never does: 'I'll kill the king, I'll rail at all his servants'; 'Let's drink to the two thousand million.' That's what I need.

Let It Bleed

The Rolling Stones

5/5

Bookended by two of the greatest blues-rock hits of all time, Let it Bleed boasts seven other tracks that ain't bad either. In fact, they're really, really good. 'She blew my nose and then she blew my mind'; 'They got earphone heads, they got dirty necks / They're so 20th century'; 'And there will always be a space in my parking lot / When you need a little coke and sympathy.' Mos Def notably opined: 'You may dig on the Rolling Stones / But they ain't come up w/ that shit on they own.' Right as he is, the Stones never claimed to be the origin. Underrated: they're as raunchy as they are prophetically dark and relentlessly in the muck. And a major shoutout to Merry Clayton (20 Feet from Stardom), who is clearly a genius.

The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway

Genesis

1/5

'Rael Imperial Aerosol Kid.' Rael apparently means 'God's friend' or 'to be exalted,' but only a friend of the pretentious and extremely boring could manufacture a record like this. The storytelling is tacky and uninteresting while the music matches the lyrics by being an utterly soulless + orchestral mess. 'But I know it's me that's hitting out / And I'm, I'm not full of shit.' Allow me to violently dissent, for this is nothing if not full of it, and finally manifests one of its neologisms: 'Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging.' That's right. So lifeless death'd be more substantial, this album certainly doesn't have 'It,' that universal thing that Rael ultimately becomes one w/. I struggle to know what contextual nightmare could've prompted this drivel.

All Directions

The Temptations

5/5

When temptations get funky, it's as much a matter of grooving the afterlife of a nightcap as it is calling out the hypocrisies of our social reality. That is, it's about getting real, real, real: 'I watch you go to church on Sunday / But you forget all you learned on Monday'; 'Talkin' about saving souls and all the time leechin'.' It's funky b/c it's no piece of cake to admit as much, let alone sing it w/ urgency and a fire liable to blaze up the entire network that oppresses in the name of god's eternal love. But it's also sweet as can be, especially on 'Love Woke Me Up This Morning' and their exquisite cover of 'The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.' Maybe it's a reckless take, but can you find me a more perfect record? Better, perhaps. But not as seamless.

White Light / White Heat

The Velvet Underground

4/5

Like the Ramones a decade later, The Velvet Underground had an uncanny understanding of rock-n-roll, so that while they are experimental, at times utterly off-kilter, they are never inaccessible, not even on 'The Gift,' which features John Cale's recitation of an eight minute short story written by Lou Reed. That story happens to be deliciously suspenseful and surprising effective as literature, w/ an ending worthy of an American master such as Flannery O'Connor: 'which split slightly and caused little rhythmic arcs of red to pulsate in the gentle morning sun.' W/ that said, I find it hard to love this record as much as I love their first, which as an artistic statement rivals almost anything. It gives me a great deal of pleasure, but not all-out affection.

Something/Anything?

Todd Rundgren

4/5

This has about four genres acting out together to create something that is enduringly original: rock, blues, soul, pop. The soul factor is particularly unexpected, but Rundgren's vocals, somewhere between Neil Young and Stevie Wonder, catapult a track like 'Sweeter Memories' from a pop hit into the sphere of unmistakable soulfulness. The Wonder connection is deeper than that, since this guy is clearly real moved by melodies and the making of weird warbles that nonetheless get stuck in your head. Exemplifying this is 'The Night the Carousel Burned Down,' w/ its unorthodox structure and surreal subject matter: 'The pipes steamed and shrieked out a blazing goodbye.' Completely bizarre but light and undemanding, Something/Anything? is one of one.

It's Too Late to Stop Now

Van Morrison

5/5

'And it's ever present everywhere / And it's ever present everywhere.' So sings Van the Man on 'Warm Love,' one of the essentials from Hard Nose. When belted on this live recording it yet obtains new significance: 'ever present' is precisely how I'd describe this album. Morrison, tho always in some sort of flow state or rambling and scatting mindfulness, is particularly 'in the moment' here. While you'd want any live experience to be about the occasion, many live records do not manage to capture that here-and-now quality, but this one does brilliantly. Not only does Van sing w/ a 'it's too late to stop now' sensibility, but the backing musicians (e.g., the trumpet on 'I Believe to My Soul') achieve a verve not even Van attains in the studio.

Bad

Michael Jackson

4/5

'And the whole world has to answer right now.' Truth b/c it's impossible not to answer to this guy, as much as you'd like to throw cold water on his career output. He's not only a once-in-a-lifetime talent. W/ the help of the highest level of production (Quincy), he's also the creator of tracks that are reminders of his context while simultaneously giving us groove-attacks as if he's the newest hit on the scene. It's just incredibly difficult to date him. The specifics of this record: more than half of the songs are utterly fantastic ('Bad,' 'The Way You Make Me Feel,' 'Just Good Friends,' 'Another Part of Me,' 'Man in the Mirror,' 'Smooth Criminal'), three are good but not great, and two are duds: 'Speed Demon' and 'Liberian Girl.'

Rock Bottom

Robert Wyatt

2/5

'When you're drunk you're terrific / When you're drunk / I like you mostly late at night.' Wyatt appears to run the gamut of reality but unfortunately picks up nothing along the way, so that while he ranges from the realist to the fantastical, neither perspective is ever effectively expressed. There're moments of musical ingenuity, specifically Wyatt's vocal abstractions on 'A Last Straw' and the horns on 'Little Red Riding Hood Hit The Road,' but it is often too technical or too weird to be moving or persuasive. I don't think Wyatt is insincere, and he's not going out of his way to be obscure or off the beaten track, but too much of 'We'll not grow fat / the mammary gland' leaves me wanting more in the way of vigor and less in the way of languor.

Histoire De Melody Nelson

Serge Gainsbourg

3/5

My French isn't good enuf for me to appreciate the lyrical quality of this record, but the fact that Serge talks and whispers the 'historie' of Melody Nelson, a vulnerable 14 year-old muse, w/o getting on my last nerve is a testament to the effective dynamism and theatricality of the music. The strings do not detract from the funky quality of the opening track or a song like 'L'hôtel particulier,' and the album is short enuf to avoid the pitfalls of self-indulgence. W/ that said, I cannot tell if the concept is deep or the mere gazing of a male: whom does the story ultimately benefit? Moreover, while it doesn't repel me, Serge's whispering is hardly my preference, and I for sure would've dug vocals that matched the explosiveness of the music.

Hot Rats

Frank Zappa

4/5

Zappa, especially + Beefheart, is where so much prog rock wanted to go but never could, too bogged down by pretensions, whereas the former, at least on this record, is all about substance and the goods. Few rock/blues artists can take a turn into European classical form w/o either being utterly overwrought or feebly intellectual, but Zappa doesn't go there to be cool, or to learn precision or perfection, but b/c there's something there that has the potential to pop and swing. 'Willie The Pimp' defines a classic, the best instrumentals are 'Little Umbrellas' and 'The Gumbo Variations,' and the whole gestalt does have a cinematic quality (Zappa's design apparently). I only wish we got more Beefheart - I guess he's the ultimate draw for moi.

Fear Of Music

Talking Heads

5/5

After its dadaist entrance, Fear of Music gets frightfully realist: 'Science won't change you, looks like I can't change you / I try to talk to you to make things clear'; 'Had a love affair but it was only paper'; 'I will find a city, find myself a city to live in / Help me'; 'This ain't no mudd club, or C.B.G.B / I ain't got time for that now.' This is the heaviest Talking Heads out there, by far, w/ 'Memories Can't Wait' bordering on Joy Division's later innovations, and 'Heaven' presaging R.E.M's sincere ballads, but somehow there's still a party, rhythmically prompted, happening between the lines. The Talking Heads are never my first thought to throw on, but whenever I do, I am reminded of how impossibly creative, seamlessly inventive they really are.

Introducing The Hardline According To Terence Trent D'Arby

Terence Trent D'Arby

3/5

Sananda Maitreya, formerly known as Terence Trent D'Arby, is at his best when he's full of shit in the right way: 'If You Let Me Stay,' 'Wishing Well,' 'Dance Little Sister,' 'Let's Go Forward.' Yes, three of those are the chief singles of the record, but that's the point: he ain't that deep. He puts his best foot forward by sticking to the horizons of pop. It's when he belts a thing like 'I've gotta hold on / Struggle through another day / To see the fire in my baby's eyes' that he becomes an ordeal. Maitreya can undoubtedly sing, but loads here is pseudo-gospel and pseudo-soul. Besides, even the standout tracks do not match the power of superiors: Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Prince, Michael and Janet Jackson, DeBarge, Smokey Robinson.

Foxbase Alpha

Saint Etienne

4/5

Their cover of Neil Young is a satisfying and exciting take on that classic, while their sampling verges on MF Doomian peculiarity and creativity. The sweetness of the 60s - not The Beatles but Petula Clark, Lulu, The Crystals ('He hit me / and it felt like a kiss') - gets a house makeover that culminates on tracks like 'Girl VII,' 'Spring,' 'People Get Real,' 'Nothing Can Stop Us Now,' 'London Belongs to Me.' More coherent than The Cocteau Twins and more persuasive than Portishead, Saint Etienne is an imperfect act w/ a whole lot of heart and a talented cast that has engendered enduring songs. A bit long for what it is, no matter, it gives me a pleasure I don't often know where to go to possess. And if you didn't know, 'Carrie's got a boyfriend.'

Lost In The Dream

The War On Drugs

4/5

Too forceful to be indie but too cerebral to be 'guitar rock' (whatever that actually means), The War on Drugs isn't a war at all, more like a unification of various traditions: retrospecting and portending at the same time. Not folk rock either, since they don't neglect soul for a strained profundity or a wistful nothing. Adam Grundeciel sings w/ a contained turbulence in the way of a Bruce Springsteen, while the music balances length w/ essence. Lyrically, there's uplift and pain, like anywhere, but here compellingly and necessarily: 'Don't want another dark time to think to myself / We won't get lost inside it all, you're on my way'; 'I wanna rise on a road / Just let me rise up against the waves.' And wrenchingly beautiful as well.

Lazer Guided Melodies

Spiritualized

4/5

Impossibly, Jason Pierce (Spacemen 3) manages to be both spaced out and thoroughly grounded. No part of me aimlessly floats listening to this record but, then again, there's a gorgeousness that's got me feeling: 'I wanna step into the breeze.' But vagueness, at least one that doesn't always adhere, has its breaking point, and on this album, that comes w/ 'Symphony Space,' an unnecessary instrumental offering. Lyrically, Pierce has a 'you' in mind throughout, one he doesn't exactly explore but merely addresses, e.g., 'And when you smile / You know you blind me / To all the horrors I see.' Quality production, tho, and elegances such as 'You Know It's True,' 'Shine a Light,' 'Angel Sigh,' and '200 Bars' furnish a triumphant sheen that's undeniably pleasurable.

The Bends

Radiohead

3/5

'You can walk it home straight from school / You can kiss it, you can break all the rules.' Radiohead becomes Radiohead, which means Thom Yorke is waxing incoherent while the music is expressive thru experiment. But it's also not quite there yet, so Yorke can be a straightforward moaner and the songs are forthright pop and indie. When a balance is struck, as it now and then is, particularly on tracks like 'High and Dry,' 'Fake Plastic Trees,' '(Nice Dream),' and 'Bullet Proof...I Wish I Was,' it's a prolific cohesion. Often, however, there's a rawness that suggests an indecisiveness and a want of identity, e.g., 'My Iron Lung' is a feeble take on Seattle grunge. I often go for raw origins, but here 'finding their voice' leaves me w/o a strong one.

Frank

Amy Winehouse

4/5

'Always have to comfort you everyday / But that's what I need you to do, are you gay?' It's her voice, obviously - that innovative throwback that's so much the substance - but it's also the wit, the storytelling, the details, the getting back at in order to get back w/ 'Frank.' Sartorial concerns occupy her - 'your Beastie's tee,' 'your jeans are too tight,' 'The Moschino bra you bought me last Christmas' - but that's b/c life for Amy is in the facts and particulars. She sings w/ flexibility as well as precision, so that while she extends her lines like an r&b singer she has the composure of a jazz singer, which she is. 'Amy, Amy, Amy' (muted trumpet is killing on this one), where do I begin? Not as perfect as Back to Black, but she's invariably essential.

Heroes to Zeros

The Beta Band

4/5

'I say the time has come for decision / Better steer my boat for a reason'; 'The milky way results from the crowding / Of extremely faint stars'; 'As the fruits of the loops of the friendships that droop.' That which is pretentious and/or nonsensical on this record is more than rectified by an energizing creativity. The instrumentation is erratic but strong, there's an interesting set of backing vocals, and the lyrics, while at times devolving into elective gibberish, are mostly compelling. Above all, there's a true assortment of sounds and ideas, a blending of influences from Simon and Garfunkel to The La's. More innovative than The Strokes (a contemporary), tho perhaps not as tangible, The Beta Band defines an under-the-radar gem. Bang-up.

Arular

M.I.A.

5/5

'I've got the bombs to make you blow / I got the beats to make it bang.' Far ahead of the rest of us, Maya felt the need to regress morally and politically in recent years, but that's besides the point. This record, like the one that followed, not only gave a voice to unheard millions, but was an artistic and political statement that we hadn't heard since...who? Buffy Sainte-Marie? Peter Tosh? NWA? But this shit's globalized: 'Somewhere in the Amazon, they're holding me ransom.' It's also educational music, not protest music: 'Get yourself an education' is its flavorful dictum. It hits not b/c she has all the answers, or even wants to. It's that she's a one-off, so recognizable and thoroughly universal. Postcolonial, but mostly slamming and palpable.

Timeless

Goldie

3/5

It's not that I don't get the pleasures of sinking into the celerity and flow of the 'bass and drum' sound, it's that the monotony and space-agedness of the enterprise leaves me cold. Stemming from 'jungle,' in reality there isn't much resembling a jungle here, more like a scrambling for the next hit, a hunting for yet another bump. That's something I've experienced and that I've enjoyed, but I gotta be out for that: the impact of such a record is thus too narrowly defined. I know that not all brilliance fits every mood, but I'd like to think that it should accommodate more than one. On top of that, the vocals, provided by Diane Charlemagne and Lorna Harris, are a weak link difficult to overcome: uninteresting, detached. Upswing for influence tho.

Five Leaves Left

Nick Drake

4/5

'So, I'll leave the ways that are making me be / What I really don't want to be.' I have never had to acquire a deep regard for Nick Drake's music. If anything, I've had to reevaluate my initial impression of his genius. But the more I listen, the more I'm absolutely convinced that he's a special talent, the composer of three uniquely excellent albums. What I admire most is that he's no malcontent; although he offers a morose image, that's mere superficiality: he wants, more than anything, to be rid of his worst habits. He has a real poetic sensibility, w/ evocative lines like: 'Three hours from speaking / Everyone's flown.' The orchestration is never ornamental, only appropriate, and his genre is a superb amalgamation of folk, jazz, blues.

Picture Book

Simply Red

3/5

Mick Hucknall isn't Tom Jones, Bobby Hatfield, or Bobby Caldwell, but he sure can sing nonetheless. His artistry isn't profound, and no song here is as passable as 'Heaven' or 'Holding Back the Years,' but he has enuf talent to overcome the saccharine disco-soul that comprises much of the record. I hesitate to employ the pejorative 'boring,' but that's how it ultimately falls w/ this one: tracks like 'Come to My Aid' and 'Jericho' are dull, not so much blue-eyed soul as shut-eyed soul: yawn, yawn, go to bed. Thing is, when it comes to The Righteous Brothers, classics like 'Unchained Melody' and 'You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling' are what they are: classics, songs I return to constantly. What's here that's got me coming back? No mucho.

Immigrés

Youssou N'Dour

4/5

Exporter of mbalax, a popular Senegalese music, Youssou N'Dour put together a short, accessible, and luminous record w/ Immigrés. I don't know what he sings about, but his voice is bright and elastic, the music is flavorfully upbeat, tho gets a bit too pensive on 'Pitche Mi,' and the whole thing offers moment and authority. Tho not really comparable, N'Dour's voice reminds me of the vocals on many Raï records, showcasing high and wobbling strength. The best track here is the nearly twelve minute 'Taaw,' which has the most powerful drum work and horn play. The weakest song is 'Pitche Mi,' which is an overall lull on an otherwise buoyant, compelling record: the guitar work is too smooth, lacking intensity and optimistic grit.

Different Class

Pulp

3/5

'But I've kissed your mother twice / And now I'm working on your dad.' It's wry British humor, that's true, but it's also para 'the common people,’ or so it is supposedly. That is, when Jarvis Cocker isn't intent on outsmarting his audience, which he too often is, there's something resembling a meat-and-potatoes sensibility: 'It's more a case of haves against haven'ts.' The big hits - 'Common People' and 'Disco 2000' - are absolute classics, and 'Live Bed Show,' 'Something Changed,' and 'Underwear' are worthy second-tier slappers, but tracks like 'I Spy' and 'F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E.' betray the record's prevailing flaws: too cold, too aimlessly theatric, above all, too fatally competent. I follow it but I'm not so sure I feel it. You feel me?

Countdown To Ecstasy

Steely Dan

5/5

Jeff 'Skunk' Baxter (lead guitar) and Walter Becker (electric bass) get this record going w/ a nod to The Allman Brothers's genius for instrumental hooks, precipitating an ecstatic and resourceful rock/blues/pop experience. Heavier than Pretzel Logic, b/c featuring more guitar soloing and gut-punching grooves, it's no less colorful or spotlit. I still don't know what Donald Fagen is singing about - 'While the poor people sleeping / With the shade on the light' - but that becomes a part of the fun: an item that is so immediate requiring dissection only gains in pleasure. 'Show Biz Kids' and 'My Old School' are absurdly catchy, but every track here is a memorable apotheosis. 'All I got to say / I'm alive and feeling fine.' Off the wall(s).

Nothing's Shocking

Jane's Addiction

3/5

The atrocious album cover confirms that 'nothing's shocking' - its blaring image of sexual violence no longer astonishes or appalls. But the music is, to an extent, shocking, not b/c of its content but b/c it weds heavy metal to a nascent alternative movement. True, other 80s acts like Dinosaur Jr. and the Pixies showcased similar dynamics, but not as forcefully or as plainly as Jane's Addiction: this isn't slacker intelligence or nerdish obscurantists treasuring the odd for odd's sack. This is, simply put, hard-hitting rock 'n' roll. Just listen to Perry Farrell's purpose: 'I want to be more like the ocean / no talking / all action.' The issue is, Farrell tends to talk too much, even if he's plain as muck, and there's only one eternal, superb track: 'Jane Says.'

Kimono My House

Sparks

3/5

I'll give it to Sparks for being sober enuf to know: 'It's a lot like playing the violin / You cannot start off and be Yehudi Menuhin.' B/c otherwise, tho far more playful than Queen, this record is just as guilty of get-you-nowhere theatrics as any Queen release is. The best tracks, heralded by 'Thank God It's Not Christmas,' have an effective sense of humor that enhance their catchiness, and some of the lyrics are hilarious: 'You mentioned Kant and I was shocked / You know, where I come from, none of the girls have such foul tongues.' But if I'm to judge a record based on how much I'd like to put it on rotation, this isn't a topper for me: tho very creative, especially the jazzy 'Equator,' Sparks is too phony-baloney to be a product I feel.

Coat Of Many Colors

Dolly Parton

4/5

'So I tell my mama that I reckon I oughta / Go to the spring and fetch us some water.' The god talk doesn't do it for me, but Parton is undoubtedly a superb, powerful vocalist, and knows quite well how to compose soulful, compelling pop-country songs. Emphasizing the metaphor of 'many colors,' be it of a coat or a butterfly, Parton ensures, at the very least, that some of what she sings about will hit home: if not this color than the other will be a relatable patch of stumbled-upon truths. She's not Patsy Cline, but then again, who is? She sings w/ an impressive amount of vigor and clarity, she's never dull or wanting of life, and her songs are polished in their curtness but raw in their simplicity.

Electric Music For The Mind And Body

Country Joe & The Fish

4/5

Heavier and more bluesy than The Byrds, just as unmediated and pertinent as Buffalo Springfield, Country Joe & The Fish bursts in like they know they are underrated. B/c man, what a revelation, I thought they were just the most vocal anti-war activists at Woodstock. In reality, they go toe-to-toe w/ the groups I just mentioned as well as bands like Jefferson Airplane, The Doors, and Love. The music is psychedelic, but never breezing or flimsy - they have nothing to do w/ what's gossamer or insubstantial: just listen to the instrumental track 'Section 43.' Lyrically, it's outspoken but also poetic: 'In startled greens of playground grass / A child jumps rope to rhyme'; 'It's a bird it's a plane, it's a man insane, it's my president LBJ'; 'L.S.D. / L.S.D. / L.S.D.'

Surfer Rosa

Pixies

5/5

'Our love is rice and beans / and horses lard'; 'Break my body, hold my bones, hold my bones.' Sadomasochistic, not so much: just up-front and in-your-face, involving lyrics that at times detail violence and upset. Few artists can do this gracefully, let alone tangibly, but that's what the Pixies pull off on this record. Black Francis and Kim Deal don't so much as sing as insist, a dynamic matched by the much lauded drummer David Lovering. This is what metal strives for but seldom achieves: if you want to go dark, go ahead, but it only hits when the brutality has intention and grit. This has all that and then some. Besides, no group remotely sounds like them, even tho you can hear the influences (Modern Lovers) and aftermaths (Nirvana).

Music From Big Pink

The Band

4/5

'Now you look out the window tell me / What do you see? / I see a golden calf pointing / Back at me.' The Band, at bottom, is gospel-rock, tho they may be completely secular for all I know. It has more to do with their lyrics, which center on the philosophical and parabolic, and their sermonic vocal style and instrumentation. Formed in Toronto, they sure feel like they hail from Modoc, Arkansas ('Caledonia Mission'). Unlike John Fogerty, keening for the unfortunate sons, The Band, organ-driven, proffers an adventure in unconscious religiosity. Their songs are not exactly catchy, tho everyone knows 'The Weight.' More accurately, they grab hold of you, as any deft preacher would. A bit uneven, but mostly an excellent, sui generis affair.

Dust

Screaming Trees

2/5

A somewhat innovative statement - I haven't heard sitar incorporated this fluently before, for instance - this record is no less a nondescript event. On a ballads like 'Look At You' or 'Sworn and Broken,' which are melodically satisfying and forceful, or a heavy hitter like 'Dying Days,' cliché lyrics and pointless vocal power corrode what is otherwise convincing songwriting: 'And when I look at you, I've got a second chance'; 'Winter's setting in again / And it feels like the end is near'; 'All these dying days / I walk the ghost town / Used to be my city.' I'm not looking for literary masterpieces, but these bits of saccharine folly can only detract from what could have been a solid product. Besides, it's for Christendom, of which I am not.

In The Wee Small Hours

Frank Sinatra

5/5

Who are the great artists of American solitude? Edward Hopper, there's no question, Raymond Carver, the poet Weldon Kees, Bob Rafelson, director and co-writer of Five Easy Pieces. One would have to add Frank Sinatra to that list, who, w/ this record, and Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely, prompts some of the most profound explorations of that special brand of American loneliness: 'I can't win, but here I am / More than glad to be unhappy'; 'What's in store? Should I phone once more? / No, it's best that I stick to my tune'; 'That I'd awaken w/ the sun / And order orange juice for one.' I can't recall anything quite as intimate or as heartbreaking as Sinatra's vocals here recorded, an absolutely familiar, attentive isolation.

Deep Purple In Rock

Deep Purple

2/5

Deep trash. It doesn't rock, tho it is dense, it doesn't roll, tho it careens off a cliff of its own bullshit. 'Good Golly, said little Miss Molly'; 'Tutti Frutti was oh so rooty.' This doesn't remotely approximate Little Richard, neither the attitude nor the voice. And then it gets strangely racist w/: 'Got black breast Chinese eyes / Got an English brain that's gonna make me wise.' I don't want to be a moral policeman, but that literally translates as: non-white women are good for their bodies, white women for their smarts. Can they play? Sure, and the central guitar solo on 'Child in Time' is their best thing going. But Ian Gillan's yelping is pathetic, and the gist of the record substantiates the truism that there's nothing worse than aimless rocking.

My Aim Is True

Elvis Costello

5/5

The most uniquely sophisticated lyricist in the history of rock music, Elvis Costello spawns a universe of effortless wordplay, effective storytelling, and pop-punk compositions that stand alone in their capacity to move you cerebrally and lowdown corporeally. Lyrically, he knows that memorability has to do w/ word choices that surprise as much as they align w/ our expectations. He rhymes vengeance w/ sentence, punctured w/ disgusted, listen w/ ignition, visit w/ limit, parents w/ disappearance, as any deft rapper might. The only comparable lyricist I can come up w/ is Smokey Robinson, who likewise grasps the sticky materiality and objectivity of words. And in terms of the music itself, it boils down to rockabilly meets punkabilly. Superb.

Harvest

Neil Young

4/5

Harvesting sheer soul and goodwill, Neil Young abounds w/ benevolence - the songs here come from the right place, the proper and warmest regions of our humanity. Young is not exactly a poet, tho he occasionally produces the impressive lyric: 'As the days fly past will we lose our grasp / or fuse it in the sun?' More so, he's shamanistic, a medicine man w/ a ghostly voice and strange hearts to offer. The best-selling album of 1972, and Young's most recognizable record, Harvest is yet not his best, but it's still good for you. Tracks like 'A Man Needs a Maid,' 'Are You Ready for the Country?' and 'There's a World' are soft and dullish, but 'Heart of Gold' is a classic, while 'The Needle and the Damage Done' is his startling chef d'oeuvre.

3 Years, 5 Months And 2 Days In The Life Of...

Arrested Development

3/5

Positive hip-hop, somewhere between De La Soul, Jungle Brothers, Dream Warriors (East Coast) and Outkast, Goodie Mob, Little Brother (Southern), Arrested Development arrived at the gangsta juncture of rap's evolution. While they're no bums when it comes to constructing catchy tracks, their anti-gangsta crusade is both unsubtle and uninformed: 'But he wouldn't stop and I ain't Ice Cube / But I had to take the brother out for being rude.' The genius of hip-hop manifests thru the convergences of opposites: Ice Cube coexists w/ Digable Planets, Above the Law w/ A Tribe Called Quest. Gangsta is not necessarily 'anti-black.' Speech is a funky moralist, but he is also self-righteous. Best track by far: 'Fishin' 4 Religion.' True & groovy.

The Joshua Tree

U2

2/5

'Our love turns to rust / We're beaten and blown by the wind, blown by the wind.' Bono's no Boss, but that's clearly what's he's going for w/ this one. Apparently about 'America,' the fantasy as well as the reality, The Joshua Tree is really about U2 being the most maddeningly mawkish band in the history of pop music. 'I can't live, with or without you / with or without you.' I bring up Bruce Springsteen b/c, unlike Bono, he brilliantly negotiates the sentimental and the concrete. U2, on the other hand, is absolute schmaltz. Plus, it goes w/o saying that Bruce knows America better than these faux. The best songs, 'I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For' and 'Running to Stand Still,' are doomed by vague religiosity. The rest? Acute syrup.

Kenya

Machito

4/5

Deservedly, the intersection of East 111th Street and 3rd Avenue in Spanish Harlem, NY is now referred to as 'Machito Square' (thanks Ed Koch!). The popularizer, really the inventor, of Afro-Cuban Jazz (explicit on the album cover), Cubop, and Salsa, Machito merges the swing-centrism of big band arrangements w/ the impossible fluidity of Afro-Cuban rhythms and the frantic celerity of bebop (e.g., 'Frenzy'). This produces something that is equal parts light and close-knit, precise but thoroughly unruly. While the record itself lacks diversity, and to some degree direction, being more of a collection of tracks than a story told, it's not really about that. It's about a movement in music affixed to neighborhoods now universally pronounced.

Safe As Milk

Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band

4/5

Truly safer than Beefheart's 1969 masterpiece, Safe as Milk is still unlike anything you've heard before: 'High voltage man kisses night to bring the light to those who need to hide their shadow deed'; 'Song before song before song blues / Babbette baboon abba zaba zoom.' Weirdness ever rules the day here, but listenability is hardly an obstacle you'll need to overcome. The same can't be said about Trout Mask Replica. My favorite tracks, the R&B-inspired 'I'm Glad' and the somehow catchy 'Electricity,' are permanent achievements. Finally, however, the debut is a mere tuneup for his far more virtuosic, erudite, and satisfying masterwork. A first step in the evolution of our foremost musicologist. 'Harvest moon be nimble.'

Channel Orange

Frank Ocean

5/5

In my view, there are three indispensable artists from the 2010s: Kendrick Lamar, who is still very much a cultural force, Chance the Rapper, whose Acid Rap greatly endures but who fell off thereafter, and Frank Ocean, w/ a minimal output that redefined experimental R&B. Ocean is the inevitable continuity of Marvin Gaye's workaday confessionals and social awareness, Stevie Wonder's melodic ingenuity, and Prince's casual, yearning sexuality. Whether he's singing about beach houses in Idaho, rich kids on suicidal roofs, or crack rock, crack rock, he incorporates heavy details into an aura that is at once existentially urgent and playfully tongue in cheek. 'You run my mind, boy / Runnin' on my mind, boy.' I'll never forget those words.

The Low End Theory

A Tribe Called Quest

5/5

'A pair of Nikes, size ten-and-a-half'; 'I sport New Balance sneakers to avoid a narrow path.' Hip-hop had been Adidas-centric for the longest. Tribe's embrace of the other brands implies an ethos of divergence. They diverge from gangsterism, no doubt, but they also deviate from their Native Tongues collective. Tho just as spunky, allusive, and self-consciously soft as De La, Tribe is ultimately heaved to fresh heights w/ Q-Tip's resourceful production. Is there another hip-hop release that is more ingeniously reliant on the technology of break loops and the lowdown addiction to the double bass? 'So low-key that you probably missed it.' But it's a low-key vitalness. 'Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?'

Elephant

The White Stripes

4/5

'And the feeling coming from by bones / Says, "Find a home."' After the arena anthem that now feels every bit as familiar as our own thoughts, if not more so, Elephant only continues to astound. Meg and Jack White are emblems of consistency: never doing too much, they're not stripped down - that would mean they begin w/ something complicated and remove the unnecessary pieces. Rather, they find a precise, unadulterated entry point into their compositions and maintain that energy w/o fussing around. You may want to call that blues, and certainly a track like 'Ball and Biscuit' is a rare example of 21st-century blues-rock, but it's also altogether something else. Heavy, droning, clarified, sea-parting rock? 'Be like the squirrel, girl.'

Blackstar

David Bowie

4/5

Blackstar reminds me of Leonard Cohen's last gasp on You Want it Darker - both artists embrace their age and feebleness, and by doing so, engender something far more powerful than forced strength. 'At the centre of it all' is a Bowie still as vibrant and addicted to imaginative production as the early incarnations, but death challenges him to be upfront and intimate in ways honestly not employed by his previous personas: 'I'm so high, it makes my brain whirl / Dropped my cellphone down below.' Especially stunning are the horns, provided by Donny McCaslin, but really the whole experience is instrumentally rich. He claims to have been inspired by Kendrick Lamar and Death Grips. I can see it: particularly K.Dot, the lyricism and riskiness.

Juju

Siouxsie And The Banshees

4/5

Siouxsie Sioux carries on the exuberances of Patti Smith, approaches the animation of Kate Bush, prefigures the spirit of Joy Division, and betters the one-note gothic axioms of The Cure. 'No more second rate movies / From those people outside'; 'Fuck the others kill the mothers.' Clamorous and haunting, they add layers of loudness to what could've been a drag of depression. Good on them for that, since I'd not want to endure a sluggish burn. But ultimately, Sioux suffers from the same shortcomings as Robert Smith. Except for 'Head Cut,' which features fun, frolicking vocals, each track possesses a monotony that is finally exhausted. Salvaged by hefty drumming, effective distortion, and aesthetic resolve, however, it persists.

Gris Gris

Dr. John

5/5

Captain Beefheart's psychedelic counterpart, prefigurement of late-style Tom Waits, and bayou-gris-gris shaman, Dr. John is a genius of mood and experience. The blues has never come w/ as many health benefits or heart balms before: 'If you work too hard and you need a little rest try my utilize rub put some on my drop fix and jam, put some in your breakfast.' But it's not really the blues, nor is it merely psychedelia-flavored New Orleans R&B - it seems to me an intimation of 70s funk in a special way. The thematic oddities, the spiritual levity, the outlandish but incredibly tight production all point to something beyond 60s rock. Somewhere between Sun Ra and Parliament-Funkadelic, this has the metaphysics + a narcotic festivity.

Bubble And Scrape

Sebadoh

4/5

'There's a joy in letting go, / Free to find a love apart.' For low-fi, slacker rock, Sebadoh is shockingly attuned to the deadweight of violence: 'Shot glass hits the wall / Tiny victory.' There's rage here, tho channeled in a way I haven't really heard before: it's not the Pistols, it's not hardcore, it's not industrial, and it's certainly not metal. Each track is uncomfortable to listen to, and tho I greatly admire the artistry that sustains this record, it honestly unloads a great deal of heaviness I'm not prepared to confront. They're not like the Pixies, who employ violence to explore philosophical themes; this is claustrophobic upset, tho paired w/ an egalitarian ethos: 'I won't hold back, so why should you?' So. I won't hold back. But now I'm afraid.

Fishscale

Ghostface Killah

5/5

'I'm on the floor like, "Holy shit!"' One of the premier storytellers in hip-hop, joining the ranks of Slick Rick, B.I.G, and Andre 3000, Ghostface is also a genius of free association. That's an impossible balancing act: how can you be at once committed to narrative structure and free to wander off in ways often hilariously allusive? My favorite instance: 'Liar, liar, pants on fire, you burnin' up like David Koresh.' I guess that's what you get w/ an artist this addicted to details, especially when he's giving directions to the heart ('fucking pervert!'). Lacking production from RZA, the record is set straight w/ the likes of Just Blaze, MF Doom, J Dilla, Pete Rock, and Cool & Dre. Simply put, perhaps the greatest album by one of our real originals.

Station To Station

David Bowie

5/5

'It's not the side effects of the cocaine / I'm thinking that it must be love.' Bowie's tightest and most valiant effort, Station to Station is a record that is so addictively confident, dexterously funky, and sweetly theatric that I'm both stunned by its audacity and consoled by its control. We may never know how it was made, since Bowie was so coked up during the recording that he had little to no memory of the studio sessions. What I do know is that Dennis Davis (drums) is an utter genius, w/o whom tracks like 'Golden Years' and 'Stay' would be merely proficient, not the constituents of an all-time release. Concluding w/ 'Wild is the Wind' may've been his homage to Nina, but it no less resumes the brilliance of Mathis, that other queer icon.

New Gold Dream (81/82/83/84)

Simple Minds

3/5

'Somewhere there is some place / That one million eyes can't see.' I would have liked The Breakfast Club group to give me more of a buffet, but this succeeds as some sort of timeless period piece: it's about as 80s as you can get, and for this reason, endures thru the decades. Lyrically, it's vague and lugubrious, the quintessential 80s backbeat charms but also irritates, and nothing tells me that it's held together by authentic ingenuity. But, call it a guilty pleasure, or else an instance of guilt being somehow pleasurable: the energy is true to form and not something I'd promptly refuse. Besides, it has moments of truths and beauty: 'We were only young in the whirlpool of warning.' I'm left wanting to squeeze what I can from life. For that: dig.

A Rush Of Blood To The Head

Coldplay

3/5

If Radiohead were to go pop, I guess you'd get Coldplay, which isn't exactly putting Chris martin and co. on a pedestal. Radiohead isn't flawless, tho they have their moments, and Coldplay is a diluted take on Thom Yorke's vagaries and philosophical pretensions. But they aren't merely that: 'The Scientist' is a pop rock classic, 'Clocks' is another worthy single, 'Green Eyes' is a gem, and 'Warning Sign' is sappy but convincing. Still, the songs are too long, Martin's voice is effective but not an all-time stunner, and the lyrics are neither saved by wit nor enhanced by sincerity: 'Am I a part of the cure? / Or am I part of the disease? Singing / You are'; 'I am nothing / In the dark'; 'Come back and look for me, look for me / When I am lost.' nah.

Nilsson Schmilsson

Harry Nilsson

5/5

Nilsson's genius lies somewhere betwixt Joni Mitchell and Carole King: he has the the poetic sense of the former and the soulful pop instincts of the latter. But what sets him apart from the pack, his being that of the singer-songwriter, is an unvarnished optimism, even at his darkest: 'Driving along you can see all the people / Who seem to have nothing to say to each other.' That's like an inversion of King's 'You've Got a Friend,' but it's also an inversion of the inversion, since he sings it w/ such buoyancy that you're left feeling: perhaps it's better this way. Vocally, he's simply extraordinary, possessing a soul voice, a rock voice, a pop voice, a blues voice, and his own voice, all at once. I've always known he was good, but not this good.

Only By The Night

Kings of Leon

2/5

When it was first released, for some reason the Tennesseans' fourth album found more critical acclaim in the UK than in America. I guess that's not exactly a surprise, since Kings of Leon harbor a sound that an American deems pseudo-national whereas British yearning for some USA flavor would extract some genuineness: 'The reds and the whites and abused / The crucified USA.' But Caleb Followill is a talented soul-barer, even if he isn't all that interesting, and the band does know how to put together pop-rock singles. The best tracks are 'Manhattan' and 'I Want You,' the song I hate to like is 'Use Somebody,' while the worst are 'Sex on Fire' and '17.' If you want stellar southern rock tho, go dig some Alabama Shakes. 2.5/5.

The Sensual World

Kate Bush

4/5

Kate Bush isn't Joycean, tho she lifts from Ulysses directly. She's Bjork before the Icelander broke thru, and if she were to mirror a literary figure, she'd be some amalgam of WB Yeats and Sylvia Plath (not to mention the obvious Emily Bronte, but that's a debut resemblance). True to its title, this record transcribes the items of a sensual world, but there's something so beautifully, explosively, taciturn about it that it's less about the inevitability of sexuality than its precarious potentials. These lines don't have me hot and bothered: 'Reaching out for mama'; 'It couldn't be you, it's a picture of Hitler'; 'I turn to my computer like a friend.' Vocally, she's as wild as ever, the music is 80s pop meets Orient(alism), Big Boi is still a fan, and so am I.

Pet Sounds

The Beach Boys

5/5

'I could try to be big in the eyes of the world.' Brian Wilson didn't need to try to be big in our eyes, having put together what can only be judged to be a perfect record. I know people cite it as perhaps the most influential 'pop' album of all time, but this seems to me besides the point. W/ a record this monumental, labels such as 'pop' surely fall flat. It's hard to put into words what's achieved in less than forty minutes, but it has something to do w/ manifesting a confident warmth enhanced by a sweet and all-too-human solemnity: 'Sometimes I feel very sad.' Paul McCartney famously said that when he first heard Pet Sounds, it made him cry. When you cry when you aren't sure why, it's not only cathartic, it sensitizes you to crying again, if that's how it oughta be.

Music in Exile

Songhoy Blues

4/5

Reigniting the fuse of blues rock, Songhoy Blues demonstrates precisely what's wrong with the label 'world music.' W/ 'world' meaning native to any locale other than the Western colonial powers, the rest of the world, even if they have little to do w/ each other, gets lumped together, while the West remains out in front. So, tho it's true that Songhoy Blues' features guitar work that resembles John Lee Hooker and Lead Belly - Garba Toure, a member of the band, fessed up, 'Besides, we love electric guitars too much' - Music in Exile isn't merely a blues rock record that happens to come out of Timbuktu. It's Malian too, it's music in exile but home music as well. Special tracks: 'Al Hassidi Terei,' 'Wayei,' 'Petit Merier,' 'Mali.'

Your Arsenal

Morrissey

4/5

'Well, you don't need to look so pleased.' Morrissey has always had guts, but on Your Arsenal, backed by a heavy guitar and drum sound, he doesn't only speak truth to power, he has fun w/ oomph and potency. 'London is dead,' and five more times of that obituary, compounded w/ 'We are the last truly British people you will ever know' and 'England for the English,' yields an unsettling ideology, but the irony isn't lost on me, irrespective of the artist's more recent political takes. My favorite track is 'Certain People I Know,' which borders on a country hit, 'You're the One for Me, Fatty' is authentically sweet, and 'Seasick, yet Still Docked' is absolutely gorgeous, equal to if not better than 'I Know It's Over.' An excellent record, raw 'n' all.

D.O.A. the Third and Final Report of Throbbing Gristle

Throbbing Gristle

2/5

P-Orridge is v horrible, and Throbbing Gristle's excursion into violence and disturbance, particularly on the harrowing 'Hamburger Lady,' is not exactly experimental music w/o reason but it is a trial in horror w/o uplift. I prefer the electronic minimalism of a band like Suicide, and if I were looking for a noisy affair, give me the free jazz of Archie Shepp and Cecil Taylor, the discordant blues of Captain Beefheart, or the heavy lyricism of rappers like Danny Brown or JPEGMafia. So while I can appreciate the influence that a record like this has had on industrial music, that's where it ends for me. I cannot get down w/ a record this disdainful of human life and this intent on sampling snatches of uneasy conversations. It's pretentious, and ugly too.

Straight Outta Compton

N.W.A.

5/5

This record proves that tho bad values aren't made better in the name of 'reality,' they also don't necessarily detract from an album's greatness. Tho N.W.A. was branded the 'world's most dangerous group' when they first hit the scene, 'street knowledge' is only part of their equation. If you were unaware, they may school you to the tragedy of police brutality, but more importantly, Dre, Cube, Ren, and E are informants of America's ugly and universal gangsterism: 'Gangsta, gangsta, that's what they yellin' is a national outcry. Aesthetically, what else is there to say? Cube's continuity w/ Chuck D, Ren's underrated flow, Eazy-E's admixture of criminality and comedy, Dre's fluid, variable production: a deep and ubiquitous influence.

Movies

Holger Czukay

4/5

On Movies, Holger krafts a cinematic mood short of a cinematic event. In the end, that's a good thing, since high concept would turn this record, a treasure of funk/jazz/rock, into ersatz unbelievability. Boasting four tracks, Movies is aptly plural. It's a remarkably eclectic amalgam of sounds and ideas: the very German 'Cool in the Pool,' the John McLaughlin meets Pink Floyd 'Oh Lord, Give Us More Money,' the pukka 'Persian Love,' the synth-energized 'Hollywood Symphony.' It's a soundtrack, but to nothing whole. Its sampling of movie snippets foreshadows hip-hop production à la MF Doom, and tho it's a bit slow at times, and a bit cool in a nonessential way, I not only commend Holger's creativity, I think it's a damn good album.

Metallica

3/5

'Exit light / Enter night.' Except that this night has little of the color or the confusion that makes night an exciting, unpredictable part of our lives. I've seen interviews w/ Metallica, and James Hetfield in particular always struck me as a kindhearted individual, but Metallica's formulas don't do it for me. While I find myself nodding my head occasionally, their riffs are heavy but they aren't bluesy, i.e., they don't approach Sabbath's soulful metal. Kirk is clearly a gifted guitarist, but his solos are perfunctory, and Ulrich's a dense and uninteresting drummer. Most damningly, Hetfield is a corny lyricist, no matter how sincere: 'Never free, never me / So I dub thee unforgiven.' I do, however, appreciate the nod to West Side Story on 'Don't Tread on Me.'

You Are The Quarry

Morrissey

3/5

Right off the bat, Morrissey takes on American politics, British identity, and Jesus. Tho he's never one to shy away from big topics, having battled the Queen and railed against eating meat since the very beginning, he had always done so w/ wit and descriptiveness. But besides the excellent 'First of the Gang to Die,' and the agonizing 'Let Me Kiss You,' this record is too vague, too lugubrious: 'Here you'll find, despair and I / Calling to you with what's left of my heart.' Morrissey, despite popular belief, doesn't feel all that bad for himself, but here he's aimlessly self-involved: 'This world, I am afraid / Is designed for crashing bores / I'm not one.' Part of me wants him to get to the point, the other less pronounced: it's overcooked; half-baked.

Purple Rain

Prince

5/5

'Are we gonna let de-elevator bring us down?' The greatest musician in popular music, at least post-1970, is at his obvious peak on Purple Rain, a nine-track record that feels more like a greatest hits compilation than a soundtrack. Prince's vocals and guitar playing are more rock-centric than on either 1999 or Sign o' the Times, but it's no less locatable in the 1980s. He's still sex-before-all-else, but he's not cumbersomely horny: 'I met her in a hotel lobby / Masturbating with a magazine.' It'd be inaccurate to say that this record achieves its grandeur in the mode of vulnerability, Prince being too aloof to achieve genius thru confession. It's therapy as climax: we all know how it's gonna end, but it hits w/ the same power every time.

Warehouse: Songs And Stories

Hüsker Dü

4/5

'Expectations only mean / You really think you know / What's coming next, and you don't.' Every punk-indie band's favorite outfit, Hüsker Dü doesn't only foreshadow, they alchemize. Just by being who they are, they verify that punk can be poetic, that indie can be hardcore, that what we call alt-rock doesn't exist w/o the whole CBGB thing. That alchemy, the coinage of indie out of hardcore punk, can be illustrated: 'Familiar places that we turn into gardens.' At times, you'd be sure Michael Stipe was the lead vocalist, but Bob Mould isn't to be confused w/ anyone else. The lyrics are hardly obscure, the music is fast but melodic, the vision is to embolden: 'There's nothing wrong w/ having aspirations / Nothing wrong w/ walking tall.'

Let's Stay Together

Al Green

5/5

Green's voice is a miracle of tension: hesitating but explosive, terrified but audacious, quiet but at full throttle. Every word is annunciated w/ power as well as timidity, shattering its vicinity b/c it took everything to overcome his shyness, meekness, apprehensiveness: 'It's like burnin' fire, oh shut up in my bones.' This is displayed most magnificently on the six-minute + 'How Can You Mend a Broken Heart,' a sensational incarnation of fear and focus, a mournful but muscular will to live. I love the strings and horns, the drums are tight and palpable, but it's Green's vocals that have become something of a mythical achievement in the canon of soul music. Only Otis likewise knew the magic of holding back in order to find one's grit and fortitude.

Doggystyle

Snoop Dogg

5/5

'That's the American dream nigga / Well ain't it?' It's no small thing that on this naught-to-the-hoes record the first verse we hear is from The Lady of Rage, but you'd have to be ear-plugged not to be disturbed by the sexism flaunted here. Thang is, that's the point. Commended for its depiction of 'reality,' Doggystyle is real to the extent that it's fantasy, a paradoxically sobering dosage of a gin-soaked, chronic-fogged gangsta party: 'Stay full of that gin and juice and have a ball'; 'Some of you don't know about the G thang baby / It's the smooth gangsta shit that be drivin' ya crazy.' Leave the horrors of the dark side to Ice-T and KRS-One. This is the horror of the American Dream manifest. And it happens to be fearfully well-produced.

Who Killed...... The Zutons?

The Zutons

4/5

Revivals don't always showcase creativity, especially revivals of revivals, since that's what The Zutons are: a horn-heavy revival of The La's who were reviving The Beatles, etc. It's not just the Liverpool connection, tho that's apparent. It's the pop outlook, the refusal to be conceptual tho not opposed to storytelling, a deepness that's not deep but merely for fun. In other words, The Zutons manage a creative revival, I'm happy to say. Dave McCabe's vocals are slightly tinged w/ pseudo-soul, but he's a pleasurable reminder of Alex Chilton w/ The Boxtops, the instrumentation variegates, the songwriting even echoes Lead Belly. 'Oh where will you sleep tonight.' It's not the greatest thing ever, but I'll take them over the Arctic Monkeys.

Happy Trails

Quicksilver Messenger Service

4/5

Quicksilver Messenger Service's ode to rock-n-roll, i.e., Bo Diddley, is one of the great (live) guitar records of all time, rivaling The Allman Brothers' At Fillmore East. The six-movement suite of Diddley's 'Who Do You Love' affirms the improvisational potential of rock music, but it also testifies to its meat-and-potato edge. Extending a 2:18 classic to 25:22 is risky business, and could easily devolve into messy self-indulgence, but this never does, fortified by an unwavering commitment to Bo's rhythmic signature. This is continued on 'Mona,' another Diddley staple, while the final three tracks are a gorgeous tumble into what Emily Dickinson dubbed 'the letting go.' For music this austere, there's also uplift and relief. Happy trails, indeed.

Halcyon Digest

Deerhunter

4/5

'Come on, kid / Keep your head up and sigh / You don't need to understand / The reasons why oh why oh why oh why oh.' Tho it starts off slow and a bit purple, Halcyon Digest clarifies via simple, unfeigned emotiveness. Cox sings w/ just enuf power and art to keep things soulfully afloat, avoiding the all too common flatness of indie rock. The songwriting is tight, a mix of short tracks that keep things honest and long ones that give you time to ruminate and explore. Lyrically, there's a gorgeous integrity, like: 'It could be the death of me / Knowing that my friends / Will not remember me.' In the end, however, it suffers from what all indie rock suffers from: softness; intensities that stem from problems that ain't problems. But very good 'tis.

Parsley, Sage, Rosemary And Thyme

Simon & Garfunkel

4/5

'My life is made of patterns / That can scarcely be controlled.' This record is defined by control, particularly the impossibly gorgeous arrangement of 'Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme,' a traditional English ballad the duo makes very much their own. In many ways, this album feels like a draft of their subsequent masterpieces, tho I don't know if Simon was ever funnier than he is on the Dylan parody 'A Simple Desultory Philippic' or if Art ever sang more beautifully than he does on 'For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her.' Simon's lyrics are evocative and probing: 'Are you looking for a way to chuck it all?'; 'Can analysis be worthwhile? / Is the theater really dead?' Somewhat mushy at times, but it's still an impressively elegant release.

Melody A.M.

Röyksopp

2/5

Melody A.M. is tolerable when it's permeated by hip-hop vigor rather than narcotics. 'Eple,' boasting a piano loop that approximates Premier's 'Mass Appeal,' and 'Röyksopp's Night Out,' featuring some tasteful scratching and funky guitar loops, are passable, while the rest is either slippery languor or tacky buoyancy. Atmosphere is the downfall of could-be-great bands like Portishead, but Röyksopp isn't just reliant on mood, they try to make up for it w/ vocal performances that are mawkish and uninteresting, e.g., 'Remind Me.' By the end, I'm irritatingly relaxed b/c I'm exasperatingly indifferent to the sounds I'm hearing: I find myself not even caring to say who cares. Don't say no to drugs, kids, but say no to this lousy ambiance.

Oar

Alexander 'Skip' Spence

5/5

'A nice place to play / And no place to fall'; 'Oh, oh Diana / I am in pain / This is my heart beat'; 'If he could be free / He wouldn't have stripes on him, like jail.' This little record, tho at 22 tracks and over an hour long, is one of the great give-everything-at-once-I'm-about-to-fall-apart albums of all time, rivaled only by Big Star's Third/Sister Lovers. Utterly gorgeous and intensely heartbreaking, Oar is a feral collection of psychedelic and country-inspired virtuosity + sincerity. Like The Velvet Underground, but unlike The Beatles, Spence makes the strange thoroughly personal. Unlike most anything else, Oar harmonizes the desperate and the lighthearted: 'I found a lot of life that day / W/ her grandfather in the bowery'; 'So what.'

Blonde On Blonde

Bob Dylan

5/5

Blonde on Blonde is Dylan's brilliant transition from the electrified folk rock of Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited to the personalized imagery of the '74 Blood on the Tracks. 'But Mona Lisa must have had the highway blues / You can tell by the way she smiles' feels like something out of 'Desolation Row,' whereas 'An' I told you, as you clawed out my eyes / That I never really meant to do you any harm' is as subjective and specific as something off of Blood on the Tracks. Dylan learns how to place the 'I' in his allusive landscapes in ways that are often as blurry as the portrait of the artist serving as the album cover. Unable to ignore love and indignation any longer, he spawns the essential double album. Sad-eyed ladies, etc.

Germfree Adolescents

X-Ray Spex

5/5

'I wanna be dehydrated in a consumer society'; 'Sensationalism for the feed'; 'Scrub away, scrub away, scrub away.' Not only are Poly Styrene and the rest of 'em convincingly anti-capitalist, not only are they true punks w/ saxophonic suavity, not only do they foreshadow riot grrrl, not only does Poly exist somewhere between Patti Smith and David Johansen, tho in some ways, she outclasses both, as punks, X-Ray Spex understood the assignment: The Sex Pistols merely completed it. Their societal anxieties are well-founded, indeed are ahead of their time, but their songs never lag under the weight of didacticism. It's more prescient than a whole lot out there, but it's also far more fun, quirky, variegated, inventive, raucous.

Stardust

Willie Nelson

4/5

This is a remarkably rich collection of jazz and country standards, entirely different from an Ella Fitzgerald cover album, which emphasizes her genius and improvisatory skill, closer in kind to Rod Stewart's The Great American Songbook volumes, tho a thousand times better. In reality, this is a mere cover album, but it possesses something grand, something transcendent, not just a sum greater than its parts, but parts that are greater than their parts, etc. It could be that, w/o Willie's songwriting on display, you're reminded just how quietly superb a singer he is. It could also be that well-arranged covers are souvenirs of an artist's love for music and its history. Whatever it is, Stardust is a touching, often jaunty record, & one for keeps.

Blood Sugar Sex Magik

Red Hot Chili Peppers

2/5

Mega-talented but ultimately unrealized, the Chili Peppers are all over the place but posses very little range. I'd normally enjoy an effective amalgam of genres, in this case funk, hip-hop, punk, and grunge, but this doesn't blend as much as it fails to make up its mind. That's probably why it's so long: at 73 minutes, Blood Sugar Sex Magik either meanders or lingers on the cheesiest aspect of a particular genre. Here's corny hip-hop lyricism: 'My lily-white ass is tickled pink / When I listen to the music that makes me think.' And here's tacky rock lyricism: 'My face will never show / What is not real.' It's tediously disappointing b/c there's a whole lotta talent behind the schmaltz and stupidity. +, Mos Def's 'Brooklyn' > 'Under the Bridge.'

Abbey Road

Beatles

5/5

It's difficult to write about The Beatles in general, but a particular challenge to say something new about Abbey Road, which may very well be their finest moment: their clearest, most wide-awake record, a conclusion but no less a beginning, their best produced and their least self-conscious. It almost feels as if the band could finally relax, perhaps knowing that it was all coming to an end, but also b/c they went thru the necessary labor pains involved in creating Revolver, Sgt. Pepper's, and The White Album, brilliant works of art but notably self-aware. It has two of the great Beatles songs, the Harrison-masterstrokes, it has Ringo's most memorable and inventive drumming, Paul's maturest songwriting, and Lennon as a soulful backdrop.

3 + 3

The Isley Brothers

4/5

Besides 'That Lady' being one of the greatest funk soul records of all time, an improbably rugged yet smooth package of spirit, w/ perhaps one of the more underrated guitar solos in popular music history, this album is a true classic of 70s soul. It's peculiar too. Ronald Isley doesn't have the most recognizable voice, he's not a luminous talent in the way Smokey Robinson or Stevie Wonder are, but together w/ his brothers, he brews a stunningly memorable sound. I think it has something to do w/ the fact that they are nearly sans genre, somehow and somewhere between soul, funk, gospel, and, most evocatively, 'rock.' W/o the Isley Bros, you'd'n't have p-funk or g-funk, but you'd also be w/o arena rock: up-close-and-impersonal magic.

The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady

Charles Mingus

5/5

The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady is a steamroller of a record, a steamy soundtrack to some sort of excessive yet controlled bash, a cosmopolitan assembly, a rooftop brawl. A fearsome lot is going on this album, but the main point is understood: the center couldn't hold, but the collapse has a beauty, a logic of its own. Mingus put together one of the greatest albums of all time w/ this four-piece masterpiece, and I do not tire of listening to it. Strangely too, it fits more moods than you'd initially think: there's quiet in it, there's stillness, there's a supported contemplativeness, particularly at the outset of the third movement. The ever-fertile touch is Jay Berliner's Spanish guitar work. America's composer after Duke and Monk is Mingus.

Dirt

Alice In Chains

3/5

'I feel so alone / Gonna end up a big ol' pile of them bones.' Sincerity does not certify aesthetic pleasure, or aesthetic success, but Layne Staley is so reliably upfront and naked in his truth that he does engender a palpable experience, even if, sonically, it's not my sort of heavy: 'Look at me now, a man who won't let himself be.' Like Jane's Addiction before them, Alice in Chains returns to Zeppelin, but w/ the same shortage of a bluesy register. It's more than just loud, but the persistence of melodies that aren't exactly melodic is tiresome, as is Staley's low-register howl, which is only slightly more soulful than Eddie Vedder's monotone. Oscar Wilde said that all bad poetry is sincere. This is sincere, and tho it's not bad, it's not great either.

You've Come a Long Way Baby

Fatboy Slim

4/5

A repetitive tho not exactly redundant electronic record, You've Come A Long Way, Baby goes a long way in realizing a 'big beat' album abounding in small touches and lasting flourishes. Clearly, Fatboy Slim doesn't take himself seriously, but he does his art. I'm no expert in electronic, sample-based music, but this feels like something between DJ Shadow and Daft Punk: it has the studio-atmosphere of the former, the club-atmosphere of the latter. Not every track is worth your time, particularly the irritating 'In Heaven,' but at his best, Slim spawns an imaginative aura that demands our attention - and our bodies. The four or five masterstrokes are not only addictively upbeat and golden, they're in my head whilst in my toes.

On The Beach

Neil Young

4/5

'Some get stoned, / Some get strange, / But sooner or later / It all gets real.' Neil Young has always gotten real, but this record is indeed on the beach, a lighthearted fantasy, too winsome in spirit to be somber in truth, tho w/ a half buried car and overcast skies. It's hard to place Young, he's such a genre-bending artist, tho at the same time almost impossibly traditional: that's what makes it magic, I guess. 'All the bush league batters / Are left to die on the diamond.' I hesitate to call it Americana, that'd be to attribute symbolism to his lyrics, which isn't fitted. Like Hopper and Sinatra, he's a master of American solitude, but he's more mystical, and a lighter spirit. 'I need a crowd of people / But I can't face them day to day.' Gently straight.

Pyromania

Def Leppard

1/5

'All I've got is a photograph / I wanna touch you.' They probably know that they're dumb, but this is such an unimaginative venture into rock vapidity that any semblance of self-awareness salvages nada. When it's theatrical, as it is on 'Too Late For Love' and 'Die Hard The Hunter,' it's as superfluous as Queen; when it's straight-up rock, it's emptier than AC/DC. 'Is anybody out there, anybody there? / Does anybody wonder, anybody care?' I don't care, for one. It starts off on the wrong foot, since rock music that's about rock music seldom hits, unless it's rock-n-roll in its earliest incarnations. Joe Elliott can hold a note, but not my attention. Rick Allen, who had yet to lose his arm, can pound but can't drum. Stagefright: wish they had some.

Graceland

Paul Simon

4/5

On Graceland, world music, by which I mean the various styles indigenous to South Africa, is distilled into Simonian wit and punctuated by imagery only a New Yorker would know. It's hard to tell what exactly Simon sings about - where biographical criticism applies and where it doesn't - but at his best here, Simon recruits the fecund uplift of African music in order to explore themes of loss and solitude: 'And my traveling companions are ghosts and empty sockets / I'm looking at ghosts and empties'; 'She was physically forgotten / Then slipped into my pocket / With my car keys.' Tho it includes absolute classics, Graceland does miss at times, w/ 'Homeless' bearing obvious saccharinity, but mostly, it's an essential, beautiful listen.

S.F. Sorrow

The Pretty Things

3/5

Remembered as the first 'rock opera,' S.F. Sorrow is the transition from The Kinks to Pink Floyd. Rock-n-roll gets caught up w/ the conceptual, refusing to 'roll' off the tongue anymore: 'Your sonnets of life / They are filling the place / High windows inside me / Look down on your face.' A mouthful, to say the least. They aren't necessarily too British, thankfully, but they are skittish: an excitable rush of half-baked ideas, lyrical programs they were all too eager to utter. Mostly, prog made rock a slog, but what saves this album from itself are the song structures and the instrumentation. Better than Tommy b/c it features sweeter vocals and more soulful riffs, it's still a pretentious barrage. The best tracks: 'Trust' and 'Loneliest Person.'

Sunshine Superman

Donovan

3/5

'I'll pick up you hand and / Slowly blow your little mind.' As if Revolver were orchestrated by Simon and Garfunkel but roundly corrupted by Pentangle, Donovan's Sunshine Superman is 60s thru and thru, the best of it (the title track, 'Ferris Wheel,' 'Season of the Witch') and the worst ('Legend of a Girl Child Linda,' 'Three King Fishers,' 'Guinevere'). I admire the innovative employment of non-Western instruments, but too much aspires to British revivalism w/ empty talk of princesses, magic, and Arthurian pastiche. As a vocalist, he's mostly understated tho unexpectedly theatrical at times, especially at the jazzy conclusion to 'Bert's Blues.' It's a classic of its era, but hardly a timeless statement. +, my guy looks like Kristen Stewart.

Lust For Life

Iggy Pop

5/5

'Here comes my face / Out of the crowd.' Lust isn't always very lustful on Lust For Life: something other than a sexual energy defines this record's temper. Iggy takes advantage of Bowie's bold and leakproof production, prompting an experience that is never more explosive than it is composed. If Fun House is the zenith of runaway vigor, Lust For Life is in a sense more straightforward, even tho the musical ideas are more complex, the lyrics more dynamic. Initiated w/ the bang of all bangs, the album never quite settles, but it also doesn't take a sledgehammer to life: 'And when you're tumbling down / You just look better.' That's more respectful than lusty, but then again, maybe it can be both at once. An exceptional record.

Reign In Blood

Slayer

2/5

'Destroying w/o mercy / To benefit the Aryan race.' The songs are short and Dave Lombardo's drumming is a mess of punky dynamism, but the lyrics cannot be thicker, and the ideas, if you can call them that, more flatly unimaginative. Reign In Crud, mostly.

Ogden's Nut Gone Flake

Small Faces

4/5

Heavier than The Who, more soulful than The Kinks, conceptual but not yet progressive, Ogden's Nut Gone Flake is an essential 60s record, a psychedelic romp, a spree of ingenuity. 'Love is like a voice in my head / Keeps turning 'round the things that we said.' Energized by vaudeville, Delta blues, and Britishisms (but not too many), it succeeds on multiple levels. If it lacks anything, it's precision and an iota of substance, but mainly it's a Shakespearean comedy + rock-n-roll. Real rock-n-roll, that is.

Rapture

Anita Baker

4/5

'I'm caught up in the rapture of love / Nothing else can compare.' Not as smooth as Sade, or as dynamite as Smokey Robinson, Anita Baker still spawns two classic tracks: 'Sweet Love' and 'Caught Up in the Rapture.' The other songs are not as memorable, tho her voice is, w/ underrated scatting abilities and a sexuality to boot: a quiet storm, perhaps, but also tempestuous, full-bodied. 'Mystery' reminds me of Eddie Holman's 'Lonely Girl'; the rest, of what's to come in R&B. For that, I'd happily listen again. Specially, w/ red wine and not a whole lot to wear.

Kind Of Blue

Miles Davis

5/5

I painfully recall a friend of a friend remarking that this was 'elevator music.' If so, it's an elevator I'd happily live the rest of my life in. Modal, it's also a model and a middle ground. Never too cool for school, it's yet cooler than you are, and more snappily happening. I've now heard it n+1 times: better—vivider—each.

Bossanova

Pixies

4/5

Clearer than the previous two, tho just as punishing, Bossanova is aptly christened. Something's relaxed, has come into its own, namely Black Francis, who's learned Tom Waits's secrets of the weird trade. 'We will wade in the shine of the ever / We will wade in the tides of the summer'; 'Time is an arrangement / Time is an arranger / I am a derangement.' Juxtaposition, not so much: more like life itself, fire and all. Who'd thought fire'd be the chief element of our best pop music? Welp, they dug for it, and found it a salve for their brokenness, a balm for too much togetherness: 'It is time for stormy weather.' That's hard-luck; that's cheer and relief. Not heaven. 'Havalina.'

At Folsom Prison

Johnny Cash

5/5

'Hello, I'm Johnny Cash.' Hardly a live album: alive is more its tune, since this one gets into your bones. From one to the next, the tracks here roll effortlessly, a set perfectly balanced w/ the upbeat and the tragic. In reality, it's all tragic, the right mode for this captive audience, now clearly feeling the pangs of freedom, at least for the moment. Cash is the definition of an American classic, in the lineage of Hawthorne and Ice Cube: America's dark side, but a vital dark, 'the green green grass of home.'

Green Onions

Booker T. & The MG's

4/5

You've probably heard it but couldn't name it or locate it. The opening track, for which this is one of the ones to hear before you die, is an iconic instrumental that's been frequently featured in things not related to green onions (apparently, the name of a cat whose walk they tried to recreate w/ that storied riff). In '62, this album must have already felt like a throwback of sorts: the no vocals thing, a strange statement to make at a time when rock-n-roll was defining itself as guitar + voice music. But a classic thing, 'tis, w/ organs vital and at times haunting: 'Stranger on the Shore.'

The Specials

4/5

Ska revival, but more like a lyrical playground for Elvis Costello: 'Am I the dog that bit / the hand of the man that feeds it.' Punk has always been a cousin of ska and reggae, politically, culturally, but also musically, since it's relationship to rock-n-roll isn't ambivalent, but it is complicated. This doesn't just have groove tho, it has sweetness and wisdom too: racial, social, insights from all concrete jungles. A bit too repetitive, and tho the DIY vibe is fitting, a bit too raw: they run out of ideas, but I don't tire of what they represent.

Vol. 4

Black Sabbath

4/5

Before hip-hop came along, Zeppelin presaged the beat switch and Sabbath mastered it. It's part of their DNA since musical ideas seem to run thru their veins, and tho they're not exactly a jam band, they jam out whenever they can. But they don't noodle, and what you get from this record, especially the gorgeous and unexpected 'Changes,' is a new appreciation for the soulfulness Ozzy boasted, the quiet experimentation of the band, their almost easy listening quality, heavier than anything you've heard before, but sweeter too.

Queens of the Stone Age

2/5

No character, no split second sense of pop profundity, just a droned out mashup of Radiohead and Jane's Addiction: the bad philosophizing, the bad hard rock. It's not stoner rock - it's not even pointless pop - it's bland and entirely burnt out: I like stoners who're still getting something out of it. Besides, in '98, hip-hop was the thing: Big Pun's Capital Punishment, anyone? Worse than Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains: those guys are in a rut they're trying to escape; these braindeads are in a rut they think is a groove: 'Hispanic Impressions.' Some interesting instrumental moments towards the end, but mostly a yard-age of gar-bage.

It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back

Public Enemy

5/5

Believe the hype. Farrakhan is certainly not a prophet you oughta listen to. Thing is, neither is Public Enemy. They didn't predict anything: they documented, they related, they integrated, and they funked the fuck out. D wants you to analyze and go deep: 'Listen for lessons I'm saying inside music / that all the critics are blastin' me for.' But they're also 'louder than a bomb,' and got blasted b/c people heard the raw and frighted. Freedom fighting has never been as organized as this, or straight-up weird. Underrated: The Bomb Squad, protagonists of the avant-garde - the grab you by the brain cells, or not, avant-garde.

Catch A Fire

Bob Marley & The Wailers

5/5

‘Good God, I think it’s illiteracy / It’s only a machine that makes money.’ As socially conscious as they ever were, and as much as reggae quests for political awareness, The Wailers are yet less religiously oriented on Catch a Fire than the Rastas tend to be: their religious practice nothing more than syncopated drumming and strumming. Many of these songs, especially ‘Stop That Train’ and ‘Stir It Up,’ have been a part of my personal soundtrack for years, but no track here is short of a classic. ‘I think I might join the fun.’ ‘Fun’ is a descriptor of a whole lot of reggae, but in this case, it bespeaks of the intangibles of the genre: before you know it, you’re having fun, tho Bob and the crew are unironic moralists.

Beautiful Freak

Eels

2/5

'This paint-by-numbers life / Is fucking w/ my head.' Inventive and varied, yet frustratingly monotone, Beautiful Freak is neither beautiful enuf nor freaky enuf to sustain my interest. E's vocals, how do I put it, are white, I mean really, really white, and while the instrumentation is compelling at first, it becomes all too predictable as well. But by far the record's worst aspect is the failed juxtaposition of the cute and the tortured, manifest in the weak, try-hard lyrics vocalized by a crooner far too hoarse to belt. It's that whispering quality indie/alt singers reach for but seldom persuasively attain. I can't tell if Bruce Springsteen or Paul McCartney is E's preferred model, but I can tell you that he's a far cry from both. Not whiney: whitey.

Gorillaz

3/5

'It's the money or stop'; ‘I’m useless but not for long’; ‘Get the cool shoeshine.’ Britpop’s white knight Damon Albarn goes virtual, but he’s virtually just as full of shit as if not more phony than he ever was w/ Blur. The record does undoubtedly boast some great tracks - ‘New Genius (Brother),’ ‘Clint Eastwood,’ ‘Rock the House,’ 'Latin Simone’ - but when they start singing about ‘Gravity-y-y-y-y-yyy,’ there’s not much more brit-poping masquerading as hip-hoping and trip-hoping I can take. It’s not lo-fi, it’s no dice, which is fine in bouts, but over the course of 69 minutes is no bueno. Del makes this thing go, but it doesn’t go very far, tho it does go on for too long: good production ruined by bad ideas.

Hunting High And Low

a-ha

2/5

'So needless to say / I'm odds and ends, but I'm me.' 'Take on Me' is a synth-pop classic, a tune known by millions but remembered by none: played in countless backgrounds, in the foreground it's actually catchier, impressive even. But the rest is an uninspired meeting of David Bowie and Morrissey. Morten Harket is a failure of pop sensibilities since he bemoans unironically and insincerely, a debacle no hit single can ameliorate. Add to that 80s production that's indeed too of its time, and you've a pop record I'd like to appreciate far more than I do. 'Love is reason enuf' to move on from this one-hit blunder. I was waiting for an a-ha moment. Instead I got plenty of uh-ohs, oy-veys, uff das, and here we go agains.

In It For The Money

Supergrass

2/5

If they were in it for the money, they'd have learned to incorporate melody in their visions of Britpop. Instead, they merely slam, but are about as soft as Mumford & Sons, the outfit they resemble on their streetwise cover art. No song hits here b/c, tho you'd think w/o melody they'd learn the trade of the riff, they don't possess those either. What's left are Gaz Coombes's prosaic vocals and unremarkable lyrics: 'I am a doctor, I'll be your doctor / I'm on my way, and you won't come down today'; 'I try and find my peace of mind / But I know what I miss.' Each guitar solo is out of place, the horns are a reprieve but never a revelation, they don't have the permanence of pop, the urgency of punk, the shuffle of rock, or, it seems, an ear for music.

Public Image: First Issue

Public Image Ltd.

3/5

'It's not a cliche / And I wish I could die (ha, ha, ha).' Tho punk was always meant to be taken seriously, there was also a needed element of bluffing, or at the very least, an image. But nothing on this record spells out fake, or overdone, which is a part of the aesthetic problem, tho I guess the chief part of the solution as well: be willing to tell the truth, no matter the cost. But there is a cost, notably a musical one. The record possesses but one track that exemplifies songwriting, the classic 'Public Image.' The rest are yelps and outbursts, believable, crucial perhaps, but not for my ears. And, a steadfast atheist for my entire life, I found myself nodding in agreement to 'Religion I' and 'II,' but not to the beat. I'd take the latter, to be honest.

Brothers In Arms

Dire Straits

2/5

'I want my MTV'; 'He got the action, he got the motion.' Knopfler intones like Bob Dylan and simplifies like Bruce Springsteen, but he has neither the reality-warping lyricism of BD or the American stamina of BS. He's actually full of BS, which gets in the way of what would be mere mediocrity, getting it together on one song only: 'Walk of Life.' But even that track doesn't approach the pop-rock spirit of Born in the U.S.A., released a year before this goes-on-forever dosage of 'cool.' But it's not cool, it's novocaine, it's a real bummer and a verifiable bore. My favorite Knopfler song is 'Sailing to Philadelphia,' the one about Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon: I think he's better when he has a source. B/c otherwise, he's as bland as sand.

Moving Pictures

Rush

2/5

'The world is, the world is / Love and life are deep.' Virtuosic but tedious, soulless, charmless, a mode of storytelling that neither inspires nor has its way w/ words and ideas. 'Mechanical music / Adrenaline surge.' It sure is mechanical, but an adrenaline surge not so much: it's dead in the water, it's a million sentences too deep in the sludge of wooden musicianship and barren lyricism to be a surge of anything, the opposite of a rush, more like a prolonged case of nerdism. I'll give it to them for being more pop friendly than they are on 2112, but they're still enemies of pop music. If that record is abysmal, this is really bad. +, Geddy Lee's vocals have to be the most annoying in rock music, like a helium-sucker w/o the comedy, the slapstick.

At Mister Kelly's

Sarah Vaughan

5/5

Tho not exactly overshadowed by Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan does seem to be remembered as the third of that legendary trio of jazz vocalists, perhaps the three greatest of the twentieth century. On this live recording, she musters up so much clarity, so much simplicity, so much swing, so many daring flashes of on-key-then-off-key hilarities, that you'd be hard-pressed not to fall in love on impact. Her characteristic vibrato is actually more controlled in this live context than it often is in the studio, but she's as playful as ever, as jocoserious as Ella is in Berlin, w/ understatements and nonchalances keeping her afloat. She's far more full-bodied than she is merely impressive: a pivotal and enduring vocalist.

Reggatta De Blanc

The Police

4/5

The Police aren't just white reggae, they're reggae lite, they've nothing to do w/ Haile Selassie or the political machine crushing Kingstown natives. They're rhythm moochers and profoundly shallow, but they're a group that makes so much out of so little that I can't help but dig their one-off brand of pop music. Sting's voice is a permanent mainstay in the listener's brain after hearing him but once, as are the buoyant guitar riffs and the indelible wielding of the hi-hat, perhaps the crucial item for the band's signature sound. 'Some say / Tomorrow's another day / You stay / I may as well play.' That's a laudable axiom, and a helpful one for appreciating this more-than-popular group, impossible to forget tho you may forget to throw them on.

Truth And Soul

Fishbone

4/5

Fishbone gets going w/ a hard-rocked Curtis Mayfield. After that, the band seems to makes it way thru every damn genre known to man, but w/ an ear for what makes you get up and dance: the only common theme that holds this record together is a belief that stimulation has far more truth and soul than any downer could possess. They're also lyrical when they want to be, w/ funky queries and the like: 'Hey, Ma and Pa / What the hell is wrong w/ ya'll'; 'You choose to close your eyes / And the rest of the world will bleed'; 'We are waitin' in restaurants over there / We are waitin' in cars somewhere over there.' Most revelatory, they do what the Chili Peppers never could - they goof off effectively, coherently, funkily, politically.

Fear Of A Black Planet

Public Enemy

5/5

A 'counterattack on world supremacy' that's more world supremacy, i.e., a 'black planet,' will never work out, but Fear of a Black Planet has more than a rumble of truth in it. Conspiratorial, not so much, Public Enemy is merely tired of the shitty system and more often than not espouse common sense: 'Teach a man how to be a father / To never tell a woman he can't bother'; 'Every brother ain't a brother / Cause a black hand / Squeezed on Malcolm X the man'; 'Yeah, I'll check out a movie / But it'll take a black one to move me.' Before PC there was PE, which recognizes identity but isn't swallowed up by identity politics. But The Bomb Squad's atonal funk, that noisy yet charitable in-your-facism, remains the sui generis export of the group.

Happy Sad

Tim Buckley

4/5

A legitimate fusion of jazz, blues, soul, and folk, Happy Sad is a machine of incorporation and expression: never bogged down by its inventiveness, it yet never ceases to impress or to discover. Buckley's voice is a delicious amalgam of singers like Fred Neil, Richie Havens, and Nina Simone, and he anticipates later figures such as Patti Smith and, that's right, Jeff Buckley. Tracks 3-5 tend to drag a bit, altho I love the finality of 'Gypsy Woman,' but he sings so gorgeously on 'Strange Feelin',' 'Buzzin' Fly,' and 'Sing a Song for You,' and so brilliantly melds elements of the folk scene as well as the jazz of Charles Mingus, The Modern Jazz Quartet, and others, that the moments of indulgence and preciousness don't smack of an ersatz quality.

The Chronic

Dr. Dre

5/5

Hyperbole rather than transgression is the name of the game on Dr. Dre's The Chronic, a record that's as dated as it is timeless. Nope, it's not the misogyny that's dated, it's D.R.E.'s beef w/ Eazy-E, easily the least creative, the least interesting, and the most regrettable in hip-hop history: 'PS fuck Mr. Roarke and Tattoo / A.K.A. Jerry and Eazy'; 'Or thought I was sleazy / Or thought I was a mark / 'cause I used to hang w/ Eazy.' Lyrically, altho it features legendary verses from Snoop, RBX, and Dre himself, most of it is typical gangsterism. But the beats literally never miss. Inaugurating G-funk, Dre also establishes the logic of layering in hip-hop production. In many ways, it's the first rap record, and maybe the last, to be 'engineered.'

Protection

Massive Attack

4/5

'I stand in front of you / I'll take the force of the blow, protection.' So sings Tracey Thorn (Everything but the Girl) on the first track, and she seems to mean it. In fact, 'protective' is how to describe this album in general, since it's mostly on the defensive and erects a veneer difficult to penetrate: you are invited to flow along, but at a distance is the only level of intimacy it offers. That has its upsides, especially for those of us who want others to 'take the force of the blow,' at least some of the time. But as a sustainable source of felicity or welfare, it's not the gestalt I'm looking for. Better than Portishead b/c the escapism is varied and allusive rather than acquiescent and morose, Massive Attack is a crucial 90s outfit, but thin in ways too.

Pictures At An Exhibition

Emerson, Lake & Palmer

1/5

A live album that's as dead as the medievalisms these dudes resurrect, w/ an ear for the pretentious and the sentimental: 'Eroded by times rivers / To the shapes we now possess'; 'Trained apart from houses of stone / Hour of horses pick the bone'; 'Come forth, from love's spire / Born in life's fire.' It's soap-operatic rather than rock-operatic, brimming w/ melodrama and about a thousand meaningless interludes. ELP is missing the H, tho I doubt they found any, releasing seven tapes after this one, and something tells me they're no better than this organ-blasted nonsense. I actually feel for Baba Yaga, stuck in this soulless mess w/o even an attempt to understand where he's coming from or to properly delineate his character. The nerve!

Tres Hombres

ZZ Top

4/5

'Well, I'll be riding on the bus 'til I Cadillac.' These tres hombres from Tejas greatly shorten the formulas given to them by the Allman Bros, but they're cut from the same cloth. Like Duane, Billy Gibbons plays an effortless lead slide, and like their Jacksonville brethren, ZZ configure honky-tonk lore into appropriate blues and boogie programs. But unlike the Bros, whom I adore, the three guys appreciate economy and demand of their listeners a sense of humor: 'A-haw, haw, haw, haw / A-haw, haw, haw, haw.' They also wear their influences on their sleeve, sounding like the Stones on 'Move Me on Down the Line' and The Meters on the unexpectedly funky 'Sheik.' I'm not moved to play this any chance I get, but its pleasures are hardy and real.

More Specials

The Specials

4/5

'Hello, I'm Terry, and I'm / Going to enjoy myself first'; 'Hey little rich girl / where did you go wrong?'; 'New pair of shoes are on my feet / Cos' fashion is my only culture.' More Specials is an improvement on the first record in terms of production quality and songwriting variety, but wanting is the raft of rawness Elvis Costello secured for their debut. The band plays around w/ ska, obviously, but also American soul and funk on 'Sock It to 'Em J.B.' (James Brown, no?), the basis of the northern soul sound. I welcome the inclusion of assorted genres, and tho the record wilts a bit on 'Pearl's Cafe' and the seven-minute 'Stereotype / Stereotype, Pt. 2,' More Specials is mostly more of the same, not unrefined, but still rejuvenating, special even.

Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols

Sex Pistols

4/5

The Ramones were already effectively anti-hippie, not to mention The VU, who established the thing a decade earlier, but the Sex Pistols are another thing entirely: 'She was a no-one who killed her baby / She sent her letters from the country / She was an animal / She was a bloody disgrace.' Always partial to the Ramones for their New York wit and evocation of 50s rock-n-roll, all the same, I can appreciate the power of this record, manufactured as it is. The guitars and drums hit hard, they stay in the pocket and have a groove of their own punkish kind, and Rotten's voice is a remarkable sneer, an angry face fomented by the vocals alone. It boils down to a statement rather than a durable take on rock music, but what a statement it (still) is.

Exit Planet Dust

The Chemical Brothers

4/5

Having moved on from the Dust Bros, the Chemical Bros are still trusters of dust, as they clarify on the second track of this record. In reality, however, they're closer to something alchemical: their genius is sample-based and organized around making the big breakbeat even bigger than it is. Before Fatboy, Daft Punk, etc., the duo from Manchester, much like Philip Glass in the realm of European forms, alchemized the repetitive into something less redundant than a whole lot of apparently variegated popular music. +, as the cover-art couple distills - a couple that brings to mind Dylan and Suze Rotolo on Freewheelin' - there's something so 90s-optimistic about this LP that it's as if The Stone Roses' up-for-whatever slant is tautened + purified.

Otis Blue/Otis Redding Sings Soul

Otis Redding

5/5

Otis Redding's voice goes in and out like a radio broadcast, but somehow never loses its power, its consequence, its relatability. For a little more than thirty minutes, the great soul innovator has the right-of-way, taking you to every locale the genre can go. But what makes this particular record so intensely vital is that four of the eleven covers have come to be associated w/ other artists, and yet not for one second are you doubtful of Redding's ability to transcend the canonization of those tracks. 'Respect' is Aretha's, 'A Change Is Gonna Come' is Sam Cooke's, 'My Girl' is The Temptations's, and 'Satisfaction' is The Stones's, but Otis's versions aren't just up to par, they're standards of their own, epitomizing that tragically truncated career.

Smokers Delight

Nightmares On Wax

3/5

Chilled out but never filled out, Smokers Delight hardly approaches its shroomy album art, which has the fecund aspect of psychedelia gone right. Instead, this is the blunt hit that propels you from a steady high to a looped nightmare, the groove that stops grooving and's got you panicking b/c you want some color and fullness back in your life. It's not that I can't get down w/ music that's better in the background, it's that this is more like tasteless food for thought: I prefer my highs to unstick my brain rather than imprison it in savorless inertia. Some of the tracks succeed on their own, like 'Wait a Minute / Praying For A Jeepbeat,' 'Groove St.,' and 'Bless My Soul,' but this is a failure of a complete record, a thin clutter of boomeranging lethargy.

Djam Leelii

Baaba Maal

5/5

Ethereal yet annealed by the accessible, spiritual yet wholly tempered by the objective and earthbound, Djam Leelii is almost frightfully gorgeous. It takes a special kind of artist to have a grip on 'peace,' especially when it's the primary affect the music offers, but for Baaba Maal and Mansour Seck, peace isn't sand that filters thru your fingers but something far sturdier, a hoisted dream bestowed on horizontal rather than vertical airwaves: this isn't music that comes from on high, but paradisal it still is. One is struck more by the vocals and guitar playing than anything percussive, but each track is as rhythmic as it is melodic. At seventy-two minutes, it's long, but only for those who undervalue bliss is it too long. An astonishing record.

Achtung Baby

U2

2/5

Achtung Baby starts off fresh enough, w/ an uncharacteristic edgy Edge riff and an assertive drum break, tho it still possesses Bono's distinctive mush: 'I'm ready to say / I'm glad to be alive / I'm ready / I'm ready for the push.' Lyricism is not only not U2's forte, it's a distraction and a diminishment, particularly when Bono sloppily evokes literary tropes: 'We're free to fly the crimson sky / The sun won't melt our wings tonight.' Contrast that w/ Joni's allusiveness and you'll see who has the edge: 'Like Icarus ascending / On beautiful foolish arms / Amelia it was just a false alarm.' Like most U2 records, it fails to be what it's meant to be: it's not pop since it's too self-serious, but it's not rock either since it extends no real punch to the gut.

Giant Steps

The Boo Radleys

3/5

The Boo Radleys got their name from Harper Lee's classic novel and this record's title from John Coltrane's essential 1960 album, odd works of art to proclaim for a pop act such as this. But beyond the cryptic allusions lies a solid enough release, a collection of tracks that teeters between The La's and My Bloody Valentine, The Stone Roses and The Pixies, sweet acoustics and distorted violence. Lyrically too, it swings from the transparent to the obscure: 'Wishin' I had money / Wishin' for the time to spend it all'; 'I've got nothing against not being proud / to me it's alright.' At sixty-four mins tho, the fusion of pop and experiment sprawls lamely, leaving you w/ four or five tracks that boast a legitimate raison d'être, heralded by 'Lazarus.'

Buenas Noches From A Lonely Room

Dwight Yoakam

4/5

'Haunted and tortured by / The rumors about you / Listening in silence / To whispers of truth.' Some cheatin' chick has wound up on his bad side, but instead of merely allowing his jealousy get to him, tho he doesn't exactly monitor his outrage, Yoakam decides to sob some pretty effective poetry: 'I searched til' I found them, / then I cursed at the sight / Of their sleeping shadows / In the cold neon light.' But what makes this such a successful record is that, released in '88 and heard for the first time 2025, it doesn't collapse into a pointless throwback. Instead, the Bakersfield sound, inured by Buck Owens himself, is shown to have more stamina and relevance than I would've guessed. Even the Jesus-dyed conclusion has me cooperating.

Gentlemen

The Afghan Whigs

4/5

'And it don't bleed / And it don't breathe / It's locked its jaws / And now it's swallowing.' Grungy tho not exactly grunge, Gentlemen is a visceral and sensible breakup record: 'Ladies, let me tell you about myself / I got a dick for a brain / And my brain is gonna sell my ass to you.' The concept album, w/ an uncomplicated notion at its core, does a lot in the way of supporting the cause for good songwriting, b/c that's ultimately what steals the show. It's not Greg Dulli's voice - not dull but not particularly notable either - or the intensity of the instrumentation. It's not even the lyrics necessarily, tho there are moments that have their shine. It's the structure and the flow, it's the abstract gestalt that somehow delivers something concrete in the end.

Jagged Little Pill

Alanis Morissette

4/5

'Why are you so petrified of silence? / Here, can you handle this?' Angsty, shallow, eccentric, bold, Jagged Little Pill is an undeniable success and an enduring statement, an uneven and imperfect record, but ultimately soulful and compelling. Morissette's voice is shrill, indeed jagged, even when she slows down on tracks like 'Perfect' and 'You Learn,' intent on shouting and quavering her way to some sort of pieced-together discordance: 'I'm sad but I'm laughing / I'm brave but I'm chickenshit'; 'A traffic jam when you're already late / A no-smoking sign on your cigarette break.' Not much ironic here, but it flourishes in a way sincere pop frequently missteps. And who would've thought that the next great harmonica-ad-libber would be Alanis?

Duck Stab/Buster & Glen

The Residents

4/5

Distressing and dadaist, ridiculous and rudimentary, Duck Stab is authentic art rock, in the tradition of literary and cultural modernism. Absurder than Trout Mask Replica, it's yet catchier and more coherent, something like the neat and thought-out strangeness of De La Soul. The lyrics are grotesque but have me laughing in a real way: 'Your heart is like a silken sponge / That calls saliva love'; 'But he soon found out / That she had the gout / And often would wink underwater'; 'Conspicuously alcoholic, flicks his tongue at me!' It's by no means a perfect record - it's ultimately too annoying and too cockamamy for me to have a deep regard for it - but it is original, and I can appreciate it for what it is: a curt dosage of telepathic eccentricity.

Medúlla

Björk

3/5

To say that Björk has forged her own lane is an understatement. To start, she has more than one, as this voice-centric record parades, so different from her previous releases. She also doesn't really seem to be interested in forging anything: her singularity flows too naturally, too inevitably. This particular album tho, I have to admit, is difficult to get into. I managed to get thru the whole thing, and while there are standout moments of real beauty, I found myself thinking too much, feeling too little, ultimately falling in line with Björk's own truth: 'I want to be flexible / I want to go out / Of my way for you / But enough is enough.' I think it's the Gregorian religiosity that doesn't do it for me, not exactly sham, but not a reliable tonic either.

Rio

Duran Duran

3/5

Duran Duran is like Saran Wrap: they cling, they're useful, they're for the purposes of storage, they're better in the unanalyzed background. Rio is a straight-up pop record, for good and for bad. While no track stands out - not even 'Hungry Like the Wolf' or 'Save a Prayer' - that also means that no track is particularly weak or abrasive. The 80s synths and backbeats have an authentic charm, Simon Le Bon is a serviceable lead, the lyrics aren't inspired but rather innocent + resourceful: 'Because you're lonely in your nightmare / Let me in / And it's barren in your garden / Let me in.' I don't like that four of the eleven songs are over five mins long, but I come away from this w/ a refreshingly clean take: superior to Squeeze, it'll do. It'll do!

Moss Side Story

Barry Adamson

4/5

A soundtrack to a crime film available at no movie theater near you, Moss Side Story is an unexpected and frustrating classic. As a concept, it's pure indulgence and posture. I'm not interested in trying to visualize the script for which this record is the sonic backdrop. But it triumphs musically, and b/c it's a collection of instrumental jazz with strings attached, it succeeds conceptually as well: scenes of lawlessness are cinematically displayed whether you like it or not. It's not the greatest crime-film soundtrack ever made - that'd be Miles Davis's Ascenseur pour l'échafaud - but it is one of the more entertaining records I've heard. Advice to the skeptic, w/ whom I can sympathize: it's not that serious. Crime films aren't high art anyway.

xx

The xx

2/5

'You used to have all the answers / And you, you still have them too.' I'm not sure if Romy ever heard of Mitch Hedberg, but that sure does resemble the comedian's classic joke: 'I used to do drug, I still do, but I used to too.' Unlike Mitch tho, XX doesn't have a single funny bone in their makeup: it's all a whispered and enervating chillness that has no sense of humor or iota of what it means to be alive. It's dream pop to the extent that my bed time accords w/ the hour the record is put on, but the legacy of The Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine, or even the flawed but memorable Mazzy Star is hardly continued on this record. I don't get why the Kool Aid was drunk w/ this group: nothing special and especially sleepy. Not XX: more Zzz.

Ready To Die

The Notorious B.I.G.

5/5

Biggie wasn't the first rapper to get personal and vulnerable on a record - he wasn't even the first to commit suicide on wax (that's Scarface) - but he was the ingenious pioneer of rap as memoir. Before Eminem was letting the world know about his mom problems and female dilemmas, B.I.G. was discharging lines like: 'Fuck the world, fuck my moms and my girl / My life is played out like a Jheri curl, I'm ready to die'; 'Born sinner, the opposite of a winner / Remember when I used to eat sardines for dinner.' The debonair yet aggressive flow, the ability to voice two characters on 'Gimme the Loot' and 'Warning,' the appeal born from self-deprecation and comedic timing, all add to the mystique of an artist who has no misgivings about who he is.

Axis: Bold As Love

Jimi Hendrix

5/5

The Experience's second release is probably their least regarded. But for this compulsive and convulsive Hendrix-listener, it's just as seminal as the other two. I love that the psychedelia is simultaneously reined-in and fully explored, w/ only 'If 6 Was 9' exceeding the five-min mark and 'Little Wing' the pithy exponent of singer-songwriter hallucinational rock. It's an album comprised of songs, not just ideas, but since it's Hendrix (+ Mitch + Noel), every strum, pluck, and hit is experimental in nature. Lyrically, it's loaded but never dense: 'I just wanna know about / the rooms behind your minds / Do I see a vacuum there / or am I going blind?' It's always uncanny hearing Jimi out, the pivotal instrumentalist in rock music, and a voice lazy as pert.

Wish You Were Here

Pink Floyd

5/5

Wish You Were Here is Pink Floyd's foremost artistic statement, a record that gracefully transcends the genre attached to this band. As much as I admire Animals, The Dark Side of the Moon, and even Meddle, this is the album on which they had something to say: 'You reached for the secret too soon / You cried for the moon'; 'Where have you been? / It's alright, we know where you've been.' Conceptually, 'the machine' is more interesting than any brick-by-brick-made 'wall,' and their turns into progressiveness do not smack of pretension but of necessity. The fact that it's bookended by thirteen-min tracks that feel far shorter than they are is everything: for once, the music took them over rather than the other way around.

Bayou Country

Creedence Clearwater Revival

4/5

I know full well that Fogerty and the crew weren't born on the bayou, but that doesn't get in the way of my rampant admiration for CCR, perhaps the most effective political act in the history of rock-n-roll. Their invention is always reinvention, their innovation always a throwback: they're hard-nosed hippies w/ enuf swampiness to induce some sort of peace-and-love-psychedelia. Above all, they're hit-makers, but their prophetic angles have an almost hip-hop agitation. Like Mos Def's 'New World Water': 'Take you a glass of water / Make it against the law / See how good the water tastes / When you can't have any at all.' Bayou Country isn't their best album, but it is essential, setting the stage for their next two, the greatest of their career.

Surf's Up

The Beach Boys

4/5

'Toothpaste and soap will make / Our oceans a bubble bath / So let's avoid an ecological aftermath.' The Beach Boys weren't the only artists in '71 to bemoan ecological catastrophe: Marvin Gaye in fact did it more classically on 'Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology).' But no one did it as romantically or as heavenly as the grown-up and fed-up group once inclined to preach an all-is-good ethos on tracks like 'Surfin' U.S.A.' It's now Surf's Up and all is not good: 'But now my branches suffer / And my leaves don't offer / Poetry to men of song.' In good faith, I can't say this is on par w/ Pet Sounds, which in its own way is just as dark and daring as this one, but I applaud it for its originality and for its moments of unusual beauty, especially tracks 6-10.

KE*A*H** (Psalm 69)

Ministry

4/5

'A truer lover has never yet to be found / I see the sunset thru the eyes of a clown.' Thrash + grunge + industrial, Psalm 69 boils down to rage, really in the same vein as Rage Against the Machine, tho w/ the junkie vulnerability of an Alice in Chains. It even makes its debt to good ol' Chuck Berry known on the classic 'Jesus Built My Hotrod,' the most fun you're gonna have w/ this record: 'Ding ding dong a bong bong bing bong.' B/c otherwise, you don't listen to this album for the fun of it but rather for the release and the rage of it, the scattering of all the tension you didn't know you had built up, tho it may've been killing you slowly all these years. Industrial, sure, but a million times better than Nine Inch Nails, a rare instance of metal I favor.

Femi Kuti

4/5

'Look at religion see the contradiction / The confusion, church and mosque dey cause.' W/ big shoes to fill - a Papa Kuti whose legacy is as historic as any - Femi clearly didn't crumble under the pressure. This self-titled release isn't a virtuosic affair - it isn't even as good as it gets necessarily - but what it does boast is an invitational energy and lyrics endearingly in touch w/ social, political, and spiritual realities. I'm not in love w/ each and every sound apparent on this record, especially the soft saxophonic tones that are wont to introduce many of the tracks, but when each song gets going, it's difficult to tune out. I also admire the son's intent to not forge his own path rebelliously but to carry on tradition effectively and uniquely.

Music

Madonna

4/5

'Music mix the bourgeoisie and the rebel.' The title track, the ostentatious 'Music,' incorporates the same whiny synths that Dr. Dre had been known to employ for his baptism of the g-funk era. Those synths appear on other tracks as well, giving this essentially genreless record a consistent hip-hop bite and confidence. The album cover would have you believe that there is something Western going on here, but besides the few folksy moments of acoustic guitar, make no mistake, this is a record of a city slicker, certified on the wonderfully sophisticated 'What It Feels Like for a Girl': 'But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading / 'Cause you think that being a girl is degrading.' And brava for not 'selling out,' as she closes out w/ on 'Gone.'

Fulfillingness' First Finale

Stevie Wonder

4/5

The fourth record of Stevie's 'classic period,' this alliterative thing doesn't have the immediately recognizable singles that Songs in the Key of Life, Innervisions, and Talking Book enjoy, but it's still a fantastic album. Slow and saccharine at times, it's yet always intricate, and possesses amusing lyrics such as: 'I'd like to make love to you / So you can make me scream'; 'When you sleep at night, baby / I wonder do I creep into your dreams'; 'There awaits you a ticket / At 'Please Have A Good Time' Station.' The bangers are 'Boogie On Reggae Woman' and 'You Haven't Done Nothin',' but it was the final three tracks that stood out most to me, especially 'They Won't Go When I Go,' a stunning, co-written alloy of Chopin and gospel.

Unknown Pleasures

Joy Division

5/5

Unlike The Smiths who are a melange of Morrissey's cynicism and Marr's jangles, Joy Division is despair matched by more despair. At no point are Curtis's arhythmic confessionals backed by instrumentation any less stuck in the shit. I'm not moved to call them sincere, but they're certainly for real and yield not a shred of irony: 'I've seen the nights filled w/ bloodsport and pain / And the bodies obtained, the bodies obtained'; 'I did everything, everything I wanted to / I let them use you for their own ends.' Descriptors like heavy, gutsy, passionate, and convulsive come to mind, but they don't clarify the sustainability of the relentless darkness. Perhaps it's ineffable. Fair enuf. But perhaps it's their improbable, almost beatific creativity.

Fear and Whiskey

Mekons

4/5

Knowing that the Mekons are Jonathan Franzen's favorite band didn't put me in the right mood exactly, but just 30 seconds into Fear and Whiskey I realized they too were a band for me. In a sense, they're the Grateful Dead of punk rock: a collective more than a band that incorporates elements of country into the schematics of their original approach and emphasizes the live show. But they're also something else entirely: I'm assuming they do not have legions of fans but thousands in the know, and while the Dead are essentially a live band w/ album footnotes, the Mekons are real studio folk. Full of warmth, humor, modesty, they yet know they're onto something. 'I wanted to say fall in love w/ me / I wanted to say fall in love / It'll be alright.'

Hounds Of Love

Kate Bush

4/5

'That cloud, that cloud / It looks like Ireland / Come on and blow it a kiss now.' Kate Bush may make demands on the listener, but that's a welcome incursion. She also makes love w/ her listener, swaggering a voice that's soulfully operatic and outlandish. Terms like 'performative' and 'embodied' have invaded academic criticism - overused and now mere placeholders - but Hounds of Love is exactly that. It's literary performance - it even flirts w/ prog sensibilities, tho thankfully never succumbs to them - but it's also something w/ marrow and muscle. The second half is definitely wackier than the first, and not always pleasurably eccentric, but it's mostly quirky w/o being quackery. At her best, she's a rare pop artist & a very cool lady.

Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space

Spiritualized

4/5

From the jump, Spiritualized proclaims an ethos of layering and hard work: this isn't any run-of-the-mill production, this is a group that takes seriously the sounds they aim to achieve. That achievement, capsuled in '1 tablet 70 min,' is not only real but often breathtakingly complete. Like My Bloody Valentine, the intention appears to be to fill the space entirely, yet there's always some invisible room left for the advantages of silence. Striking too are Jason Pierce's lyrics, which run the gamut of the abstract and tangible: 'Warm's the dope running down my spine'; 'Just me, my spike in my arm, and my spoon.' Simultaneously the Pet Sounds and Velvet Underground and Nico of the 90s, it's mournfully - brokenly - spiritual. And real heavy.

Mothership Connection

Parliament

5/5

'P-Funk, uncut funk, The Bomb.' Authentic having-a-helluva-time music is harder to come by than you may think - it's either qualified by the tragedies inherent to blues music, or it falls far short of something eternally superb. But Parliament is only a good time, which is not to say that it's ahistorical or somehow willfully uniformed. It's to say that funk needed to go to outer space in order to effect this sort of unbridled sanguinity: 'Starchild here, citizens of the universe / I bring forth to you the good time.' Besides the obvious influence this had on L.A. hip-hop (Dre's 'Let Me Ride,' explicitly), 'The Bomb' is also a revelation of production, and in its own way, it's the revolutionary outlook incarnate: I dare you to have an ounce of worry left.

Sincere

Mj Cole

2/5

Like the hole burned in the luxury-store bag featured on the album cover, this record left a gash in my brain for want of substance and really anything worth an ear's time. MJ Cole may produce, but he doesn't induce - that is, he doesn't stimulate or influence besides the brief moment of witless body moving. What's particularly awful, especially on the big tracks like 'Crazy Love,' 'I See,' and 'Sincere - Re-Cu'd,' is the posturing of some sort of R&B-suavity which not only doesn't exist but is nearly parodied, so generic and uninspired are the vocal performances. 'Rough Out Here' borders on a caricature of Curtis Mayfield while 'Slum King' is hackneyed take on reggae politics. 'Do you feel the vibes?' I do not. Bad for the body and the soul.

Moondance

Van Morrison

5/5

'Oh, the water / Let it run all over me / And it stoned me to my soul / Stoned me like Jelly Roll.' Altho Astral Weeks will always be the album for me, not only in Van's catalogue but perhaps of all time, Moondance is where his romanticism is somehow fulfilled in the vernacular of hits and catchiness. He isn't an occultist like Yeats; he's a nature-worshipper like Wordsworth, a mouthpiece for the sublime merge of self and non-self: 'Hark now, hear the sailors cry / Smell the sea and feel the sky / Let you soul and spirit fly / Into the mystic.' It's also and unavoidably black music, soul music for the gospeller of the 'Brand New Day' and 'Glad Tidings.' This record is on the short list of the greatest, and let me stress, happiest ever. 'Lalalala,' etc.

The Suburbs

Arcade Fire

4/5

'The kids want to be so hard / But in my dreams we're still screaming / And running thru the yard.' As if Americana got hold of The Beatles, Arcade Fire is a Canadian cry for their lost-souled neighbors across the border. This is to say that the best I can do in appreciation of this band is to underscore their brilliant pop sensibilities, their simple song structures, in-the-world lyricism rather than political messaging, and vocal interpretations that are always achievements of discharge. 'I feel like I've been living in / A city w/ no children in it / A garden left for ruin by a / billionaire inside of a private prison.' In other words, the great and undervalued comp for this Montreal group can only be Neil Young, that other Canadian healer and hitmaker.

Songs In The Key Of Life

Stevie Wonder

5/5

'It's that love's in need of love today / Don't delay, send yours right away.' This record confirms that the 'key of life' is 'love.' Just as Joyce's Ulysses is the greatest novel to explore the various manifestations of love (uttered: 'love loves to love love'), Stevie's essential double album is, for my money, the best of all to browse the many incarnations of love: sexual love, familial love, self-love, faith & love, love for community, love for humanity, love for music ('Sir Duke'). At an hour and forty-four mins, it's not only not too long - it could be even lengthier. The genius displayed here is startling infinite. And a divulgence: Stevie Wonder is a witty and quotable lyricist: 'Since one ain't good enuf for you / Then do yourself see how you do.' Lovely, no?

Californication

Red Hot Chili Peppers

2/5

Worse than the Red Hot Chili Peppers goofing off aimlessly and sexually is RHCP not goofing off: tame, sincere, and melodic. Kiedis still can't rap but it turns out he can't sing or write pop songs either - neither the heartfelt variety nor the kind that deals ironically w/ the cultural zeitgeist. The crew merely wanted to have fun before, which they never could do particularly well, but now they're intent on being for real and in touch w/ their feelings, which is foul, especially on the title track w/ the dumb '-tion' rhymes. My least favorite: 'Born and raised by those who / Praise control of population / Well, everybody's been there / And I don't mean on vacation.' When the dust settles, RHCP will be remembered as e'en more than wasted talent.

Merriweather Post Pavilion

Animal Collective

4/5

'If I could just leave my body for the night / Then we could be dancing.' B/c of the assumptions I had - that Animal Collective could only be enjoyed by all white cross country teams in the Northeast - it took some time for this record to grow on me, tho only about three mins into the opening track. Their most obvious pop-music analogy is The Beach Boys, and specifically Brain Wilson: the psychedelic silliness, the wholesomeness, the harmony. Contemporary affinities are w/ Fleet Foxes and The Flaming Lips, but they achieve something few other groups do: a brand new whiteness. For the length of an entire album, their novelty dwindles, but I have no plans to be insincere. I readily concede, and celebrate, that much of this is gorgeous.

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

4/5

B/c he resists being completely forgettable, somehow he manages to be energetically memorable. He isn't folksy like Bruce Springsteen, hard like the emergent punks, literary like Dylan or Neil Young, or virtuosic like his fellow Floridian Duane Allman. His invaluable feature is that he's steeped in the history of rock-n-roll rather than rock culture, ironically the reason why he's gotten so much airplay on classic rock stations, arenas responsible for the the outrage that is 'rock' music. The debut is a mere flash of a record, partly b/c it doesn't contain a track exceeding four mins, but partly - or is it mostly? - b/c it's a damn good listen. 'American Girl' is an American classic and even foments exceptionalism in this American negativist. A good one.

Life Thru A Lens

Robbie Williams

3/5

Objectively, this is a bad album. Whoever he was w/ Take That - and I don't care enuf to find it out - Robbie W isn't much to write home about on Life Thru A Lens. He makes the whole Britpop thing more generic than it had already been, opting for a sound that's got little to no attitude, even on the Oasis ('Live Forever') reprisal 'Old Before I Die': 'I hope I'm old before I die / I hope I live to relive the days gone by.' It airs dreadful tracks like 'Angels,' 'One Of God's Better People,' and 'Killing Me.' The better ones would still never find their way on rotation, not out of a sense of guilt, but simply b/c extant is more outstanding music. For some reason tho, I find it difficult to hate this record. He seems to be smiling thru the whole thing. For that, ☺️.

Born In The U.S.A.

Bruce Springsteen

5/5

Famously dark and ironic, tho seldom understood by its biggest apostles, Born In The U.S.A. explores American folklore from a place of resignation. Following the stripped-down bleakness of Nebraska, the Boss decided to be just as bleak, and in many ways, just as bare, albeit w/ production that at least offers a semblance of the upbeat. But even that's not entirely true - tracks like 'Downbound Train' and 'I'm On Fire' are thoroughly minor-key anthems. Indeed, one of the major themes of the record is boredom, or as the modernists would have it, ennui: go ahead and check out the lyrics to 'I'm Goin' Down,' 'Glory Days,' 'Dancing In The Dark.' But in the special way Beckett never leaves you bereft, Bruce roars 'no surrender' and means it.

Sulk

The Associates

4/5

Like Joy Division and The Cure, The Associates are post-punk Gothic. The difference is that Billy Mackenzie is more of a classic vocalist than either Ian Curtis or Robert Smith, evoking the likes of Frank Sinatra, Johnny Mathis, Johnny Hartman, and Jackie Wilson. That is, he's simply more talented than those two other depressive blokes. Even lyrically, tho much is free-associative, a lot suggests something out of the 40s and 50s: 'Death is no dream for in death I'm caressing you / W/ the last breath of my soul I'll be blessing you.' As an artist like Freddie Mercury documents, talent alone isn't enuf for the creation of endurable art, but it's hard to ignore just how virtuosic Billy is. +, the music, tho at times irksomely grumpy, is magnetic.

After The Gold Rush

Neil Young

5/5

Rightly lauded as one of if not the best Neil Young album, After The Gold Rush is a superb work of art. More than Dylan or Cohen, Young is, for all intents and purposes, a possessed artist: his lyrics seem to come out of nowhere and he has melodies to boot. 'Is it hard to make arrangements w/ yourself / When you're old enuf to repay / But young enuf to sell?' I'm not sure what that means, but I know it means something b/c I feel it and I'm pretty sure he feels me. He's like the Thelonious Monk of folk-rock: nearly child-like in his simplicity, he's yet rudimentarily complex - deliciously from the heart w/o being mawkishly earnest. A rocker too - I mean some pretty heavy stuff, guitars that don't wail but thunder and hit hard. A real one-off.

People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm

A Tribe Called Quest

4/5

A Tribe Called Quest weren't unprecedented - they weren't unlike anything you'd heard before - but they were a perfection of a certain approach not to be achieved again. That's not a dig at the formula-makers such as De La and the Jungle Bros or those who followed suit like Digable Planets or The Pharcyde. Rather, it's an acknowledgement that, unlike those other classics, Tribe is the most synonymous w/ a philosophy and a sound from which they never really deviated. Tho this is their debut, and in fact not their greatest record (but crucial), it possesses a maturity and confidence unusual for a premiere. In this sense, they were never experimental, only commanding. From Q-Tip: 'This ain't trial and error, more like tribin' era.'

The Healer

John Lee Hooker

4/5

It's a testament to Lee Hooker's status and uniquely poised vocal style that he can be backed by tacky production and yet sound as raw as he does on this blues-pop crossover. Anyway, this one really gets going w/ the Bonnie Raitt duet: the opening track features a particularly thin Santana, even for his very svelte standards. The rest is more than serviceable tho, boasting blues that's...well...bluesy. B/c ultimately, the only way to judge this record is to say that it's somehow both a blues album and an album in possession of a bluesy feel: the real thing and not quite there. It essentially grows into the former tho, concluding w/ a trio of solo tracks that are as good as any in the canon of blues music, even if the final twain border on something else.

The Queen Is Dead

The Smiths

5/5

Yes, it's that good b/c it's that funny, that visceral, that necessary, and that iconic. Wit is not wont to make you get up and do something, but the well-known equilibrium Morrissey and Marr strike, one between the cataclysmic and the blithe, not only establishes a will to live but an anti-capitalist drive to dismember the status quo. Lyrically, Morrissey is at his absolute best, letting the loners know it's more than okay to hanker for company, even or especially if it's a confounding thing to desire: 'And when you want to live / How do you start? / Where'd you go? / Who do you need to know?' There isn't a bad track on this relatively short release, but of course there are the highlights, and they're even better in the fold of an entire album. Superb.

Buena Vista Social Club

5/5

A stunning document and a bountiful assemblage of Afro-Cuban traditions, Buena Vista Social Club has become a standard - perhaps the classic - of world music. This ought to make any consumer hesitate since white-only determinations of what's essential to other cultures seldom hit. But w/ this particular recording, it feels wrong to politicize: the songs and the musicianship are simply too good to take up what may or may not be valid ethical points. And while no one should consider themselves some sort of expert in the danzón having heard it, they can still be moved by its luxurious rhythms, the clarity and vigor of the piano parts, the way the trumpet punctuates the scene, and just how haunting the whole thing is.

Innervisions

Stevie Wonder

5/5

'Genius' doesn't only get thrown around too much, it's too often employed to describe an artist's style - their way w/ words and music - a lazy attempt to get at the quiddity of a figure. But w/ Stevie Wonder, it's more than appropriate to observe that, yes, the man is a genius: for some reason, it works to characterize his musical program. At one point, 'genius' referred to an individual's quintessence rather than mere cognitive capacity. W/ this in mind, we can take heed of Stevie's adage: 'Everybody's got a thing / But some don't know how to handle it.' On Innervisions, the third of his 'classic period,' genius manifests as a brave embrace and a final transcendence of platitude: the ability to say what's on his mind in a cocktail of complexity.

Blood, Sweat & Tears

3/5

If progressive soul were a thing, mixed w/ jazz fusion and jazz-rock, I guess Blood, Sweat, & Tears would be the exponent of that genre. I don't really like progressive anything, unless it's politics (and even then that reeks of a neoliberal formulation), but this is honestly better than I expected. Unlike the other prog slogs, BS&T at least give the impression that they're having fun: the others, that they're completing a chore of intellectual drudgery. Loosed is even sweet sagacity (shout out to Laura Nyro): 'All I ask of living is to have no chains on me / And all I ask of dying is to go naturally.' It can't be that good tho, since, in the end, it's too pretentious and long-winded, it's not that original, and I'd actually never choose to listen to it. Okayish.

Screamadelica

Primal Scream

4/5

Kicking things off w/ a Stones-grooved banger, Primal Scream is euphoria and only exhilaration, be it in the mode of rock, soul, house, or something that's a primal emulsion of the three. This isn't psychedelia but straight-up MDMA-inspired lucidity, the kind of light Dante experiences upon entrance into The Empyrean: 'I've glimpsed, I have tasted / Fantastical places / My soul's an oasis / Higher than the sun.' That kind of experience more than warrants artistic expression, and Screamadelica is one of the best records to elide a qualifying negativity for the sake of basing an adventure that's authentically blissed-out. Even 'Damaged' is an ode to the good times in its own way. Several tracks are too long, but those who've rolled will get it.

Nevermind

Nirvana

5/5

'Our little group has always been / And always will until the end.' This little group certainly impresses now like they've 'always been,' it being virtually impossible to imagine popular music w/o Nirvana's influence. Perfecting the gesture of the slacker sensitive type - the one who cares so much he can't care anymore, not b/c he's cynical but only b/c he's too floored by emotion to catch his breath - Kurt Cobain is indeed a stalwart conveyer of existential alienation: 'I'm so excited, I can't wait to meet you there / And I don't care / I'm so horny, that's okay, my will is good.' Remarkable too is just how slow many of the tempos are, w/ the exception of punkier tracks like 'Territorial Pissings.' At least it feels slow, turning chaos into tragedy.

Fragile

Yes

2/5

'I'll be the roundabout / The words will make you out and out.' What can only described as a letdown for the nonbeliever, Fragile goes from being an innovative pop-prog record to a schooled but meaningless play of chops in less than two mins. B/c even the hit single, which I admit does get into your head, and for that reason is a semi-success, is too long and too uninteresting to save this record from itself. 'Did we really count to one hundred?' That’s how it feels listening to this ersatz mind-fest: counting aimlessly, never doing the dirty work to yoke thinking w/ feeling. Moments of beauty exist on the acoustic instrumental 'Mood for a Day,' but by then it's too deep in faux intellectualism.

All Hail the Queen

Queen Latifah

4/5

'This ain't the best you've ever / Hear coming from a female MC.' Right she is, since the best female emceeing shines from Lauryn or Missy, objectively, but w/ Roxanne and Lyte, Latifah effectively started the whole thing: Salt-N-Pepa is an ancienter form, something like the Whodini of female hip-hop. In many ways, Dana is the most original of the three. Mostly rhyming about dope rhyming - dopely I grant - she's also backed by superior production, supported by Native-Tongue features (De La, Monie Love), and has an ear for a compelling alloy of genres. As she puts it: 'Hip-hop house, hip-hop jazz, w/ a little pizazz.' I concede that after an hour, the old-school sound is no longer as exciting as it is dated, but this is a classic with a capital C.

Marcus Garvey

Burning Spear

4/5

Every track on this album, one of the all-time reggae records, bum-rushes the political system, an expected upshot of roots music, but Burning Spear offers his listener history lessons as well: 'They been talking about William Gordon / They been talking about Norman Washington Manley / Including Bustamente / No one remember old Marcus Garvey.' Suddenly, Jamaica is far more than the land that's exported reggae and ganja - it's a country w/ a story I'd like to read more about. Instrumentally, it's nothing special, tho the horns are a nice touch. What makes it stand out are Spear's vocals and the fact that he's a kind of Talmudic psalmist, intent on chanting more than singing, just as the music syncopates more than it melodizes. Great stuff.

Garbage

3/5

'You can always pull out / If you like it too much.' Shoegazey yet not quite in the clouds, Garbage's eponymous debut is strange w/o coming apart at its seams. Shirley Mason may yelp about being the 'queerest of the queer,' but this is no more than a pop record, and I don't mean that as a bad thing. Somewhere between the Cocteau Twins, The Stone Roses, and a far more reined-in Kate Bush, you can see their influence on bands like Broadcast and artists ranging from Avril Lavigne to Courtney Barnett. Ultimately tho, the lyrics and the dubious angst they express don't covert me: 'If holy is as holy does / This house would burn straight down to hell'. At times it's a fun record. Problem is, I don't think they were going for fun as much as they were going for weird.

Physical Graffiti

Led Zeppelin

4/5

Zeppelin's double album is double the fun. The innovators of heavy metal or hard rock, whichever moniker you prefer, are decidedly less in the mood to riff about medievalisms than they are to groove, funk, and activate that blues muscle that dips into gospel - 'It's got to be, it's got to be my Jesus' - while maintaining a fidelity to nightlife festivities and goofy relaxation. A track like 'Houses of the Holy,' which has the nominal makings of a weary trip into British lore, is nothing more than a warm invitational: 'So let me take you, let me take you to the movies.' Even 'Kashmir,' the hit featuring that slow and fertile drumming from Bonham, is somehow not the synthetic thing it could be. In short, no Zeppelin record makes me feel so good as it.

Tuesday Night Music Club

Sheryl Crow

4/5

'She was born in November 1963 / The day Aldous Huxley died.' That'd be Nov 22, the same day JFK was assassinated. Known for brightness, Crow is also a subtle and at times hilarious lyricist, as that snatch evinces, as well as an exasperated realist w/ troubles and questions abounding: 'Well, got a brother / He's got real problems / Heroin - no / There's just no stopping him tonight / And I won't cry anymore.' In that sense, it's pop and it's not, not b/c pop music can't deal w/ dark matters but b/c she negotiates them as Bruce Springsteen or Neil Young might: w/ misdirection and irony that yet doesn't detract from her sincerity. I'm aware that she collaborated w/ other songwriters, but her vocals signify that the lyrics come from her own store.

Marquee Moon

Television

5/5

It's still the best to come out of the CBGB thing and simply one of the greatest albums of all time. For me, it ranks w/ the great jazz recordings - not only b/c Verlaine was listening to Ayler, Coltrane, and Miles, tho that's a piece of the mystery, but b/c it's high art in a way that few of its kind are. On Marquee Moon, virtuosity merely sets the table - it's never an end in itself. It's the thinking man's punk rock at the same time that it's for anyone heroical enuf to believe in the ecstatic and limitless transport of a bare and effortless night out. The lyrics are abstract but they aren't ever obscure; the guitar playing is complex but never distorted: safely ablaze like a hearth but always inducing you to step and to fall where you hadn't.

Violent Femmes

3/5

I don't always know what to do w/ 'cute' things, especially when the object essentially satisfies both definitions of the adjective: a cunning or shrewd commodity, on the one hand, and something that's immaturely attractive, on the other. That's Violent Femmes's eponymous debut in a nutshell, a record that's simultaneously clever and innocent, sharp-witted and yet wet behind the ears. Some of the tracks here I can get down w/, even enjoy in a real way, especially 'Please Do Not Go,' 'Confessions,' and 'Good Feeling.' +, it impresses me that this came out in the early 80s, foreshadowing a 90s aesthetics embodied by acts like Neutral Milk Hotel. But it also fails to do much for me - they aren't a wannabe VU, but come on, they kinda are, dig?

The Modern Dance

Pere Ubu

4/5

Artsy, sure, but not as postmodern or experimental as you might assume: these Clevelanders know what a hook is, they know that the avant-garde can coexist w/ something that's as immediate as it is cerebral. The aptest comp for this record is Beefheart's Safe as Milk, a record that endures on the margins of the very weird and the unusually catchy, held together by odd, memorable, and often farcical lyrics: 'I can't wink / I can't blink / I like The Kinks / I need a drink'; 'Techniramic Heartache (TM) / Out in the Real World.' 'Sentimental Journey,' the most out-there of the tracks, is flat and pretentious - David Thomas is at his best as a songwriter not a slam poet - but the rest is a welcome balance of hard-hitting punk and erratic signals.

Trans Europe Express

Kraftwerk

4/5

'Parks, hotels, and palaces / (Europe endless).' About as bourgeois Euro-centric as it gets, but also frank and reflective in a Wildean sense: 'Even the greatest stars / Fix their face in the looking glass'; 'We look around / And change our pose / We are showroom dummies'; 'In Vienna we sit in a late-night café / Straight connection, TEE.' Kraftwerk's masterstroke is an irrefragable annotation to this ongoing moment of globalized capitalism, a stretch of time witness to mere simulacrums and postures. In other words, as I came to the end of the record, I was filled w/ a deep sense of sadness, especially as the album gradually grew into a kind of meta-medley: tracks that blent into one another and sadly, tho beautifully, recited its beginning.

The Dark Side Of The Moon

Pink Floyd

4/5

'Breathe, breathe in the air / Don't be afraid to care.' That's how this record opens, an album unexpectedly clad w/ wisdom and advice for the everyday + spiritual. Indeed, it often reads as a self-help book backed by packages of funk, gospel, and rock: 'The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older / Shorter of breath, and one day closer to death.' This aphoristic kind of lyricism - the sort you might find in a trashy collection of poetry that's more Ryan Holiday than Wallace Stevens - yet manages to avoid a collapse into the maudlin, and in fact inspires/emboldens. Wish You Were Here is, for me, still their best release - bigger, bolder, quieter, wiser - but I greatly admire the sincerity packed into these 42 mins. +, it's too classic to decry.

Forever Changes

Love

5/5

Danny Brown's favorite album of all time, revered by Robert Plant and The Stone Roses, Forever Changes is a cult classic and yet more than that. I don't know how you can listen to it w/o converting immediately to its wit, its warmth, its realism, its inventive-never-indulgent instrumentation, and the chaotic tensions it promulgates. Is there another release from the 60s that so masterfully negotiates starry-eyedness and dark absurdism? 'Sitting on a hillside / Watching all the people die'; 'Oh the snot has caked against my pants / It has turned into crystal'; 'And that's all that lives is gonna die.' It isn't 60s protest music or even psychedelia - it's heartfelt, desperate, and utterly gorgeous 70s disillusionment foreshadowed in '67 LA. None like it.

Shaka Zulu

Ladysmith Black Mambazo

4/5

It's background music, not only b/c LBM famously backed Paul Simon on his seminal Graceland, but b/c it's music of the background, to be preciser. That is, the songs comprise a world unto themselves, a world at a distance from our own and yet too full to be intangible or abstract. These a cappella performances overflow w/ a meticulous peace, and tho there are elements of despair and joy, trouble and celebration, the main ingredient is stability, a settledness and serenity equipped w/ a vital outlet. Chanting is repetitious by nature, but no track here wants a necessary variety. My only fuss is that the accessibility of the record is finally a bit soft, so that, over the course of an entire album, the tranquility it offers wanes from robust to kinda wimpy.

Highway 61 Revisited

Bob Dylan

5/5

Tho Blonde on Blonde and Blood on the Tracks are even more realized than Highway 61 - b/c fiercely personal - nada in Dylan's oeuvre approaches the iconicity of his second electric installment, not Bringing It All Back Home w/ 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' and 'Mr. Tambourine Man' or Freewheelin' w/ 'Blowin' in the Wind.' This isn't where it all began w/ this artist, but it is where something remarkably new - dare I say mind-expansive? - began in popular music: pointed yet abstract lyricism, long + subtly crescendoing tracks, and a bluesy literariness. Worthy or not of the Nobel Prize, he's the pivotal limit of modernism: 'You've been thru all all of / F. Scott Fitzgerald's books'; 'And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot / Fighting in the captain's tower.'

Supa Dupa Fly

Missy Elliott

4/5

It makes more than a little sense that Missy's debut is bookended by Busta, that other rapper whose ad-libs don't ornament but substantiate: 'ficky-ficky-ficky-ficky-ficky-ficky-ficky'; 'Iza bah bah zah zay / Iza zah zah zah zay'; 'Bam bam bam bam bili bili bom / Bam bili bili bili bili bili bili bom.' Like B.I.G., Elliott is so rhythmically gifted that one is inclined to pass over her lyricism, a shame since she's invested in rhymed content as well as sound. Like Lauryn, she raps and sings, often saving her best writing for the non-rapping parts: 'You don't wanna date / No ifs ands or waits, it's over babe.' And like none, she essentially invented vibe in the hip-hop context. I have but one doubt w/ this one, notably that it's a bit one-note, but a classic it is.

Dire Straits

2/5

Knopfler must know that he's not as cool as a real jazz or blues cat, but his living depends on the pursuit of that sort of hipness. Mix in a Dylanesque vocal style, and you get something that's not only boring but unoriginal. I don't need all musical ventures to be fully authentic, but when it's empty - when the bullshit isn't a form of ironic or satiric critique but coincides w/ a colorless + tedious smugness - I can't get down. B/c besides 'Southbound Again,' all the tracks are too long and the lyricism somehow manages to be both clunky and chic: 'You think I care about your reaction / You think I don't understand / All you wanted was a piece of the action / Now you talk about another man'; 'Greasy, greasy, greasy hair, easy smile.' The point?

One Nation Under A Groove

Funkadelic

5/5

'Here's a chance to dance our way / Out of our constrictions.' If you ever needed proof that funk was our very best salubrious and patriotic wager, One Nation Under A Groove would be your decisive testimony: 'W/ the united funk we can fly.' I'd press you to take them seriously: imagine what national politics could achieve under a groove rather than aligned w/ shitty powers [see '...(The Doo-Doo Chasers)']. Yes, the songs are jumbo, but for once the avant-garde - b/c that's what they really are ('Fried Ice Cream is a reality!') - is for fun and wholeness rather than masturbatory chops + licks. And don't get it twisted, it's one of the all-time rock records: 'We're gonna rock and roll the crowd / Just watch them dance, watch them dance.'

The Velvet Underground

5/5

'Chill' is seldom haunting, and it's almost never visceral, but The VU typify both of those qualities on their third release, the 'chillest' of their five, the one that can be said to approximate easy listening, but which nonetheless cultivates a sense of the desperate and the tragic. Lou Reed's lyricism is as clear it's ever been, cutting to the bone, not only making something out very little but having the heart to respect the immensity of our living years: 'Candy says I hate the big decisions / That cause endless revisions / In my mind'; 'I wore my teeth in my hands / So I could mess the hair of the night'; 'I'm set free / I'm set free to find a new illusion.' And as always, tho unlike everything before or since, The VU don't just imply - they live - rock 'n' roll.

Be

Common

4/5

It could be that this is Common's best album, tho Resurrection is his most classic and Like Water for Chocolate his most essential. An authentic folk experience, Be is artfully produced, boasts a variety of flows, commands memorable choruses, and has enuf off-key rhyming to offset Common's cliché moments. The Chi-town native is like Simon & Garfunkel in that he gets away w/ corniness b/c he's never pretentious and he's not corny all of the time. For every 'The present is a gift and I just wanna be' there's a 'We talk shit, play lotto, and buy German beers / It's so black packed w/ action that's affirmative.' For the rap skeptic, Be is a brilliant place to start - if not only for its brevity - but it also convinces hip-hop elites and rhyme-junkies.

Drunk

Thundercat

4/5

'I feel weird.' Definitely weird, Drunk is a splattering of 23 relatively short tracks, all of them virtuosic in one way or another, some speaking to some sort of relevance, others sheerly odd and abstract. A playful lyric: 'Thank God for technology 'cause where would we be / If we couldn't tweet our thoughts.' Objectively, while impressive, it's not as profound as it tends to make itself out to be, and it goes to show that Thundercat is an inventive bassist but not necessarily a resourceful songwriter. With that said, it has a sound that's undeniably nostalgic for me - a drift of alternative funk and R&B that artists like Vulfpeck and Frank Ocean also exemplified. We even covered 'Them Changes' in college. I'm thus liable to overrate it. Oh well.

So

Peter Gabriel

2/5

The Genesis vocalist narrowed his progressive tendencies on this widely popular album, gravitating to an amalgam of pop, funk, and some sort of British heartland folk. Shades of Duran Duran, Stevie Wonder, and Bruce Springsteen all figure in the makeup of this record, tho consciously or not I'm unsure. The trouble is that he's neither Stevie nor the Boss, and while he's squarely superior to Duran Duran, he's just as forgettable. I don't think it's a matter of the album's unfavorable 80s affect - I'm not one to decry a period piece. I think it boils down to 1) his pretensions and lyrical failings; 2) his cheesiness and prosaic vocals; and 3) the knowledge that there's way better music out there. In short, it bored and chagrinned me.

American Beauty

Grateful Dead

5/5

While I'll always be missing something since I never saw them live, I harbor no misgivings when I say that American Beauty is not only an excellent album but an American classic - a wise, lyrical, and subtly mysterious ten-track set that only gets better w/ age. If it seems awfully straightforward, that's b/c psychedelia is more than speculative experimentation - it can also be rendered via fairly traditional interpretations of folk and country. It isn't lost on me that much of this, especially 'Ripple,' speaks to me b/c of my halfway hippie-childhood, but I dare you to underrate lyrics like: 'Then please don't be surprised / When you find me dreaming too'; 'And my tunes were played on the harp unstrung.' +, it trucks and ponders all at once. ✌️

The Notorious Byrd Brothers

The Byrds

4/5

The Notorious Byrd Brothers, at least the original eleven-track event, is a brilliant thing of juxtaposition: lyrically, instrumentally, perspectively, even cosmically. It starts off w/ an unexpectedly funky gem, apparently reeling from the effects of speed: 'I'm coming down off amphetamine / And I'm in jail 'cause I killed the queen.' It then goes into an exploration of all stuff psychedelic, from loving relations to a metaphysics of evanescence: 'I can recall a time / When I wasn't ashamed to reach out / To a friend'; 'Change is now, change is now / Things that seemed to be solid are not.' I guess what I love most about this record is the brevity of the songs, almost punk-like in their economy, as well as the intimations of Americana and country music.

Risque

CHIC

4/5

Listening to this conjures up memories I don't actually have, a testament to disco's time-capsule nature, at least when it's a classic like this is. I can't pretend to hold any specific prejudice against disco since I didn't live thru that era - I can't calculate how vexed I would've been to hear that genre flood the airwaves. All I can say is that this particular record, besides being monstrously influential, has a special warmth that I can certainly get down w/: 'Don't be a drag, participate / Clams on the half shell and roller skates, roller skates.' Repetitive, sure, but the rhythms are often irresistible, and the percussion often inventive, especially on 'My Feet Keep Dancing.' I'm moved to throw this on at a party to see what happens. Folks'll dig, right?

Pretenders

4/5

'Bondage to lust, / Abuse of facility / Blackmailed emotions confused, / The demon and devilty.' Chrissie Hynde is neither Poly Styrene nor Patti Smith: she's Strummer + Reed w/ a little bit of Costello there for nerdy relief. The music is essentially unclassifiable - every time I'd like to call it punk or new wave, it displays an edge that's older and more fundamental, a feel for 50s rock 'n' roll and Doo-wop that brings to mind the likes of Link Wray and girl groups such as The Crystals. The reggae-rhythms on tracks like 'Private Life' are purposeful rather than a distraction, more than you can say about most whites attempting that sort of thing. There's a whole lot of joy here, but it's of a perennial kind: summer jams don't monopolize their ambition.

Moby Grape

5/5

'SF freak scene was on my mind / Fillmore Slim is just a-wasting time.' If you didn't know, which I didn't, Fillmore Slim is a bluesman and former pimp from the Bay Area. Also, if you didn't know, which I didn't, this self-titled debut is the very best exemplar of the psychedelic blues to come out of the 60s, better than Clapton and the Blues Breakers, better than Cream, than Love and The Doors, fuller than the early Kinks, just as soulful as The Rascals. The only comparable act, at least in terms of quality, is Hendrix, but this has variety and foresight while Jimi had visions and impossible-to-replicate virtuosity. +, is this the first album cover to feature an artist (Don Stevenson) flipping the bird, before Johnny did it on the Ramones debut?

Rejoicing In The Hands

Devendra Banhart

3/5

Devendra's middle name is Obi, taken from the Star Wars character, which should give you a good idea what kind of household this guy grew up in - I can only imagine that the arts were emphasized, that he was encouraged to be 'different,' etc. Nothing wrong w/ that - in fact that sort of parenting ought to be adopted by each and everyone. What I'm trying to get at is my ambivalence w/ this record - it seems he's more affected artiste than real folk artist. That's not to say there aren't any good songs here, tho nothing strikes me as great, or eloquent lyricism: 'We've had a choice / We chose rejoice'; 'This is our father / And this is how he strayed.' It's to say I don't buy his cabaret number. I'd like this most at a cafe in Bennington, Vermont.

Amnesiac

Radiohead

3/5

Part two of Kid A, at times its leftovers, at others its genuine extension. In either case, Amnesiac isn't very exciting: even w/ its signaling of forgetful and bewildered states of mind, I'd have liked more energy, at least more in-your-face lethargy if a slothful approach is indeed what they're going for. I wouldn't call this a caricature of the Radiohead sound, but only a handful of the tracks poignantly command the band's signature resonance: 'You And Whose Army,' 'Knives Out,' 'Morning Bell/Amnesiac.' Lyrically, Yorke relies too heavily not only on the obscure but the trite: 'There are doors that let you in / And out / But never open'; 'While you make pretty speeches / You feed me to the lions / A delicate balance.' Ya can't tell me that’s not...soft.

Nixon

Lambchop

3/5

A turn-of-the-millennium album, Nixon puts you in a good mood, even an inspired one if you allow it to flow w/o much investigatory intent. In other words, this is nothing more than a pop record, tho it has the quirky lyricism of an indie-rock release and Kurt Wagner sings w/ a been-there-done-that hipsterism. Its optimism is a welcome elevation, especially when it nears a gospel-affect, but it eventually cloys too much and bottoms out in the end. I'm left w/ bits and pieces of what isn't genius but merciful decency: 'Each and every stinking day / I'm getting much better / This evening's little up-setter'; 'Part of the process / Is sifting thru the piles of shit.' If Chance the Rapper were in a soul-rock outfit, this is the sort of sappy thing I'd expect.

The Gilded Palace Of Sin

The Flying Burrito Brothers

5/5

W/ a name like The Flying Burrito Bros, you'd think you'd get farce or parody. W/ an album called The Gilded Palace Of Sin, you may think you'd get prog or intellectual snobbery. But what you get is country - I mean the straight-up version, the simple, haunting, and necessary foundation. Gram Parsons is a hell of a singer, and tho he's no Aretha or James Carr, his renditions of 'Do Right Woman' and 'Dark End of the Street' are soulful and profound. 'My Uncle' is an essential political track, rivaling CCR for how much punch they pack: ''Cause they don't need the kind of law and order / That tends to keep a good man underground.' They're everything The Eagles are not, and even if they never released a comparable product, this is superb enuf.

Hot Shots II

The Beta Band

3/5

Brits probably knew of this band when they first hit the scene - conceived of them as some sort of amalgam of Oasis and Radiohead - but Americans have Stephen Frears to thank for any exposure to The Beta Band: Cusack puts on 'Dry The Rain' from The Three E.P.'s to apparently sell five copies of the record. Unfortunately, Hot Shots II doesn't boast a track nearly as good as 'Dry The Rain' and is far flatter than Heroes to Zeros, their third and final release. Lyrically, it's wanting - tho I do dig this outburst: 'I never been the type to sing all night but Aaaaaaaaaah!' - and every song begins to sound the same, rhythmically as well as vocally, aiming but mostly failing (save on 'Quiet') to achieve a negotiation of the casual and the vigorous.

OK Computer

Radiohead

4/5

For this Radiohead-valuer but not so much -adherent, Ok Computer and In Rainbows (yes, not Kid A) are their two best releases, and nearly prepare me to concede that they're one the great bands. Insofar as In Rainbows is the apotheosis of their gorgeousness, Ok Computer is the zenith of their rawness and vulnerability: it's the record that's more believable and more emotionally pertinent than any other. Yorke is still a limited and too-studied lyricist - 'And now we are one / In everlasting peace'; 'Don't get sentimental / It always ends up drivel' - but he never whines, just lays down his oomph w/ color and variety. The fact that each song is essentially a ballad is what makes this record so impressively complete: it's doing what it's good at.

Infected

The The

4/5

Adjacent to British bands like Simple Minds and Fine Young Cannibals, the The (the most pretentious but inevitable name) boast a surprising amount of soul on their second release, Infected. Their successes derive straight from Matt Johnson's vocal stylizing, always cool but never strained like Knopfler's distant modishness. At times he's a composite of Tom Waits + Bowie ('Heartland,' 'Sweet Bird Of Truth'), at others he's as tortured as an Ian Curtis. Lyrically, he's both personal and social: 'Y'see I didn't want to be w/ any people I know / But God knows I didn't wanna be alone'; 'This is the 51st state of the U.S.A.' Far superior to pop-soul outfit Simply Red, the The is the authentic stuff: wild, civil, corporeal, deliberate. + big ups to Neneh.

Boston

3/5

Sometimes uninteresting things are interesting in their own right. Boston's self-titled debut is that sort of commodity. It doesn't inspire musically, tho the group can certainly 'play,' and it doesn't inspire soulfully since their hits ain't from the soul. But it does inspire culturally, e'en or especially if it begs you to discover a better product. Classic rock radio stations serve up crap mostly, and there's a whole lot of crap that's better than this: ZZ Top, Tom Petty, The Stones, Lynyrd Skynyrd. Still, Boston has good intentions: 'No, we didn't have much money / We barely made enuf to survive / But when we got up on stage and / Got ready to play, people came alive.' It's also a worthy experience to listen to an 8-track record that spawned 8 hit singles.

Master Of Puppets

Metallica

3/5

'Pounding out aggression turns into obsession.' I think that line articulates well my trouble w/ metal: it's obsessive to the point of being compulsively neat rather than chaotically heavy. Formula reigns - even the occasional shift mid song is too much an anticipated variation. I don't doubt that this record is as influential as it's reported to be, and for that reason I respect it, but Hetfield is not my kind of gruff (I'd take Lemmy), and the messaging is politically upright yet brims w/ cliché: 'Welcome to where time stands still / No one leaves and no one will.' Succinctly, it doesn't give me the energy or the remnants of a shattered beauty I know it gifts others. Wallace Stevens insists that the supremest poetry 'must change.' This doesn't change enuf.

Survivor

Destiny's Child

4/5

'You thought I couldn't see w/o you / Perfect vision / You thought I couldn't last w/o you / I'm lasting.' Before Beyonce was singing about 'irreplaceable' she was in the crew that sexified women's empowerment via juxtaposition: the trilogy of 'Survivor,' 'Bootylicious,' and 'Nasty Girl' perfectly exemplifies that possibility. That logic, which isn't irrefragable, has nonetheless had a profound impact on our music and cultural sensibilities: no Nicki Minaj, no Cardi B, no Megan Thee Stallion, indeed no Lil Nas X or Lady Gaga w/o this. Musically, it's not only pleasurable but deliciously experimental: off-kilter rhythms and cadences that pop and prowl ('Sexy Daddy,' 'Perfect Man') transform a record that already buzzes w/ attitude into a fertile aesthetic.

Copper Blue

Sugar

3/5

Grunge + punk + alt, that is, Nirvana + Hüsker Dü + R.E.M., Sugar adds heft + drone + melody to the St. Paul outfit known for speed + a playful thinness + flirtations w/ the melodic. At times, Bob Mould sounds amazingly similar to Michael Stipe, but Mould is actually the better lyricist: he seems to have always known how to simplify, to do less w/ more, to play to the strengths of integrity and real life: 'If you're thinking of changing / If you're thinking of staying w/ me / We need to agree / We need to make some changes.' It isn't any small success to be able to merge pop sensibilities w/ this much rawness, but what this record lacks is one or two truly great songs: you're thus left w/ an idea, a stance, and even a good time, but no notable wrinkle.

Rain Dogs

Tom Waits

5/5

Waits has always essentially been a storyteller, but on Rain Dogs, along w/ Swordfishtrombones, he becomes some sort of medium for the (un)reality of an America he ceaselessly aims to depict. Theatrics certainly define a major element of this masterpiece, but so does a prolific directness and a frightful realism, as if you were to meld Lewis Carroll w/ Theodore Dreiser. Lyrically, he has the ability few others have to be utterly memorable and yet invariably exciting: 'We can always find a millionaire to shovel all the coal'; 'I'll tell you all my secrets, but I lie about my past.' I love that most tracks do not exceed the three minute mark, w/ only two longer than four, and that its initial strangeness gives way to a gentleness and grooving perspective.

Home Is Where The Music Is

Hugh Masekela

4/5

What makes this a great album is that it intermingles so many apparent and yet inevitable influences in engaging and memorable ways. On the opening track, Masekela blows like Freddie Hubbard (I think the trumpeter's implicit mentor); Larry Willis comes in on the second track sounding like his best + most fragrant version of Keith Jarrett; the third has a Cannonball Adderley-type feel; the fourth is a Miles thing w/ Ntshoko injecting the Elvin Jones we know from 'Psalm'; etc. And thankfully, he never draws from the dismal + boring hard bop of Horace Silver. I do not mean to diminish the originality of the artist by citing so many prior jazz authorities, but isn't that the point of jazz criticism to an extent? Anyway, this long record is really excellent.

High Violet

The National

4/5

The National stand for everything that was wrong w/ Brooklyn in the 2010s, a hipsterism that's hopefully on its way to obsoletion, but I'm not going to insincerely denounce the band that got me listening to genres I wouldn't've dared appreciate before. I understand that they don't exactly make rich or very exciting music, but it's not pretentious, it's honest enuf, and it exhibits an authentic beauty I'd like to swim in. Berninger's baritone is a rare thing and his lyricism, tho imperfect, has its moments of provocation + identity: 'Don't leave my hyper heart alone on the water / Cover me in rag and bone sympathy'; 'Awesome prince, get your sleep / Lose your heart in history.' We don't need any more bands like them in the world, but they've a place.

Elvis Is Back

Elvis Presley

4/5

I get that once the 'album' was introduced to the world, consumers didn't look to greatest hits packages much anymore, but w/ certain artists - Elvis, Chuck Berry, James Brown - those collections of singles make a whole lot of sense. That's not to say that a record like Elvis Is Back! isn't worth your time - it absolutely is. It's to concede that what you're getting are deeper cuts rather than the tracks that made the man into the cultural icon he was, deservingly or not. Elvis's fourth studio album is not always a rockin' thing, but that's not exactly lamentable: I prefer the soulful version to the white-guy-gets-the-chicks-to-dance-edition. If you want who the world recalls, this Elvis isn't that. But if you want who he was at bottom, this Elvis is it.

Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea

PJ Harvey

5/5

'I want a pistol / I want a gun / I'm scared baby / I wanna run'; 'Cause baby I'm just a scared and lonely rider / But I gotta know how it feels.' Polly, like Bruce, runs b/c she's scared and at the end of her rope. That feeling of a last-ditch effort pervades the entire record, simultaneously providing it w/ edge and flight, attitude and restraint. Despite the obvious comparisons to Patti Smith, Polly is a fresh and moving approach to the perennial tropes of popular music: love, sex, drugs, violence. Besides, if we're doing honest comps, this is Because-Of-The-Night-Patti (I know, more Springsteen, but that's where I'm at), not Radio Ethiopia or even Horses. Words like 'brave' or 'fearless' don't do this album justice: how 'bout 'destined,' 'staggering'?

Darkness on the Edge of Town

Bruce Springsteen

4/5

'Baby, I got my facts learned real good right now.' Bruce's heaviest record, not lyrically - that'd be Nebraska - but musically, that is, in terms of what it means for the heartland hero to rock out. 'Adam Raised a Cain' features his most impressively hard-hitting guitar playing, while a track like 'Something in the Night' boasts that distant wail we know from 'Jungleland' tho w/ even more desperation. I know it's in the title, but the truth is that this where the Boss doesn't just learn how to be darker - he let's that darkness speak for itself: 'Now some guys, they give up living / And start dying little by little, piece by piece'; 'End of the day, factory whistle cries / Men walk thru these gates w/ death in their eyes.' No writer of America can ignore that for long.

Solid Air

John Martyn

4/5

Folk-jazz is hard to pull off, since the two genres are antipodal to a degree, but John Martyn does it as well as anyone this side of Nick Drake and Tim Buckley, not to mention Nina Simone. There's no doubt that this is soulful and beautiful music, but it's also a slow-down-get-your-groove-on-thing, a trip into the strange and mythically reposed: 'I'd Rather Be The Devil (Devil Got My Woman),' 'Go Down Easy' (Hejira-like), 'Dreams By The Sea.' As the record goes on, it doesn't exactly convince you that it boasts a single great track, tho 'Over The Hill' and 'May You Never' come pretty close, but it has so much variety, virtuosity, and believable vibrancy that you can both admire it from afar and devour its emotive riches. Just not a go-to album.

Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)

Eurythmics

3/5

'It's noble and it's brutal, it distorts and deranges / And it wrenches you up and you're left like a zombie.' Like A-ha's 'Take On Me,' 'Sweet Dreams' is heard more than it's attended, but unlike the Norwegian outfit, Eurythmics can make a full album, or at the very least, a respectable one. Besides the international hit, the record has tracks like 'Love Is a Stranger,' 'The Walk,' 'Jennifer,' songs that don't send a shiver up your spine but are good enuf. Nothing here isn't catchy, and some of it can even be called sexy, but too much is uppity and, in the end, like a mealy apple: it's all bountiful 'til it's exposed to the better air and presents you with something edible but no longer delicious. In fact, it's too 'eurythmic,' too tepidly symmetrical. K?

Hail To the Thief

Radiohead

2/5

'You have not been paying attention.' Contrary to his detractors, Yorke is not a whiner, a moper, or even a lamenter: he's a nuanced and perpetual droner, a strangely aloof and not very emotional castaway. Unfortunately, he's also a very bad poet, pretentious and threadbare at the same time. When the band decides the write a song, as they do w/ 'Go To Sleep,' they are tolerable and moderately successful. When they do not, which is the case w/ much of Hail To The Thief, they're pretty unbearable. It's the worst Radiohead I've heard (I haven't listened to The King of Limbs) b/c it's not even remotely fun: 'Why so green / And lonely, and lonely / And lonely.' Ya know, I can dig the darkness, just not the weary or densely drab. Faugh!

The Genius Of Ray Charles

Ray Charles

5/5

After Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles broadcasted the most important male voice in the history of popular music. I'd like to add Robert Johnson's, but his is not a crossover in the way Louis's or Ray's is. Then again, perhaps 'crossover' is not precise enuf - above all else, Ray is the foremost genius of integration, engendering a style that fused blues, gospel, jazz, and those early expressions of rock 'n' roll: soul music, in other words. If you require evidence of his unusual and necessary power, listen to the final moments of 'Just for a Thrill' when the man pushes and grunts his way to a sublime capture of feeling. This record is particularly thrilling, featuring jazz greats like Clark Terry, Paul Gonsalves, and Zoot Sims on side one.

Fuzzy Logic

Super Furry Animals

3/5

'Show me magic'; 'You're the battery incarnate, I'm an innocent man'; 'You know we're drowning in designer ice cream.' Guitar-wise, this feels like My Bloody Valentine, while lyrically it has the mundane absurdism of bands like The Flaming Lips or Animal Collective. I guess that adds up to a 'logic' that we can baptize as 'fuzzy,' but I'd opt for a word like 'faint' or 'weak': it's not ambiguous as much as it's slight, lacking a substantiality that justifies their posture of cool. B/c that's the central problem of the record as I see it. It has decent tracks like 'Frisbee,' 'Gathering Moss, or 'Bad Behavior, songs that nicely recall 60s pop, but there's something in Gruff Rhys's voice and the overall tenor of the album that reeks of an unjustified, restless hipness.

The Marshall Mathers LP

Eminem

5/5

Outrageous, satirical, realist, and forthright, Eminem's magnum opus only gets better w/ age, no matter how 'of its time' his hatreds and vulgarisms are. 'You want me to fix up lyrics while our president gets his dick sucked?' Right he is to call out the engine of hypocrisy his country often runs on, but his wit and penned social-awareness only works b/c, as a technical rapper, he's indisputably a genius. It's more than the rhyming, tho 'taught 'em to swear' and 'daughter to wear,' or 'two kids, sixteen,' 'M-16,' 'ten clips each,' 'them shits reach,' 'six kids each,' 'Bill Clint's speech,' 'fix these streets' are prolific displays of the skillset. It's beyond his flow as well. It's his tone, as angry as it is resigned: urgent yet nonchalant, it's a dosage of deep clarity.

m b v

My Bloody Valentine

3/5

W/ not a whole lot to hold onto, m b v gets its power from the band's honed and oceanic guitarwork: its vague and muddled sound yet displays a true-to-life vastness, an atmosphere of droning as well as drowning. The group, like Spiritualized, has always been impressively dedicated to the production of their craft, and I admire their ability to engender a music that feels nearly impossible to make, but shoegaze is, by definition, a genre dangerously at risk of ethereal stagnation, and on their third record, the band by all means stagnates. I say 'by all means' b/c they do it well, and I could get down w/ its most songy tracks like 'new you,' but m b v is no Loveless. It's honestly lifeless and, at the end of the day, kinda bad for you. Bad meaning good?

Scott 2

Scott Walker

4/5

'If I could be for just one little hour / A cute-cute in a stupid ass way.' Scott Walker is like a midway point between Tom Jones and Associates lead man Billy Mackenzie, until he goes country on the Tim-Hardin cover and gives you his best Harry Nilsson. As theatrical as Screamin' Jay Hawkins, but in his own way a man very much keen on authenticity and pushing things only as far as they need to go, Walker is an excellent comedian - 'And never to be next / Oh, never to be next / next!' - w/o collapsing into sheer farce. As a vocalist, he can't really be doubted, but he doesn't coast on mere talent since he's a helluva songwriter and when he covers a song he covers the right one (save 'The Girls And The Dogs'). No Bowie w/o this Ohioan, too.

Face to Face

The Kinks

4/5

'Hubby's gone away / And while the cat's away / The mice are gonna play.' The Kinks's Rubber Soul, tho as a lyricist, Ray Davies was more biting and deliberate than either Lennon or McCartney, e.g., compare 'Session Man' to 'Paperback Writer.' It seems to me that The Kinks were the first to see that 'conceptual' music could most easily get going from a satirical and/or critical perspective, preferably in relation to commercial society/capitalism: 'Why should he care if he is hated in his home / 'Cause he's gotta a house in the country, / And a big sports car'; 'And I can't sail my yacht / He's taken everythin' I've got.' As such, the most soulful/bluesy tracks like 'Rainy Day in June' and 'You're Looking Fine' unfortunately feel out of place. Still, nice.

Green River

Creedence Clearwater Revival

5/5

Fogerty's voice has traveled the airwaves into our subconscious and is, at this point, a statement in itself, but the uncredited genius behind this album is Fogerty's guitar playing, at once simple, vigorous, and persuasive. I hate to discount the rest of the group, and I know they must be essential in their own ways, but CCR is a remarkable proposal b/c John Fogerty literally does it all: never backed by another member's voice until the very last track, he strums and notates these songs to classic status. W/ lyrics like 'Old Cody Junior took me over / Said, "You're gonna find the world is smolderin',"' one can only admire how much of an influence he must've been on Springsteen and the folk literati who wanted to be more down to earth than impressive.

Document

R.E.M.

4/5

Murmur remains R.E.M.'s 'finest hour,' but there is something to say in re the group's first refusal to 'murmur' any longer: Stipe clears his throat w/o an embarrassing or pedestrian devotedness to radical politics. What he's learned, or at the very least learned to express, are dialectical materialism and the structures of history: 'Sugar, cane, and coffee cup / Copper, steel, and cattle / An annotated history'; 'There's something going on that wasn't here before . . . There's something going on that's not quite right.' W/ this said, their political clear-eyedness fits right in w/ their new musical program to be catchier and happier than ever. Like a Born in the U.S.A., Document is this group's daring attempt to be more accessible AND more meaningful.

Highway to Hell

AC/DC

2/5

Metal/hard rock about parties, girls (a million of them, + w/ rhythm), and all manners of a 'touch too much,' Highway to Hell boasts peculiar love songs and not very good ones: an abstract 'she' pervades the album inanely and boringly. My issue w/ AC/DC is that they don't do one thing all that well: riffing, raspy vocals, choruses, backbeats, don't-give-a-fuck-attitudes. I know they brand themselves as 'simply rock and roll,' but this primitivism doesn't guarantee authenticity or good song writing: 'We're rising, falling, like at sea / You're lookin' so good under me'; 'You can throw me lefts / And you can throw me rights / But where were you last night?’ This isn't 'back to the basics' (that'd be the Ramones), it's back to the same shit, over and over.

Sheer Heart Attack

Queen

2/5

'It would be of small avail / To talk of magic in the air'; 'Gunpowder, gelatine / Dynamite w/ a laser beam'; 'Synchronize your minds and see / The beast within him rise.' The once proggers are now wannabe showstoppers, but the prog in them won't die, as those snatches of lyricism illustrate. It's a shame b/c Freddie Mercury has one of the great voices in rock history, and yet I can't claim to be moved by something this repetitively crescendoing and theatrical. At their rare tolerable ('Killer Queen'), they're a somewhat fresh amalgam of The Beatles and Led Zeppelin, w/ harmonies inspired by The Beach Boys. Mostly tho, they're lost not knowing what to do or where to go: technically proficient, the band however never dramatizes w/ a soul.

american dream

LCD Soundsystem

3/5

'You're still a pushover / For passionate people.' This is good pop music, a fusion of therapeutic landscapes and Talking-Heads quirkiness. Opening w/ a legitimately consoling track - 'Oh, sugar / Give into me / You're just having a bad dream / Of ringing alarms'; 'Lean into me / There's always a side door / Into the dark' - the band then steadily reaches into their bag of percussive dreams and makes a record that's at once soothing and hard-nosed. James Murphy is a real artist in that he sounds like no one b/c he sounds like everyone: in other words, tho LCD has clear soundalikes, they possess a magnitude that can only imply a deep musical entrenchment. It would take too long to get to the bottom of their influences - a good thing.

Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not

Arctic Monkeys

4/5

The Arctic Monkeys's debut is a rare paradigm for rock music that's also + before anything else dance music, thanks to Alex Turner's rhythmic sense and funky locution along with Matt Helders's catchy drumming. 'Get off the bandwagon and put down the handbook'; 'Get on your dancing shoes / You sexy little swine.' This means that the band doesn't really give a shit about melodies, and this elision of melody often smacks of a crutch rather than an innovation, but these songs get you off your ass in a real way. Even at their aberrantly contemplative, Turner is the voice of fun and the wisdom to omit all seriousness: 'Oh, those silly boys in blue / Well, they won't catch me and you.' I prefer The Libertines's self-titled second, but this survives.

Vento De Maio

Elis Regina

3/5

An album apparently unknown by many, Vento De Maio boasts the talents of a widely popular and influential Bossa nova singer. Regina's vocals are warm and expressive in that laid-back Bossa way, w/ soft textures and little vibrato, pelagic yet wisely halcyon and controlled. The production is weak, however, sappy and uncreative, while the track list does not feature enuf variety to sustain my interest: when it gets funky, I'm not moved to dance, when it's contemplative, I'm not moved to lay low and think about things. I have no doubt that she has far more impressive releases in her catalogue, this one being a late compilation put together after her death in 1982, so I am happy to have discovered this artist. But as a record, underwhelming.

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

Wilco

4/5

'Let's forget about the tongue tied lightning / Let's undress like cross-eyed strangers'; 'You have to learn how to die / If you want to be alive'; 'Strung down you cheeks / Bitter melodies turning your orbit around.' It makes very little sense to call Wilco the American Radiohead since, tho they both make pop songs that aren't always intelligible, the Chicagoans have every intention to vitalize their obscurity whereas the Brits are amnesiac thumb-twiddlers. Tweedy is a far better lyricist than Yorke, possessing the rare knack to turn a phrase that's felt before it's understood, or to reorder cliché just enuf for it to hit more profoundly. If only for 'Jesus etc.,' a country-rock classic that rivals the Dead's 'Ripple' for sheer beauty, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is glorious.

Aladdin Sane

David Bowie

4/5

According to Bowie, Aladdin Sane is better than The Rise and Fall b/c it's 'more informed by rock 'n' roll.' That's probably true - 'Watch That Man' is more rockin' than anything off the predecessor - but it's also more in touch w/ free jazz, e.g. Mike Garson's piano on the title track, and is harder than anything he'd done before, e.g. 'Panic in Detroit,' 'Cracked Actor.' It’s hard in a way Deep Purple never could be: giddily heedful of The New York Dolls's innovations of a glam toughness, Bowie spawns one of his essential albums. And yet, it's not as perfect as his late, formally brazen 70s work or as fresh as Ziggy Stardust. Bowie's conceptual narratives have their limits, and I'm more moved by the production of Station to Station, Low, "Heroes."

When I Was Born For The 7th Time

Cornershop

4/5

'No Asian fire will leave us dire / Born again to Asian lion'; 'Worker strikes are back again'; 'I want you each and all to switch your tiny mind on.' Five years the senior of Bend it Like Beckham, Cornershop's third studio album, a more graceful vision of representational art than that classic film, is the best example of Britpop I've heard and it's not particularly close. (Oasis is really something else, so I exclude them.) Peppering the record w/ various fusions, instrumental interludes, and Allen Ginsberg, Cornershop did the impossible before M.I.A. managed it: pen socially-aware bangers that are natural and bighearted. Yes, we have punk and we have hip-hop, but they bum-rush the establishment - this speaks softly and yet I dig their moment.

KIWANUKA

Michael Kiwanuka

4/5

Preaching? I don't think so. Thinking? Always, but that does not seem to be its source. Solidifying? Yessir. Letting go? Absolutely. Kiwanuka does a remarkable job marrying the sentiments of an indie band like Radiohead and a soul-barer like Bill Withers. For that, we should commend him, but it takes more than an impressive incorporation of influences to make great or even decent music. Fortunately, Kiwanuka passes the ear-test as well: the record is loaded w/ more than a share of hard-hitters and soulful rock tunes that don't only give pleasure but make it as well. Its only want is lyrical: 'I thought I could break away / I hope I fall in love today'; 'Am I a hero? / Am I a hero now?'; 'You are my air to breathe / You're just like a honey bee.' Hm.

Bone Machine

Tom Waits

4/5

If Led Zeppelin represented the blues twisted and turned inside out, Tom Waits is a more traditional blues artist b/c he's thoroughly more American than any blues-loving Brit could ever hope to be. His renditions are often bizarre, of course, but for every 'All Stripped Down' there's 'Who Are You,' this record's 'Downtown Train.' The thing about Waits - what makes him a touchstone for me - is that he's essentially a historian of American music + religion, the only sensible thing to be if you aim to command this country's folkloric accents: 'And the great day of wrath has come / And here's mud in your big red eye'; 'I wanna know am I the sky or a bird? / 'Cause hell's boiling and heaven is full / We're chained to the world and we all gotta pull.'

Tarkus

Emerson, Lake & Palmer

1/5

It often reveals a benighted aesthetic to call something pretentious - it can even be pretentious to evaluate a work of art that way - but I do not know what else to say about this record or this band: they fit that category too perfectly. Pretentious b/c soullessly self-important - plenty of great artists suffer from self-importance, but if they have soul they have my ears - ELP is what happens when a group of not very intelligent nerds fly the flags of their nerdism via the overabundance of organs and Moogs. It's a truism: if you have nothing to say, blast the organ loudly and annoyingly. It turns out this group has nothing to say: 'Have you walked on the stones of years? / When you speak, is it you that hears?' Altho...an armadillo I like very much.

It's A Shame About Ray

The Lemonheads

2/5

'I'm still aware of little, but I'm gonna try'; 'It slipped my mind that I could use my brain.' The Lemonheads makes short and catchy tracks that unite the lyricism of Elvis Costello w/ the slacker poses of Pavement. Yet, their catchiness never catches fire, and as one song starts to bleed into another, Evan Dando's voice dawdles and exasperates more and more. It's a shame - I dig their ethos of simplicity and curtness - but they simply don't explore enuf for me to bother: their enervation spells out an indifference even the grandest slackers don't assume. Their cover of S&G is, in fact, the best 3 mins on the record, which says a lot about their inability to invent a serious or memorable sound. The nineties had a whole lot to offer better than this.

Parachutes

Coldplay

3/5

Coldplay are old souls at heart, for good and for bad: tho their genre is alt, indie, or whichever white moniker you prefer, they share more w/ soft rock from the late 60s and 70s than they do w/ R.E.M. thru Pavement, etc. That is, Chris Martin and co. are essentially a folk-rock group, but they're not all that folksy or homespun: Chris is too graceful a singer to have the required rasp of a folk artist, and the music is gossamer rather than knowing or tender. What really drags them into the mud of mediocrity are their philosophical pretensions, which are even more boring than Radiohead's: 'That the spies hide out in every corner / But you can't touch them, no'; 'We've been living life inside of a bubble.' 'Yellow,' like 'The Scientist,' is a classic, tho.

Imperial Bedroom

Elvis Costello & The Attractions

4/5

It's impossible to quote Costello adequately, so fecund is his lyrical talent, which has rightly been compared to Gershwin and Porter. A few moments from the first three tracks, tho these merely scratch the surfaces: 'I hang around dying to be tortured / You'll never be alone in the bone orchard'; 'I guess time gave up the ghost too late'; 'I have betrayed you and me / And paid for my own bribery.' Really, there're only a handful of artists who have continued the tradition of classic American songwriting: Costello, Waits, Smokey Robinson, Carole King (sorta) - the rest went the Bob Dylan route. For this, Costello always has my heart. Yet, something about this record, I have to admit, is the product of a try-hard sophisticate. I prefer his naivete.

Madman Across The Water

Elton John

3/5

'Jesus freaks, out in the street / Handing tickets out for God.' I'd be lying & inconsistent if I said I didn't value 'Tiny Dancer,' one of those inane classics that oughtn't work but do and there's not much else to say 'bout it. 'Levon' is a noble second helping of that seminal track, continuing the odd tributes to Jesus + Americana: I never knew Elton John was essentially a Brit doing some kind of prog-country act. By the time 'Razor Face' starts, however, I no longer care for the orchestral pretensions, the melodramatic storytelling (the nadir being 'Indian Sunset'), or John's bright mundanities. Things are slightly bettered on 'Holiday Inn' - 'Slow down Joe, I'm a rock and roll man' - but if there's genius on this record, it's privileged on the first two tracks.

Rubber Soul

Beatles

5/5

If The Beatles never made another album after Rubber Soul, they wouldn't have gone on to be (in)arguably the greatest band of all time, but we'd still remember them as one of the more important acts in the history of popular music. Tagged as their transition record, it's perhaps their most creative & subtle release. I adore its various nods to soul and Motown, especially on 'Nowhere Man' (my favorite Beatles song?), I venerate their vague and not always upstanding decorum, i.e., these aren't your run-of-the-mill hippies: 'I'm Looking Through You,' 'Run For Your Life.' In short, I'm thrilled that an album like it exists, one that you can throw on while putting together a brief dinner or listen to thoughtfully. +, Harrison shines: 'If I Needed Someone.'

Tical

Method Man

4/5

After 36 Chambers was released, Meth was the Wu-Tang member w/ the most breakout potential, due in large part to the hit single from their debut. And yet, in the pantheon of solo Wu records, Tical isn't celebrated to the extent that Cuban Linx..., Liquid Swords, Ironman, Supreme Clientele, and Return to the 36 Chambers are. I'd like to think that's b/c Method Man was far stranger than anybody could've imagined, tho 'Method Man' isn't your everyday rap hit. The thirteen tracks that make up Tical are all beautifully odd in one way or another, w/ choruses and standalone lyrics that reclaim strangeness as hardness: 'Is it real, son, is it really real, son? / Let me know it's real, son, if it's really real'; 'The ism helps to stimulate my pugilism.'

Vulnicura

Björk

3/5

'Moments of clarity are so rare / I better document this'; 'Anything peak for clarity.' Björk's breakup record, Vulnicura is not just an honest outpouring of emotion, it's intensely analytical, striving for 'clarity' above all else. She insists on having it: 'I demand all clarity.' Every track resembles some sort of therapeutic procedure, an emotional reckoning that's as philosophical as a novel by Sartre or Camus. In order to get clear about oneself, especially during and after a breakup, one ought to analyze - it's probably not a great idea to chew over things aimlessly and feverishly. The problem is that this doesn't always make for very interesting art. In this case, tho the songs are often beautiful, they drag lyrically + orchestrally: the monotony wears thin.

Stripped

Christina Aguilera

4/5

'I will never hide what I really feel.' While her message and stance are clear enuf - she's a feminist intent on acknowledging her mistakes ('I keep going right back / To the one thing that I need to walk away from') - Aguilera is, musically speaking, nearly impossible to classify: R&B, rock, hip-hop, Latin folk, jazz. Tho the influence of this record has certainly been recognized, it's quite the experience listening to it all the way thru: its aesthetic really has gone on to become an ubiquitous presence. Even artists as seemingly self-contained as Solange and Amy Winehouse owe something to Stripped. More importantly, as long as it is, the album is simply a pleasure to listen to. She's also dead serious: fuck those who said it's 'almost' for grown-ups.

Hotel California

Eagles

3/5

'He said, "we haven't had / That spirit here since 1969."' I want to hate the title-track, and in many ways I do, but it has a few things going for it, the guitar solo notwithstanding (I know it's celebrated, but it's soft rock trying hard to be hard). At the very least, it's a peculiar if pretentious success, a song that's enjoyably inexplicable. I want to hate the rest of the tracks, and in many ways I do, but they're not the worst I've heard, despite the milage of faux soul the band covers. The record is essentially a deficient version of Clapton's inconsistent solo work, w/ the subtle reggae nods and all. It does boast a particularly bad song, the arid and brainless 'Victim of Love': 'A room full of noise and dangerous boys / Still makes you thirsty and hot.'

Searching For The Young Soul Rebels

Dexys Midnight Runners

3/5

'I've been spat on and shat on / And made to eat soap / I've been working and shirking / For what, I don't know.' Tho they sound completely different, and one would be wont to compare Dexys Midnight Runners to The Clash, Elvis Costello, or The Specials, there's really one band that's comparable to this group, and that would be The Smiths. Kevin Rowland and Morrissey appreciated that anti-establishment music would have to be undergirded by an 'I,' even or especially if that 'I' couldn't help but lament bookishly. So, w/ this said, this is a band and a record theoretically right up my alley: the horns, the soul, the punk, the roaring, the poised and blaring right-side-of-history-adventure. But I think it's overestimated: any great, great song?

The Sun Rises In The East

Jeru The Damaja

5/5

'Even though I'm righteous / Rotten's what you're yellin' / But I'm not chain-snatchin' / Or drug-sellin'.' Jeru's debut is, in every way, just as innovative and imaginative as Nas's, tho it lacks the seismic quality of that greatest of all hip-hop albums. What I venerate most about this record is the aspect of an east-coast cacophony: Gang Starr, Organized Konfusion, Boot Camp Clik, Nas, Wu-Tang, Mobb Deep, Kool G, Chuck D, De La, Jungle Bros. It is, in other words, NYC hip-hop incarnate. And yet, Jeru is sui generis: a flow that's funky and disjointed, a voice that's sonorous and pastoral, and lyrics that are memorably righteous. 'Your nine spay, my mind spray.' +, Preemo proves that he's the east-coast Dr. Dre: at times, he out-funks the G-funk.

In The Court Of The Crimson King

King Crimson

2/5

'Politicians' funeral pyre / Innocents raped w/ napalm fire.' I know that it's branded as one of the first prog rock records, but lyrics like that remind me of what was to come w/ the political metal of Black Sabbath, e.g., 'Burning globe of obscene fire / Like electric funeral pyre.' Instrumentally, that first track also has the heaviness of metal, or, at the very least, hard rock. Yet, things regrettably soften as the album goes on, and that's coming from a member of not-crazy-about-metal-pack. It's soft b/c it's sentimental and nostalgic, corny and pretentious, no matter how compelling their anti-war sentiments were. The sole thinker in the band appears to be Michael Giles - I wonder how much I'd dig this release w/ just the drum parts. He's neat.

Larks' Tongues In Aspic

King Crimson

4/5

The fact that three of the six original tracks on Larks' Tongues In Aspic (a savory title!) are instrumentals shows a degree of growth on the part of the OG progressive band: prog is a foul and soulless genre primarily due to its lyrical failings. These instrumentals are especially poignant b/c Bill Bruford and Jamie Muir are excellent percussionists, adding far more than detail to this already intricate record. I'd be false, however, if I said I despised what this album has to offer lyrically: the other three tracks were well worth my time. 'She responds like a limousine / Brought alive on the silver screen / To the shuddering breath of yesterday.' In short, way better than the debut - and tho it's still pretentious, I take to it like I take to Wish You Were Here.

White Blood Cells

The White Stripes

4/5

'All they got inside is vacancy.' Like all rockers, Jack White is a romantic as well as a Romantic. At bottom, he's a gentleman, w/ the proper etiquette and a feel for civility, but he also has an itch for self-expression at all costs: 'Maybe I should carry you / Then you said "You almost dropped me" / So I did / And I got mud on my shoes.' Jack and Meg are more than economy, and certainly more than rock revival, they're good sense + the stewardship of rock 'n' roll decorum. The songs that comprise this record, arguably the best of their tenure, are neither cool nor uncool, unusual nor prosaic: they exist on the plane of rituals and mores. Jack knows he's just a fella: 'I'm coming thru the door / But they're expecting more of an interesting man.'

John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band

John Lennon

4/5

'Mama, don't go / Daddy, come home.' I know it's fashionable to dig Paul more than John these days, and I can see the argument from a musical and an ethical perspective, but Lennon is a presence, a lifeline, a way of being in the world. He has got to be on for his magic to work, but boy is he on w/ this record, a moving confirmation that he was the most soulful Beatle, and it's not that close. He was also the most petty, which I love, contending w/ Dylan for the best get-back artist: 'Old Hare Krishna got nothing on you / Just keep you crazy / W/ nothing to do.' He's not particularly in the mood to protest here, at least not outwardly, until the atheist-anthem 'God,' and that's affirmation via negation: left is love + the self, reality not the dream.

Superunknown

Soundgarden

4/5

'Damn the water, burn the wine / I'm going home for the last time.' Grunge is heavy and often cheesy, but at its best, it's also 'real,' however you'd like to disentangle that adjective. It was at its best and its most real w/ Nirvana and Soundgarden, never w/ Pearl Jam, Alice In Chains, or Screaming Trees. Importantly, it's 'real' but not necessarily an exponent of realism: it comes from the marrows of the human condition, it's guttural and lousy, it's spit-up and scummy lunchmeat. It's real b/c you fucking feel it, even if want to get the fuck away from it: 'Hello, don't you know me? / I'm the dirt beneath your feet.' I don't think Chris Cornell was the voice of a generation as Kurt was, but in his relentless darkness, you're pillared: 'Head high, head high.'

Astral Weeks

Van Morrison

5/5

'If I ventured in the slipstream / Between the viaducts of your dream.' I've heard that opening refrain n+1 times, and it always means the same thing, which is that, for me, there is no album that matters quite as much. It has no real genre, but I'd say in the realm of 'rock,' the only record that comes close is Marquee Moon, but I heard this first, and there it remains. I'd have to go to pre-60s music - Armstrong and Monk, Patsy Cline and Ray Charles - to find a sound as revelatory. The track I initially heard was 'Sweet Thing.' Then it was 'The Way Young Lovers Do,' the song that most resembles the style he'd go for on Moondance. From there, it was everything. I can't, in the end, analyze Astral Weeks. I can merely say that it's taught me to love.

Pieces Of The Sky

Emmylou Harris

4/5

Emmylou learned from Gram to sing country from the depths as well as the surfaces, which means going pop, going rock, and going for nothing but the soul. 'I have come to listen for the sound / Of the trucks as they move down out on 95.' She's more Joni and Mary (Travers) than Patsy or Dolly - she's more of a soarer than a crier, hence the title of this record. But that doesn't mean she's an ethereal or vapid angel. She has her problems, no doubt, and she gains from Merle to be straight, to be actual: 'The one true friend I thought I'd found / Tonight, the bottle let me down.' I prefer Dolly's 'Coat of Many Colors,' and tho Harris is an Alabamian, it don't always feel that way. If I want southern, this isn't where I'd go, but good for you it is.

Ill Communication

Beastie Boys

4/5

Eight years after License to Ill, the Beasties continue to be hysterically and wholesomely allusive, in this case w/ quite a few basketball references: 'Bill Laimbeer, motherfucker, / It's time for you to die'; 'I got my hair cut correct like Anthony Mason'; 'See, I've got heart like John Starks.' Released in '94, Ill Communication confirms that the white-boy group was able to survive a rapidly changing hip-hop scene better than most 80s acts. Think about it - in this year, we get Illmatic, Ready to Die, The Sun Rises in the East, To the Death (M.O.P.), Resurrection, Creepin' on ah Come Up, + Outkast's debut. What room was there for the pioneers? And yet, this trio, w/ a melange of punk, jazz, funk, + hip-hop, not only stayed relevant, but self-augmented.

My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts

Brian Eno

3/5

Before Madlib, MF Doom, and RZA, Byrne/Eno were the first incorporators of vocal snippets that engender a kind of immersive and documentarian experience: from Ray Taliaferro of KGO Newstalk AM 810 to Reverend Paul Morton and Lebanese singer Samira Tewfik, these samples prompt worldly perceptions w/o committing the crimes of a poacher like McLaren. The two were also able to sustain enuf funkiness throughout to engage my dance-wise senses. However, what I love about the Talking Heads, especially w/ Eno, as well as Brian's solo work, is missing here: this is nerd music, plain and complex, w/ almost no emotional depth. I feel it percussively, and I can dig its influence, but the two of 'em made far better records than it. Nerds!

Want Two

Rufus Wainwright

2/5

'The lady gloom and her hornets / Circling 'round is now before us.' I'm not sure what Rufus wants, but he seems to reach for some kind of amalgam of Queen + Radiohead, achieving the theatrics of the former and the droning philosophy of the latter. To be fair, he's a better lyricist than Yorke, and has the righteous desire to be understood, but he's still an obscurantist and an aesthete at heart. Clearly an ultra-talented maestro, w/ virtuosic vocals + an aptitude for composition, he yet doesn't know how to write a song that gets into your soul. It isn't that he's trying to outsmart the listener, but he constantly outsmarts himself, and writes/sings tracks that are a half-step from his truth. The best song, 'Gay Messiah,' is regretfully facetious. Meh.

All Mod Cons

The Jam

3/5

The truest heirs of The Kinks, The Jam is the about Britishness and money. As a lyricist, Paul Weller, like Ray Davies, engages a satirical and economic realism, i.e., he's a practical bloke: 'Artistic Freedom / Do what you want / But just make sure the money ain't gone'; 'And the bread I spend / Is like my fame / It's quickly diminished'; 'The noise flows me along, as I catch falling cans / Of baked beans on toast, technology is the most.' The songs on this thing are punk qua pop rather than pop-punk: appetizing and yet not worthy of seconds or thirds. In the tradition of Strummer and Costello, The Jam is not as masterful as those icons. I find myself agreeing w/ Buck Mulligan: 'God, these bloody English. Bursting w/ money and indigestion.'

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