Bowie was one of a kind. This is one of his finest, but it's even more extraordinary how far he came from the David Jones of 1967 to this in 1972. Mainline Glam Rock.
The first 45 seconds of vamping groove (edited out of the single version) changes the context of the familiar and absolute classic "Chain of Fools" and sets an ominous tone for the song that starts this 1968 soul gem. Despite this and other classic songs/performances ("Natural Woman"), this doesn't feel like a cohesive album. Aretha never sounds anything less than amazing, but, for instance, going from the emotional beauty of Curtis Mayfield's "People Get Ready" into the goofball "Niki Hoeky" is just odd. "Groovin'" is here too for some reason, and doesn't really improve the original. The last song is what I don't like about when r&b singers "go too far". Regardless, this album is worth having for the two incredible singles alone.
If there's one thing this album is, it is completely ITSELF. George Clinton was not afraid to make the album that HE wanted, not what he thought would sell the best or be the easiest to listen to. He was lashing out, in his own unique way. A 10-minute electric guitar solo to start the album, and a 10-minute chaotic jam to end it, with five slabs of funk perfection sandwiched in between, is not everyone's cup of tea. Although Eddie Hazel's (mostly) unaccompanied guitar heroics in the opening track are stellar, it's not the kind of track you want to put on repeat. Those middle 5 songs, though... damn!
She's writing modern pop music that's on such a higher level than the pop music that gets played on the radio. A radio edit of "Tightrope" should have been a big hit, regardless. I'd never heard this album before. Such a wealth of ideas. Sometimes too many elements are packed into a single song that it's overwhelming. From a purely sonic/visceral standpoint this album is sung, played, recorded and produced beautifully and goes all over the map stylistically. There's another layer, lyrically, that relates to a time-travel narrative... it's a complex work of dystopian sci-fi told in lyrics. Not something anyone can digest in one listening, but holy cow! ...a little like walking in on friend's "hobby" where they had told you they "like trains", but their entire garage is transformed into a miniature city and countryside with a working network of trains/tracks, miniature homes and buildings with lights inside, farm animals... details everywhere that you can't take in on one visit and you're amazed but worry a little about your friend's sanity.
If anyone actually reads this before listening to this album, check this out: "The ArchAndroid is a concept album that continues the story conceived in her debut EP. Partially based off of Fritz Lang’s 1927 magnum opus film Metropolis, it loosely tells the tale of an android named Cindi Mayweather as she struggles with both her role as a messianic figure to free other androids, and with her forbidden romance with human Anthony Greendown. Watching Metropolis or fully studying the narrative will only strengthen your listening experience, though it isn’t necessary." [Medium]
If you don't like this album, you don't like Van Morrison. Which is fine, he's not for everybody. But this is his most consistent, best-sung, best-arranged, most accessible album, with four classic songs -- And It Stoned Me, Into the Mystic, Caravan, and of course Moondance. Moondance, the song, is overplayed and parodied, but the magic of it is that any ELSE that tries to play it sound like a parody. Sometimes Van's melodic sense gets repetitive, starting lines on high notes and winding down to the tonic far too often, but at least on this album he makes it work. "Astral Weeks", the album that came before this one, is quite a bit more spacey and folky and less soul-inflected... but if you like "Moondance" and want more, you can't go wrong with the 3 albums that came after. "His Band and the Street Choir" and "Tupelo Honey" especially, and "St. Dominic's Preview" as well (however, the two 10+ minute tracks on St. Dominic's, especially "Listen to the Lion", are not for me). Heartfelt, passionate pop-rock without equal in 1970.
Although I'm no stranger to '70s AOR, I only know a couple of Supertramp songs, 'Take The Long Way Home', 'Logical Song' and 'Give A Little Bit.'... none of which are here, but 'Bloody Well Right' sounds familiar too... can you imagine a pop song today going for 1:38 before the first vocal comes in? A Sabrina Carpenter song would be almost over by then... BWR got to 35 on the charts, anyway. That continual plodding sixteenth-note electric piano sure shows up a lot, doesn't it? You have to be patient with this record, and buy the aesthetic... it doesn't work for me, unfortunately. The 'go for what you want but the world is controlled by evil people' vibe throughout feels pedestrian 50 years later. "If Everyone Was Listening" is a nice '70s ballad I'd never heard. "Bloody Well Right" is the standout track for a reason.
Love The Jam! One of the best power trios in rock history IMO. And "All Mod Cons" was a big jump in maturity from their two '77 albums ("Billy Hunt" excepted). Your average angry young disaffected punks wouldn't come up with "Fly" or "English Rose". And it's interesting that they sequenced the most powerful songs, which I think were singles, to the end of the record. To Be Someone, A-Bomb, Tube Station are all revered Jam classics.
Underappreciated 1974 classic that languished in obscurity until David Byrne re-released it in 2001 (w bonus tracks) and brought it much-deserved acclaim. This is when I heard it. Knowing Shuggie played most of the instruments himself (not horns/strings) and employed an early example of a drum machine on some songs is cool but not necessary to enjoy this experimental soulful record. It could have used a couple more straight-up songs like the title track, which promises more than the rest of the album delivers. It's a classic, though.
The one-two punch of "War Pigs" and "Paranoid" is hard to beat in this era for hard rock power and mastery. Suddenly, though, with track 3 we are a bunch of hippies ("The Earth, a purple blaze / Of sapphire haze ... While down below the trees / Bathed in cool breeze / Silver starlight breaks down the night") before "Iron Man" melts our face again. Side two tells us "Dying world of radiation / Victims of man's frustration / Burning globe of obscene fire / Like electric funeral pyre"... now THAT'S the Sabbath we know and love. Ozzy tells us how doomed we all are then in "Hand of Doom" tells us how ridiculous we are for doing drugs to escape the pain of our destruction. We end with "Fairies Wear Boots" and our singer hallucinating, not heeding his own advice... it's a chaotic mess in the Sabbath brain, but the simplistic sludge riffs are epic and have been copied for 50+ years now.
I've gone through seven or eight of these albums before looking at other reviews, and decided to look at them for this album. Wow. What a mixture of 5-star "I've loved this album since I was 16" and 1-star "U2 is the worstest or blandest thing ever". To the 1-star people, all I can think is "man, grow up." There's a difference between something being awful and it just not being your thing. Sometimes the albums on this list are good to hear because they have artistic merit and have had a cultural impact, and some of the ignoramuses who think that these songs have no melody or that Bono can't sing or that the band wasn't doing anything new in their field just don't know enough to criticize. That's fine, I guess. I guess if you think the singer from the Meat Puppets can out-sing Bono, then good for you.
Regardless: this was never my favorite U2 album and relistening to it today hasn't earned it any new points. "Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses" ends up being the standout track to me and maybe the only song I don't mind hearing again when it pops up somewhere. "Even Better Than the Real Thing" succeeds for me by percolating along in a Madchester kind of way without getting bombastic. I could care less about One or Mysterious Ways.
As a musician who has spent a ton of time in the recording studio, I can empathize a little bit with what these guys were going through trying to make this album. Trying to not repeat past successes has doomed bands to obscurity, but it worked for U2, even if to our ears it still just sounds like U2. Play this album back to back with "Boy", though, for instance, and they're definitely pushing their own envelope.
Took a look at some of the other reviews, some of which cite "Suspicious Minds" as their favorite track from this album. Unfortunately, "Suspicious Minds" isn't on this album. It was a non-album single. The only real hit song here is "In The Ghetto".
Elvis does Memphis, circa 1969, post-"comeback special". "I'm Movin' On" is emblematic of what was going on in country in those days. Wall of sound background vocals, funky back beats, saccharine pads of sound... these things sold, but they really sound dated today... while somehow the early Elvis (and early rockabilly and '50s country like Hank Williams Sr.) don't.
"Power of Love" I'd never heard, is slightly bad-a**, and I actually wouldn't mind hearing again. "Gentle On My Mind" is owned by Glen Campbell, sorry Elvis.
I disagree with other reviewers that say Elvis is phoning it in here... it's really the opposite. He was phoning it in throughout a lot of the '60s and is fully, 100% committed here. Releasing "In the Ghetto" as a single is about as far away as you could get from playing it safe and phoning it in. It's just a matter of whether you connect with it or not.
I appreciate this album, I just prefer the early Elvis.
Once you get to the early 70s, you have to be all in on Dylan to be able to tolerate his voice most of the time. It's really an acquired taste. Lyrically this record is a gem, with no two songs alike. I can't do repeated listenings of 70s Dylan, sonically it's just not for me. But I can't deny the genius.
A perennial Christmas favorite, despise the despicable producer Phil Spector's later history. Sleigh Ride, White Xmas and others done in a unique way, oddball entries like Marshmallow World and the Bells of St Mary's that still work, and a short run time. Solid.
Got this in a thrift store in the '90s. It's a great little undiscovered gem for those who are into classic rock. Certainly it's not for everybody... But, I've listened to a TON of '60s music and I can say this: the majority of bands were trying to be like somebody else more successful than them... and Spirit was just being themselves. It meanders a bit, but even the less strong songs here are clearly labors of love, with care given to the production flourishes.
and it's such an LP in the true sense... Side 1 ending with the jammy fadeout of "Mr. Skin", Side 2 fading in with the weird lounge of "Space Child"... interstitial music or fx used to join tracks together so that each side is its own listening experience.
"Nature's Way" is a lost classic track of the period. Headphone stoners should appreciate "When I Touch You".
This album's rating, and pretty much anything from the '90s and '00s, is going to being dramatically influenced by preconceived feelings people have based on personal experience with the record. I'm finding that the most interesting listening experiences in this survey have been with records I've never heard of, or at least never listened to. How can you be objective when a record pops up on your list and you immediately think "those guys suck"?
All I know about the Verve is the hit single. I must have heard samples of some of the other songs and been put off at the relentless mid-tempo safeness of it. Plus, this album came out the same year as "OK Computer", which made everything else in the alt/indie-rock world that came out that year and for a couple years afterward sound limp and uninspired.
In listening to the majority of this record today, it just sounds to me like what well-off suburban kids would listen to as they experiment with downers and ruin the immense privilege they've been given. "Come On" sounds like the strongest song, but unfortunately it happens after an hour of ennui, and also sounds like a medium-good Oasis song. And the hit lead single has that whole "we borrowed the entire groove, key, mood, and much of the string parts from The Rolling Stones" thing going for it (if you've haven't heard it, check out The Last Time by the Andrew Oldham Orchestra).
This is my first 1-star review on this list. Ack!
I've got hundreds of records from all around the world, either downloads or physical copies... and of course one of the amazing things about this part of the 21st century is that you can think of a country and be streaming music from that country within seconds. It's absolutely amazing and not something anyone should take for granted.
An Algerian, but I think he lives in France, Khaled (once Cheb Khaled) is the kind of international pop superstar that most of America will not have heard of. ("You mean DJ Khaled?") Recording since at least the '80s, he is one of the preeminent Arab Rai singers in the world.
I don't dig a lot of modern 'world' pop music, and I don't really dig this album. I can't deny its broad appeal, beautifully sung in multiple languages, with heavy 4/4 beats throughout, with a slick production. I can get behind the groove and vintage singing style in "Melha" and "Raba Raba" and a couple of others (the Bollywood-style duet of "El Harba Wine" would have been cool if the drum part didn't sound exactly like Fleetwood Mac's "Second Hand News"), but other tracks come off sounding like airport lounge music thanks mostly to the dated '90s western elements. And I don't need another version of "Imagine", thank you, I don't care WHO sings it.
This album gets 6 stars from me for originality and inventiveness. Brian Wilson finally realized his vision for the follow up to "Pet Sounds" and it's quite amazing.
Bands like the High Llamas and others owe their careers to the atmospheres created by the likes of the various versions of "Smile" that have circulated across the decades.
For me, though, this album is "Good Vibrations", an absolute '60s masterpiece of production, performance and songwriting, and "Vega-tables" and "Heroes & Villains" and a bunch of other tracks that I don't have the patience for. I don't know why I imprinted on "Vega-tables" in it's "Smiley Smile" incarnation back in the day, but I still like that version better than the cacophony of this "Smile"'s version. I get why people call this a masterpiece, but if someone told me I had to listen to a Beach Boys album I would almost always pick "Pet Sounds".
Thought I'd scan through the reviews as I listened to this. You really get a sense of the overwhelming lack of empathy from what I assume is mostly younger folks. Might not be younger folks. But the crowd that uses "I hate country" and "this is cheesy" and "I'm not a cowboy so I can't relate" and so on as their justification for dismissing this album are curiously bereft of any ability to connect with anything or anyone outside of their narrow range of interest. Even the video game crowd can sort of only connect with the one song that was in that video game they play.
Isn't the point of going on this "1001 records" journey to be exposed to records from different genres, different cultures, different time periods? It seems as though many are seeing it as an opportunity to talk about all the ways they managed to be offended by a record.
And then there's those who want to compare this to gangsta rap thanks to the subject matter. Some of the songs on Robbins' album are old traditional songs written back in a time when the west really hadn't been settled yet, and the world was an entirely different place than, say, '90s Compton. And recognizing the huge cultural impact this and subsequent albums, tv shows and movies had... the "western" was ubiquitous back in the day. This record absolutely deserves to be on this list for any number of reasons.
For me, ultimately, I see his perfectly clean suit and shoes on the cover, and hear the beautifully sung music with no rough edges other than the words themselves, and it feels like a museum piece... unlike the feeling I get when I hear Hank Williams Sr. "El Paso" I've known since I was a kid, I don't remember where I first heard it, it's lilting melody belies the dark story... "Big Iron" is great and "Cool Water" I know from Sons of the Pioneers. I can do about 4 songs on this before the production start sounding samey. Beautiful, but samey.
I just encourage people to see the beauty in the world, see the beauty in the records you are unfamiliar with, learn about the artist or circumstances around the recording the album or its cultural impact... practice finding something positive to say.
It is insane to consider the vast musical terrain that Radiohead traversed from "Pablo Honey" to this, their 4th album. "Kid A" doesn't sound like the same band. There's the voice of Thom Yorke that shows up from time to time here sounding like he did in the past, and only in stretches of "Optimistic" does the powerful 'old' Radiohead's personality make an appearance.
"Kid A" divided fans, and made you wonder why you liked this band. If you liked the big guitar riffs and soaring melodies like you got on "The Bends", well, those are ALL GONE NOW. It's sort of... not the same band any more.
Frankly, I appreciate this record more than I connect with it. The more esoteric and less direct they got, the less interested I became.
I can say this if you have never heard Radiohead except for this, don't give up on them. "The Bends" is a rock gem and "OK Computer" is incredible.
This record is exhausting.
It doesn't really matter what genre you're working in... if you manage to spew out a song like "Ace of Spades" that becomes emblematic of the genre, that becomes an undisputed classic in the field, you've accomplished a rare thing. It doesn't matter if the rest of the record sounds like varying attempts to capture that same lightning in the bottle again ("Fire Fire" comes sorta close). 3 stars exclusively for producing a genre all-time classic song.
Hey, prudes: act as uptight as you want about "Jailbait", but the sentiment is nothing new through popular music history. Everything from "I still remember when you used be nine years old" ("Shout!") to "She was just 17 and you know what I mean" (what DO you mean? is she 16?); there's "Good Morning Little Schoolgirl" (Sonny Boy Williamson etc), "My Sharona" and so on. Even Bruno Mars ("I'm addicted... you young wild girls I'll always come back to you"). Rock music coexists with the male libido.
Oh, and go look up the video of Lemmy backing Kirsty MacColl on this German tv spot she did in the '80s, it's great. So incongruous and wtf. He was a larger-than-life personality in the world of hard rock.
The first album I've heard from this list that should like it was written to accompany something, rather than as actual music to pay attention to. It's like a sound bath. Expecting song structure and meaning is a mistake. It's all atmosphere for your drug trip (I guess), although unless your psilocybin is providing the variety, not an adventurous one. Only "Shine A Light" tries to go anywhere and would be the only track I wouldn't mind hearing again. But this is mostly a major-key, knuckle-dragging thoughtless hour-long slog bent on robbing you of IQ. Its single-mindedness of purpose is worth a star, I suppose.
I'm not very far into this journey and there's already been three 90s euro rock bands, and zero Beethoven or classical of ANY kind. Hell I'd take "Water Music" over more Britpop! And before you get all weird on me, I was IN a rock band in the 90s....
Much hay is certainly made about poor good George having been repressed by the evil John and Paul, and needing this album to break out of his Beatles-imposed prison. We sure do like to choose sides, don’t we?
But why did “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun” become massive timeless hits, and “Isn’t It A Pity” and “Wah-Wah” and “What Is Life” did not? The simple answer is they’re just better songs. And this album is full of songs that aren’t as "good" as what George published with the Beatles.
Music is entirely subjective, and while these songs might not generally be perceived to rise to that level, they seem to be regarded by passionate Georgites as all-time rock classics, fumbling over themselves to praise everything from the lyrics to the chord structure to the individual players to the PICTURE ON THE COVER. Sycophants!
My view is what this album needed more than anything else on "All Things Must Pass" was EDITING. “Isn’t it A Pity” is lovely, but at 7:10 it's far too long. If there’s one thing the Beatles understood, it was economy: when to get out of a song and “leave ‘em wanting more”. Or when to use length to subvert expectations, like how “She’s So Heavy” keeps building and building and you can’t believe it’s getting even uglier until suddenly “Here Comes the Sun” starts. It’s perfect. Here we get “Wah Wah”, “Pity” and others just meandering on too long; even the snappy “What Is Life” could be nearly a minute shorter.
There’s no need for a cover tune, George. Especially when the original is better.
“Behind that Locked Door” is nice but feels like pastiche, “Let it Down” tries to make up for being unfinished by being extra extra loud half the time. “Run of the Mill” is a hidden gem. 100% George, odd meter, catchy, not belabored. “Apple Scruffs” is good clean fun, a throwaway treat. “Frankie Crisp”? Unnecessary. “Awaiting”? Can barely hear it under the production. God the production sucks in a lot of places and on "Awaiting" it's the worst. There's probably a cheesy song hiding under the murk, predicting “Got My Mind Set on You”. “All Things”, the song, just never fully gelled. It’s so close. “I Dig Love” is a cool, goofy 2-minute lark dragged out to 5 minutes.
Now I’M droning on almost as long as this record does, and I haven’t even mentioned the extra “blues jam” tracks.
In the end, this is still absolutely worth hearing, it’s worth winnowing down to its best tracks, it’s worth a Steven Wilson remix to undo some of the damage Phil Spector did to muddy up the mix. Despite it’s flaws it’s nearly worth 5 stars.
I have a hard time getting through an entire song sung by the singer of this band. If you played in a rock band in the '90s, it was hard to get away from them in 1994/5 thanks to "Self Esteem", "Keep Em Separated" and "Gotta Get Away". This version of punk became mainstream and similarly-minded bands were everywhere.
Listening to this now, I could enjoy "Genocide", which is a weird thing to say considering what it's about, but just the fact that it has more of a gang vocal approach saves it for me. Something about the tone of the dude's voice just makes me want to claw my ears off. The band is tight as hell and some of the songs are good high octane hard rock. I prefer Bad Religion when I want to be sonically bludgeoned by a band like this, but I can't deny the popularity these guys had.
I'm admittedly not that far into my 1,001 album journey, but there are already way too many 1990s alternative rock albums per capita. Maybe I didn't read the disclaimer when I entered the building, but I think I was hoping for a more diverse roster of records, and certainly more records that I haven't heard.
I'm biased here, as I am already pre-disposed to be irritated by JSBE. The '90s were full of noisy rock bands of different stripes, and one of those stripes was the "blues/roots revivalist" stripe.
Taking James Brown's "Make It Funky" lyric and groove and saying "Make it Fucked Up" instead and have everyone think it's cool and clever was enough to make me hate all music for a brief period. All I can say to the positive about this is that the cool kids got it out of their system and JSBE is kind of an afterthought nowadays.
Whereas I can go back to Howlin' Wolf albums and they never get old, and I can also go back to Captain Beefheart, or someone like Tom Waits, inspired by Wolf and Screamin' Jay Hawkins, and THOSE albums never get old ("Rain Dogs" in particular), stuff like JSBE feels disposable... at least most of this record does. Tracks like "Rocketship" at least sound like they're trying to be their own thing. I like this quote from the SPIN review, though: "garage raunch beloved by white boys who still believe a sonic mess equals something real."
I stumbled onto White Denim a few years ago looking for modern stuff that was of a psychedelic bent. Most of what I was finding was pretty meh, but when I put this record on (and, soon after, another record of theirs, "Side Effects"), I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.... this song is COOL... probably the rest of the record blows, right? and the rest of the record DIDN'T blow.
In fact, it was one of the best new albums I'd heard in a long time... elements of prog, psych, math rock, stoner rock, classic rock, Beatlesque bits... elaborate but focused. Tight but expansive.
The "jam band" moniker some are using here doesn't fit. Do you know what a "jam band" is? One that thinks an 11-minute version of "Stella Blue" is a good idea. One that lets the guitarist noodle endlessly without purpose. THESE songs, however, are all around 3 or 4 minutes, and are COMPOSED. God forbid anyone dismissing this as patchouli-scented hackey-sack "Jam" music ever hears, say, King Crimson or early '70s Genesis.
Anyway: there SHOULD be a penalty for use of flute in rock music (the 7/8-time-Santana-esque latin of "River to Consider").
When people say rock music is dead they don't realize people like White Denim are out there making it in the 21st century. I think that most rock bands just DGAF about writing hit singles so the charts ignore them. As long as the fans don't, we're all good here.
Another ‘90s record. What’s up with the preponderance of ‘90s albums on this list? Must I continue to be reminded of the years when I most frequently played in rock bands?
Anyway. Reviewers here that say this record has “no passion” are just looking in a mirror. You don’t like it. That’s fine. Here’s hoping you hate everything on this list, and find no joy or passion in life at all. But, The Black Crowes are fully committed to an earnest throwback kind of rock and roll which, believe it or not, wasn’t in vogue in 1990. 100% committed to potentially looking foolish playing a kind of music that saw its heyday in, say, 1973.
Which is why it’s a little weird to me that this record would be on a list of records you have to hear before you die. Fast forward 25 or 100 years, and the records you should hear that sound like this are, well, the “source material”… the rock bands from the early ‘70s (“Exile On Main Street” would do fine), and the R&B, soul, and blues cats that came before THAT.
[Why do people keep mentioning Led Zep? None of these songs sound like Led Zeppelin, except, MAYBE, “Struttin’ Blues”. The Black Crowes aren’t the slightest bit adventurous sonically, songwriting-wise, lyrically, or anything else, like Zeppelin was. These guys wanted to be the Stones, or maybe the Faces.]
This record, however, was a huge, huge hit, and especially for a debut album, that’s impressive, so I guess that’s why it’s here. And might have introduced some folks to Otis Redding, who didn’t know him before hearing “Hard To Handle”. Which is a good thing. And “She Talks To Angels” was an undeniable hit and tons of people connected to it. Say what you want about these guys being a “just another bar band”, but there are thousands and thousands of bar bands that never came close to a song that was meaningful to people like “She Talks To Angels” was/is to so many. Other than that song, this record to me is essentially top-quality pastiche… if I can’t get the originals, I’ll take this over 90% of the bar bands I played with in the 90s.
I can sum up what makes me hate this record in one lyric:
"'Cause the same people that tried to black ball me/
Forgot about two things, my black balls" (from "Gorgeous").
I don't care. Congratulations... and people ate this shit up like he was a god-like rapper and lyricist. Look, this isn't my favorite genre, it wasn't fed to me along with my fentanyl-laced fruit loops. I don't know who the guest spots are by, I just listened based on pure sonics and lyrics.
It's funny to think a few albums ago in my list people were complaining about the lyrics to a Motorhead album. These are a thousand times worse. The lyricist here comes off like a horrible, juvenile, misogynistic, paranoid, narcissistic, sociopathic person, there's just no way around it.
And a lot of the lyrics are obviously references to little petty squabbles. That shit just isn't going to stand the test of time.
The backing tracks are varied and interesting, at least. I was actually interested to dive into this partly because I'd always heard Yeezy was such an innovator back in the day.
Man. Actual innovators need to take note of "Lookin' at my bitch, I bet she give your ass a bone", "I sent this bitch a picture of my dick", and other golden aphorisms. I guess it took big balls to stretch a 3 minute song ("Runaway") out to 9 minutes, or use a Black Sabbath melody to spruce up a hypnotic throwaway x-rated jam ("Hell of a Life").
"Lost in the World" ended up being the only tolerable, fully-formed track for me. Maybe because Gil Scott Heron was invoked? ... but then the last track just straight-up lifts GSH's message, perhaps trying to bring some gravitas to a record that doesn't have any.
This record makes no sense and has no merit outside of the time, place and context in which it was made. Will they be teaching it in 400 years like Chaucer is taught today? I doubt it.
Kind of blows my mind that this album came at me immediately after a Kanye album. Everything is the polar opposite here. Bombast is replaced by understatement. Vulgarity is replaced by poetry.
This will be hard to get through for a lot of people, it offers so little sonically. Its success hinges almost entirely on the poetry of the lyrics, and to a lesser degree on the delivery. "So Long, Marianne" comes across as the only song approaching pop, with some extra production flourishes, but it goes on for five and a half minutes. Take THAT, pop radio!
Suzanne, Masters Song, Marianne, and especially Sisters of Mercy do it for me. I'll take that as an EP and feel content.
"If your life is a leaf
That the seasons tear off and condemn
They will bind you with love
That is graceful and green as a stem"
Nobody's proclaiming the glory of their big black balls. Hallelujah for that.
Took all the retro synthy sounds that were bouncing around the clubs and being sampled and wrung within an inch of their lives by djs, and rammed them through a Serge Gainesbourg strainer and used actual music skill to make songs both instrumental and with lyrics. Took all of the spastic insanity out of the stuff too. It's very chill.
Recently I was subjected to a Spiritualized album that tried to take two or occasionally three chords and a bunch of reverb and bludgeon me into a trance, or possibly coma, state. "Moon Safari" allows you to stay awake and go about your business. I could do without tracks 3 and 7, which make me want to turn off the record and put on Portishead instead, and without track 8 which mistakenly allows a french horn to play a solo. If you like track 9, go check out the High Llamas, it's quite a bit like them (Hawaii or Gideon Gaye).
This is cool, fluffy stuff, easy to listen to, but not easy to produce.
Ah yes, the Damned, while they were still punk, before they slowed things down, covered Love, and got all goth, and just as they were starting to incorporate elements of new wave and synths into their sound. Not the most famous of either the punks or the goths, the Damned were still the shit. Featuring "Love Song", "Plan 9", and "Smash It Up", this album still holds up remarkably well after all these years. I think maybe because of the mixture of punk rock abandon, like everything's just about to fall apart or explode but doesn't, and songwriting skills, and levity... the Damned never took themselves or the punk "movement" too seriously and in retrospect it looks like the right call.
Strangely, I just watched the "24 Hour Party People" movie starring Steve Coogan a couple of weeks ago. I had it saved to a 'watch later' list and didn't remember why. The focus is a music-centric somewhat fictionalized biopic of the main dude in Manchester-based Factory Records who's biggest bands were Joy Division / New Order, and later Happy Mondays. If you like this stuff and don't know that movie, check it out. It's weird and cool.
One thing it gives you is some insight into how the Mondays were in the right place at the right time for this "dance music meets rock band" scene in Manchester in the late '80s.
[Yet another '90s album from the makers of this list. It must be when the authors came of age, there's no other way to explain it. They're probably British too. I'll probably go find out in 100 albums or so.]
I can only take so much of this relentlessly samey drum groove, not being at a dance party in 1990. The production is fantastic.... thick, buttery, varied, with a vocalist who obviously isn't particularly gifted at singing handled very well both in the recording and in the mix. This record could have sounded 100x more annoying than I it does, as I expected it to actually, not being more than passingly familiar with this band. As a pure record, though, it comes across as... well, quite samey.
I'm one of those people who loved the Stone Roses first album, know all the songs inside and out. I could give a rat's ass about "Fool's Gold" and "One Love", which is where they really got dance-y like the Mondays. I liked the b-side to Fools Gold better, 'What the World is Waiting For'. But I digress. The Stone Roses first album had 10 songs that were distinct from each other, there was no mistaking one song from the other (we won't get into Waterfall/Don't Stop), but this Mondays album blurs together... as a record, that's not good... at a dance party, though, it's great... the beat is relentless and there's ENOUGH variety in THAT context.
I'm glad I heard this Happy Mondays record, I'll be a skosh less dismissive of them going forward.
If you take away the "can you believe she was 18 and 19 years old when she made this, her debut?", and just focus on the music, you're left with a different vibe. I never listened to this record in 1996 or after, but probably brushed up against a couple of the singles here and there... "Criminal" was hard to escape for a bit there.
So it's interesting to hear this disembodied voice and production, removed from its time period and context. It certainly sounds great, with a jazzy, '70s singer-songwriter undertone... seventh chords and melodies clinging to the blues scale when she runs out of melodic ideas... this was also the period of time when rock songs, even 'pop' songs, were at their longest on average, and this record is caught in that snare... "Criminal" is groovy and catchy but it's 5:42, "Shadowboxer" is 5:25... you REALLY have to be patient with these songs.
I don't get why the people in charge would allow "Slow Like Honey" and its plodding, meandering ilk to make the final cut... it's like a lounge singer who has been playing standards who told the audience "I'm gonna play one of MY songs now" and puts everyone to sleep... it REALLY pulled me out of the record, and the nineties bossa groove of "The First Taste" couldn't get me back.
In the end, for me at least, the production, the voice, the musicianship, is all far better than the actual songs. That may be enough for some, but it wasn't enough for me.
This is a tough one to dive into knowing nothing about the artist... coming deep into his career... from my count it's his 24th album, including 5 with the Birthday Party, and the rest either solo or with the Bad Seeds, and that's not counting other collaborations. And this came out 20 years ago, and he's still going strong.
One should be warned: these are two separate albums, with two separate lyrical conceits and two different sonic approaches. In my mind they should be approached separately.
It's interesting -- Why Cave will never be accepted by the mainstream listener, just look at something like the "single" "Nature Boy" versus, say, Counting Crows "Mr Jones"... each have free-flowing rambling verses and a repeating chorus... It's just that the "Mr Jones" chorus is a BIG HOOK that plays well on the radio, and "and she moves among the sparrows" just doesn't get there, although it sounds like it's trying to. Cave doesn't really do "hooks".
Instead, he is a poet, a bleak, ecstatic-experience seeker, a morose romantic, a hopeless optimist, a lover of the profane and the spiritual. A contradiction, and absolutely not for everybody. I appreciate him more than I like listening to him. These two records, though, are a helluva lot more palatable than the old days of the Birthday Party, which to me was the audio equivalent of drinking cold black coffee while getting kicked in the head in a rock club at 11 am.
Cave has somehow developed an elegance I would have never expected in the '80s. In the end I think he's a better lyricist/poet than songwriter. "Let The Bells Ring" being a prime example: a heartfelt tribute to Johnny Cash on his passing, it's kind of a boring song, but a great lyric.
There weren't enough songs in this thing that I wanted to come back to and hear again. The opening track on each record turned out to be my favorite.
Looking at some of the reviews, I wondering if expectations are getting in the way of the enjoyment. A guy with a smallish tenor voice playing mostly quiet songs dominated by mostly acoustic guitar... sorry, you've got to go to him, you can't expect >2021 stylings and production to jump out at you and grab you by the throat. Seems like those into Vetiver and Iron & Wine would already be ready for this, and those who've already been through the Simon and Garfunkel catalog. Others have to try a little harder.
Those who don't play guitar don't understand that Simon is doing some fascinating, unusual stuff here. "Armistice Day" in particular is a cool drop-D guitar workout, almost Leo Kottke-like, before the rest of the band kicks in. It provides some contrasting experimental haze to prepare you for the pop hit "Me and Julio...". ...and, after that, the acoustic break half-way through "Peace Like a River" (around 1:40) is incredible.
I had never listened to this album before, only having heard "Julio" and "Mother & Child" before. It's interesting to grok all these early '70s Simon songs that are so solid, but so under the radar. "Peace", "Armistice" and "Duncan" stand out for me besides the hits. and hats off to the electric piano solo at the end of "Congratulations". That's the way the early 70s should end.
Many commenters are comparing this to "Graceland" for some reason, a record that came 15 years later. I am guessing that album is one of the 1001 but I haven't run into it yet. I'm VERY familiar with that record. I'm not even going to BEGIN to compare a record I've heard once to one I've heard a hundred times. I'll just say that Simon, like him or not, is an absolutely 20th Century songwriting giant with a ton of classic songs, hits and gems to his name.
Well, this was huge album in '98, winning awards, elevating Hill to iconic spiritual neo-soul/r&b star status and made the Fugees kind of an afterthought. I had the cd but never REALLY listened to it, I think.
Now it's 26, 27 years later. Do people in this genre still have intros and between song "skits" still? How long did that trend last? It's kind of distracting now. The other thing that's distracting is all of the vocal overdubs (or additional people singing call-and-response vocals). They're just relentless. Can we ever get a song where Hill just sings by herself on one track? Is she so insecure that she always has to cover herself up with other voices and sonics?
Glad to have listened through this with fresh ears. I love how VARIED it is from track to track, without sounding schitzo... it's held together by her performances, words and ethos. It's essentially a double album, and it sure feels like it. It's LOOONG. ....but it's full of REAL INSTRUMENTS played by real people, and both the instruments and vocals are all kind of UNDERproduced, left to sound just as they are for the most part, without flashy effects or even much reverb at all.
"Forgive Them Father", "Superstar" stood out to me, and the Stevie Wonder-esque "Every Ghetto...". The lyrics don't hit me hard... my life experience is worlds away from hers, but I appreciate how she's able to convey her point of view through these songs, from heartbreak to different kinds of love (for a new child, God, a new love, for self), to the pitfalls of the music biz.
My main criticisms are: 1) many of the songs seem done, but then go on for another two minutes, 2) too often there are too many cooks in the kitchen (too many singers/voices/rappers), 3) the skits take away from the flow.
This is still a significant achievement that certainly belongs on this list.
Oh man. I love Ella. I'm old enough that I got to see her in concert when I was young. She melts and revives my craggy dead heart. I've had the big red-box "Songbooks" cd box set, with the LP-replica sleeves, for many years.
I hope folks who haven't heard this, or Ella, come to appreciate her. What a treat. Of course, this PARTICULAR set is daunting, a 3-record 59-song set is a lot to take in. It starts with an obscurity and then gets right to an all-time classic Fitzgerald take on an all-time classic Gershwin tune, "But Not For Me." My god. The way she treats the melodies with reverence, yet by the last verse is giving them her own "sounds like it was always that way" interpretations, and makes it sound so effortless, I just can't stand it.
If you're not into "the standards", you'd probably be better off with a cross-section of maybe 8 tracks from this collection. "S Wonderful", "They Can't Take That Away From Me", "But Not For Me", "Fascinating Rhythm", "Lady Be Good" and so many others are the tunes that Sinatra and every other jazz singer has sung... but hard to match Ella's take on these.
One reviewer I saw gave this 1 stars, claiming it is a "compilation". I can see that. Verve released Volumes 1, 2, 3 and 4 of these recordings ALL in 1959, and the cd box set compiled all of those, and that's what we get here. It's not a cross-section or retrospective of her career, like the reviewer was complaining he didn't get from a different artist. Regardless, I could randomly take any 10 songs from this group and it would get at least 4 stars, the quality is so consistently good, of Ella's voice, interpretation, the Riddle arrangements, and of course the songs themselves.
Someone else described it as "three hours of old music". Others say "proficient", "background music" (and "background noise"), "Disney music", "unobtrusive", "boring", "tiresome".
Look, it's idiotic to force-feed yourself 3+ hours of music in one sitting, and even more idiotic to tell the world how you didn't like it. But I guess that's the brainpower that about 25% of the people taking this journey have. The makers of this site and book are not going to boot you off the list if you take 3 days to listen to a record. It's "one album a day", this is 3+ albums. So, chill out a little bit, folks. Music is fun, not an endurance test.
Regardless, I would have preferred the makers of this list choose a different record. I prefer the Rogers & Hart song book, but even that is a double album. For brevity there's "Ella & Louis" with Louis Armstrong... or "Ella Swings Lightly"... or a live record like "At the Opera House" or "in Berlin". "Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie" is pretty fantastic too. And more. Any of these would have at least winnowed out the "it's toooo loooong" complainers. I've not deducted any stars because something is too long so far and I'm not going to start now. In the vocal jazz genre, this is a classic. Just take it one record at a time. :)
I've had this record for years, once played in a horn section in a song-by-song recreation of it.
I see it as kind of an advanced class in the Stones. It's NOT a good first album you should hear of theirs, as so many of the tracks are just VIBE, and it's a double album with only a couple of hits.
For a starter (non greatest hits) Stones album? '60s Stones: "Flowers". '70s Stones, maybe "Sticky Fingers", the one before this one.
But, I mean "Tumblin' Dice" is one of the greatest rock songs of the '70s for sheer vibe, groove and hookiness. We generally don't love the Stones for their deep lyrics, let's just be clear about that. Sometimes they sneak in some good stuff ("Torn and Frayed") but their appeal isn't usually in the lyrics. "Happy", btw, is a hit as well, with Keith on lead vocals.
I like the Stones, even after almost a decade of popularity and huge hits, manage to make this record sounds relaxed, like a bunch of friends hanging out at a cabin by a lake or something, just partying, making music, writing songs on the spot, making food, playing old blues records, philosophizing about whatever. Of course that's not the story whatsoever, with sessions happening in different studios in different cities, Keef not showing up and developing a raging heroin habit, etc., but as a straight-through listening experience it FEELS kind of like that...
I'm fond of how "Loving Cup" turns into a New Orleans-style horn-and-piano freakout at the end. There, I said it.
Loose-limbed, sprawling, rootsy, world-weary, it's a classic, but in the end I would shave off about 4-5 of the more meandering songs and make this a long-ish single album.
There was a time when if a song didn't appear to have any "real" instruments in it, I would snobbily shun it. Synths were fine if they supplemented or were accompanied by other instruments. Nothing lamer than Depeche Mode: watching well-coiffed meterosexual dudes dance in front of keyboards where they played mostly one note at a time to a preprogrammed artificial drum beat... blech!
Of course, later I grew up and realized that art could be made with any kind of instrument, and by any kind of person.
But there was also that important period where you imprint on music, in your teens and slightly beyond, when you're also going through social anxieties... and when you don't get invited to dance parties, you might start to resent all dance music.
Not saying that happened to me, OBVIOUSLY, I was and am unceasingly popular, *ahem* ...but dance-y electronic-basic music was never something I listened much to. I came to appreciate the hookiness of some of those '80s songs that married electronic instruments with new wave jitteriness, and Kraftwerk and Neu! and others eventually became essential listening.
But I don't think I ever thought twice about Heaven 17. I barely remembered that they existed. This is the first "essential" record on this journey where I've thought, "Did I miss something special... really?"
Well.... meh, not really. I did dig the John Taylor stylings of the bass-player-for-hire on the title track, he went nuts at the end of that track! Duran Duran meets Level 42 with too much cocaine...
Released in 1981 before "synth pop" really got heavily produced (this is the same year Depeche Mode's 1st album came out), you can expect the sequences and production to be somewhat rudimentary. There just don't seem to be hooks anywhere, though, that make me want to listen to any of this again. "...Very Long Time" kind of has a sing-along-able chorus I guess.
What version are people listening to that's so long? This album is 9 tracks, folks.
And for the endless stream of complainers? You don't have to participate. Don't listen to the record. Move on with your life. Sheesh.
I'm starting to look at other reviews on every album now, especially when I already know the artist or album. I'll wait until after the listen if it's something I'm unfamiliar with.
Gillian Welch and her accomplice David Rawlings have risen to kind of Godlike status in the folk / Americana world over the years.
I do already like the genre but sometimes I don't have the patience for Welch's penchant for slower, more reflective tunes. "Dear Someone", sound like a lost 78rpm classic, for instance, but could be about 12 bpm faster. And opening the album with a 6+ minute dirge is litmus test for the listener right off the bat.
"Red Clay Halo" is straight-up bluegrass and gets the feet tapping, but the energy it generates is sapped by yet another long slow tune, "April the 14th". "I Wanna Sing that Rock and Roll" straight-up sounds like the Louvin Brothers on one of their non-religious albums.
One reviewer called this "dull" and "unimaginative". I challenge them to write and sing and record something a quarter as compelling. [btw this is someone who gave Kings of Leon 5 stars : / ].
---
And when I pass through the pearly gate
Will my gown be gold instead?
Or just a red clay robe with red clay wings
And a red clay halo for my head?
---
It's unfortunate that people taking the journey of this 1001 records would just say "I don't like country" or "I don't like singer-songwriters" and throw down a one-star rating. Why wouldn't this journey be about OPENING YOUR MIND to new experiences? Isn't that the whole point?
I'll confess to having only really listened to a couple of Skynyrd's biggest hits. You can't avoid "Freebird", it's become woven into pop culture, although as it and those around in the 70s have aged, it's faded.
I gotta say this is an impressive debut album, self-assured and fully fleshed-out. Having "heard it all" at this stage in life, I am impressed with "Tuesday's Gone" which I think I've heard before. I did, however, want it to be over half-way through, instead of it repeating itself with riffs on top ad infinitum, but that tends to be how I feel about a lot of classic rock I missed that I've gone back to...
"Gimmie Three Steps" is one of those hits I've heard. Didn't know it nor "Free Bird" were on the debut album. Classic rock riffs and solos.
"Simple Man" I hadn't known but learned last year, as a friend who died had requested it be played at the memorial service. I can appreciate its earnestness more through my friend's love of the song He was a good, good dude.
Hey there's seven people on the album cover... did they really need that many to make this record?
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Okay, checked out the comments. Folks, I can't help but notice there's no racism nor is there a confederate flag on the album cover or in the lyrics. The only political-leaning song complains about Vietnam and the government not protecting the people from the effects of pollution, and instead spending money on going to the moon. "Help the poor", it seems to say. You want to argue against any of that?
I'm trying to take this journey like a visitor from another planet, without relying so heavily on all the baggage surrounding the record and the people who made it. It's impossible to completely leave your biases at the door but it's a fun exercise while going through these albums.
The more I think about "southern rock" and sunburned jerks in tank tops that used to be t-shirts drinking American whiskey in front of a confederate flag, the less I like this record. The more I just focus on the music, the more I like it.
Dang, I have too much of a history with this album to see it objectively, as I have been trying to do through these albums.
Juan de Marcos González and Ry Cooder brought all of these brilliant Cuban artists out of the obscurity (and sometimes squalor) they'd been living in, despite their luminous pasts, and breathed new life into their careers with this album. Or, rather, allowed them to breathe new life into their OWN careers, because although they're older, the music is still incredible.
Ibrahim Ferrer, Rubén González, Omara Portuondo and Orlando ‘Cachaíto’ López, Compay Segundo, Eliades Ochoa, Barbarito Torres... some careers were revived, and we're lucky to have this hi fidelity album, as many (all?) of these guys passed away in the decade or so after its recording.
Simpletons who just view this stuff as "pleasant" or "background music" are I suppose going to be in the majority, but it is not easy to make this music. not at all. The laoud solo by Barbarito Torres on "Cuarto de Tula"? Come on, people! The level of musicianship to hold this stuff together is incredible, and the passion with which it is performed is palpable. Might be background music to you, but it is LIFE to them.
This record launched me on an exploration of Cuban music (and Puerto Rican, Haitian and more...) that I'm still on. Although there was a bit of a "white folks being charmed by latin music" craze in the aftermath of this record, at least it was nothing compared to the lunacy of the "cha cha" craze of the '50s and its related culturally-questionable shenanigans.
Glad to listen to this record again on a day when things weren't going well.
Well, to me, Suzanne Vega is "Luka", and that's it. I've heard a few other songs, and nothing has appealed to me at ALL. I appreciate that she has an artistic ground in which she herself dwells: she's not trying to be someone else. She has her own style.
I was pleasantly surprised to find her singing through most of this record, rather than speaking through the verse like she does on some of her songs, including a couple of tracks here ("Cracking", "Neighborhood Girls"). Actually found myself enjoying this more than I thought I might, other than the spoken songs which I hated. Sonically the '80s production only gets schmaltzy and in the way a couple of times, but mostly features restrained and understated chorused electric and acoustic guitars, pianos/synth pads and Vega's solo voice. Her lyrics read more like poems than songs, and it makes your heart hurt a little bit that singer-songwriters that major labels sign today barely even seem to try to connect with that muse, allow for mystery, are always dumbed-down. "Queen and the Soldier" tells an interesting story that doesn't go how you think it will, and the queen's motivations remain mysterious. Some of these songs seem to mine the same territory as Leonard Cohen, although Vega's take on relationships doesn't seem to have the gravitas of Cohen's.
I come away from this appreciating Vega more than just "Luka", and more than being "that New York girl that talks her way through her songs". "Undertow" and "Queen..." were my favorites.
It would be interesting to hear this album not knowing anything about who Syd Barrett is. Being able to strip away his past with Pink Floyd, his drug and mental health battles, the fraught recording sessions, the Soft Machine participants, and so on.
I always try to listen to the records on this list from that viewpoint as much as possible, as that's how these records will be heard a hundred years from now, but when I have any history with a record, it's hard to do.
Hard in this case because I'm reminded that I long ago grabbed my favorites from this and "Opal" and a couple from Floyd's 1st album and made a kind of Syd Best Of. A few of the tracks on "Madcap Laughs" seem to me like attempts to encourage Syd to flesh out a full LP of songs, but his mental state just wasn't quite there. The makers of the record could have, I suppose, released a pretty remarkable EP, but they went with the more difficult full LP with a few raw and demo-sounding tracks that maybe only the super-fan can fully dial into for repeated listenings.
Is it exploitative? Again, staying away from any backstory, it doesn't matter, and it's not my call to make. It's fascinating and worth hearing and I remember why I cherry-picked a few songs and forgot the rest.
All I know of the Temptations in the '70s is the GREAT "Psychedelic Soul" 2 CD compilation, which has Funky Music Sho Nuff Turns Me On and Papa Was a Rolling Stone from this album.
Turns out those are the two best songs on this album, and of course "Papa" is the song that revitalized the Temps career. There's nothing wrong with the rest of the record (although I friggin hate "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" no matter who does it; side note: the same guy who wrote that also wrote "Dirty Old Town" by the Pogues, which is a trip), but none of it is incredibly compelling. The chilled funk of "Do your thing" is pretty bad-ass I have to admit.
One other note on "Papa": as a young music snob I used to dismiss "simple" music that only had a couple of chords. I've since learned better. A song having only two or three (or even one!) chords isn't bad simply BECAUSE it only has a couple chords. "Papa" essentially rides on one chord for 11 minutes, but it GROOVES. It's propelled forward by something other than chordal development. The single edit of the song is seven minutes, but even the 11 minute version doesn't seem long, somehow. I think the initial lyrics kick you between the eyes a little bit and make you want to know more about the narrator(s) and what the deal was with papa. They give you just enough and don't wrap it in a bow. It's a velvet box lined with coarse sandpaper and we're lucky to have it.
Giant Sand was band that I tried to get into in the '90s but I had given up by the time of this 2000 album. Nothing ever caught hold of me. I'm surprised to see anything by them on this list. Not that they're terrible. It's just that Howie Gelb's vision has never appealed to many outside the band's following.
...and this record, as it turns out, is more of the same. Meandering, understated, mood pieces that conjure remote places and broke-down people, not exactly Americana... not exactly like pre-Odelay Beck, sharing some sonic space with Jim White's more-compelling stuff from the same era... at an hour long, this is a slog of a record for the most part. The punky spurt of "1971" was a surprising interlude, and "Shiver" stands out like an actual song I'd want to hear again. Some of the lyrics carry some weight, and some of the atmospherics/production is cool, but not enough to save this record for me.
I guess this list is like 90% rock albums? I've gotten one country album, one world album, one jazz album, one R&B album, one hip hop album, and about 60 rock albums so far.
So, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I gave their first album a chance, at the time the rock world seemed to be going nuts about Karen O, but I just didn't get it, from her supposed "charisma" to her affected vocals to her stage presence or "outrageous" persona. "Maps" was cool and has proven to be a modern rock classic, but I didn't get on the bandwagon. The Siouxsie / Dale Bozzio / Chrissie Hynde mashup is intriguing, I guess, and works for the young fans this band pulled in early on.
I never heard this record, though, and am glad to hear that a lot of the annoying vocal affectations Karen O had on the earlier stuff is much less prominent here. There's also more of an emphasis on synths... not til "Dull Life" do we really get rock guitars. It did start to drag after that song, though, as the energy kind of left the building in the 2nd half.
I liked this more than I expected to, but not enough to want to hear it again.
Three stellar voices from the country world are brought together at a time when record production was kind of lame, to be honest... in 1987 the wonders of synths and digital processing units were still infecting studios everywhere in all genres, bathing everything in a slick gloss of audio goop. CDs were still new and folks were angling for that "DDD" label on the packaging (look it up), and sometimes the music itself seemed like an afterthought, or, more accurately, a Product. a Widget.
Mercifully, I was happy to hear that this recording didn't suffer too badly from that problem. Although everything sounds too perfect and on-the-nose for how I want my country music to sound, the presence of the likes of Ry Cooder, David Lindley and Albert Lee and a crack backing band keep the music honest and supportive of the vocals. "Telling Me Lies" might be the worst '80s offender with its chorused piano ballad vibe.
All three singers sound fantastic and are in their prime here. What a treat to hear them sing solo and in different harmony combinations. "Pain of Loving You" seamlessly alternates between 2- and 3-part harmony, but almost sounds too sweet and lovely to sound like actual pain... Tracks like "Those Memories of You", though, could have sounded a lot grittier, with that bent "...they lay" they sing at the end being present throughout... giving those upbeat tracks some oomph let the sweet tracks like "To know him..." have more impact.
Although I could do without a couple of the sweeter-sounding tracks ("I've Had Enough" and its Van Dyke Parks-like orchestration just doesn't seem to belong, for instance), at least half of this album will live in my country playlist from now on.
I had this album and just got rid of it, oddly enough, a couple of weeks ago. I kept four tracks: "Time to Pretend", "Kids", "Electric Feel", Of Moons, Birds & Monsters". The rest just kind of left me 'meh'. I think the rest of this record and future records had them alternating between trying to recapture the magic of their hits, and experiment like their heroes did. Neither effort quite succeeded. These few songs, though, worked for me on many levels and pushed this record up to 3 stars.
"Do you wanna take a chance on maybe finding some sweet romance with me?" "I wanna talk to you / I wanna shampoo you". Those unnecessary bursts of falsetto singing. People over 50 getting weepy-eyed at the mention of her name, to whom of course she is just "Joni". There are lots of reasons to make fun of, or at the very least not have Joni Mitchell not be your thing.
I always think that like a true musical artist, she is her own category. You can't easily say "oh I like "RXRX" and she sounds kind of like RXRX so I can get into this". Sure, "singer-songwriter" applies here. But no others would construct a melody like the weird chromatic movement in "My Old Man". Nobody sings quite like her, writes lyrics like her, puts songs together quite like her.
She does come from a time when LYRICS ACTUALLY MATTERED. It's got to be hard to be a newcomer, inoculated on today's music largely devoid of poetry, diving into introspective 70's music and knowing what to make of it. Who wants to pretend to be an English major and analyze poetry?
I took a look at the reviews. Some idiot wrote this was "menopause-core". WTF? Mitchell was in her 20s when she made this album. Someone else says she doesn't rhyme. Here's some rhymes from Carey: "home, cologne." "down, town". "room, moon." Or Blue" "pin, in, skin". Little Green: "cancer, answer", "fade her, made her" and dozens of other examples. Yeah it's tough on these kids today.
When I was 20 I thought Joni Mitchell was "chick music", so I kind of get it. But I probably wouldn't have been open to exploring 1001 records I might not have heard, either. I already knew everything then. Now I don't know jack.
Eventually I did a deep dive into her first 8 albums and found stuff to like on the first 6 or so. If I remember correctly, "Court & Spark" was my favorite with the most songs I could enjoy, "Clouds" was also solid, everything else I could cherry pick a few tracks out of to make a "my favorites" compilation.
"Blue" is supposed to be one of her best, and one of THE best, and I think it is more of a winner based on its far-above-the-crowd lyrics, rather than on great memorable songs that stay with you.
"Oh, I could drink a case of you, darling
And I would still be on my feet"
is still a better couplet than in any dissolving relationship song these days.
It's hard for me not to judge the lifestyle that these lyrics represent. In all cases I try hard to empathize with people born into different circumstances than me but I'm so "anti-" almost everything being espoused here that it makes me ill. It's bad enough that someone feels this is the life they have to live, but other people who DON'T live that life who CELEBRATE it are even worse, almost. I frankly don't CARE about your "flow" if you're so psychically messed up that "Because the nigga play pussy, that's the nigga that's getting screwed / And bruised up from the pistol whipping" is the way you think the world is supposed to be. Today almost half of black children in the US live without their father. Is that something to be proud of? What kind of a legacy is Biggie leaving behind him, what good did he do on this earth? He had "techniques dripping out his butt cheeks" and now he's dead. You're still alive. How cool are you now?
I was never cool enough to fully embrace Sonic Youth. I still like putting on "Daydream Nation" to hear Teenage Riot and Silver Rocket... like Television spat out a crack baby and got lucky it inherited the more melodic genes. [pardon the terrible analogy]. But that album (from 1988) was more groundbreaking, ambitious and challenging than "Goo", and I hope it turns up on this list somewhere down the line.
When they go off the deep end into their "applied noise" for too long, it's usually a turn off for me, I'm not in a deep enough hole of depression or a blissed-out enough state to be engulfed by it. I'm just like, "put your dicks away and get back to the song [or end the song]". "Mote" is like that on this album. It's awesome but could have ended 2 or 3 minutes earlier for my tastes. But I'm an impatient dork.
"Goo" is bad-ass though, overall. "Dirty Boots", "Disappearer" and "Mary Christ" are the ones I've gone back to through the years... but I kind of forgot about "Titanium Expose" which is a great album-ender. I'm not kool enough for "Kool Thing".
Daydream Nation and Goo both came out before Nirvana's "Nevermind", and the Nirvana Legacy site has a nice little article about how important Sonic Youth was to Nirvana pre-Nevermind. You had to hand it to Geffen, a "major label", for sticking with these non-hit makers for many albums, and to Sonic Youth for having a major label deal and making a record like this without regard for what "people might like". They did exactly what THEY wanted to do. And it is absolutely NOT for everyone. [as I saw from reading through some of the comments here. I remind you: review the record, not the band's fans that you don't like.]
There was a point in my life where I might have dug this more. Certainly it's a top-tier classic of '70s blues-rock. I'm not sure what "southern rock" is supposed to be, but if I didn't know any better I'd say this was a high-quality blues cover band (the entire first LP is blues covers)... although most blues bands might not try as hard as these guys do on tracks like "You Don't Love Me".
On the 2nd LP it's their own compositions, with "Hot 'Lanta" being essentially a jazz tune done by rockers. There's a head, solos, repeat the head at the end. I don't think I ever heard that one before and it's probably my favorite track listening today. Dickey Betts' track "..Elizabeth Reed" sounds like Santana without congas. Santana really grinds my nads, so NO THANKS. On the last track, which takes up all of side D, the 23 minute "Whipping Post" goes bonkers on the 5 minute studio version with guitar wanking galore. Having listened to plenty of Grateful Dead jams from this same era, in comparison this tracks just feels static and tame after all this time, despite the Allmans' mastery of their form.
The more concise "Brothers and Sisters" might be a better introduction to the Allman Brothers. In 2025, twenty-minute songs that are mostly bluesy guitar, harmonica and keyboard solos don't resonate like they did in the early 70s. Let us all mourn the waning attention span of today's youth.
Still, as '70s guitar-wanking goes, this is one of the wankiest!
Listening to this record, you'd think Johnny was at the peak of his popularity. It's interesting to learn the back story, but even on its own, it's a classic concert full of energy and excitement that nobody bought a ticket to see.
It's a thoughtful set list with a couple of JC hits and a bunch of tunes chosen specifically for this audience, sequenced beautifully (not sure if that's how it happened for real, but on the record it's just jim-dandy) so that even the two jokey Cowboy Jack Clement songs have an impact. You can just feel how he's somehow both simultaneously invested in the stories he's telling and how the audience is receiving them... how he can get caught in a laugh during the dirge "Long Black Veil", how he knows when to crack wise or go for the tear-jerker. The humanitarian shines through.
For those that don't know, the last song was written by a convict and a tape of it was played for Johnny the night before the show by the prison chaplain, and Johnny insisted he learn it and teach it to the band that night and play it the next day. How incredible. The inmate's story ultimately is a tragic one, which I suppose isn't surprising.
Glad to have heard this record all the way through after only hearing bits and pieces through the years (and hearing "Folsom" repeatedly). Cool cover too, with the sweat running down his cheek. Johnny was a special one.
Another big influence on Nirvana, Pixies had a distinctive sound all to themselves (although Frank Black [/Black Francis] credits Sisters of Mercy as where they got the "quiet-loud thing"). And that sound could be maddening: flurries of hooting, talking, shouting and sorta-singing over abrasive electric guitars at mostly mid-tempos (except for the speedy "I'm amazed"), with occasional massive hooks like "Gigantic". Sometimes both things would kind of happen at the same time, like in "Euphrates" or the sad-sack classic "Where Is My Mind?" and it works. Much of the songs just don't work for me, they just give me a headache. If you imprinted on this genre and record at that pivotal time in your life, good for you.
I can take from 3-5 songs from this and the next 3 LPs through "Trompe Le Monde" and make a great longish album. But I don't see "Surfer Rosa" in its entirety as an all-time great, classic, must-have, album. It's for a very narrow swath of hipsters who like things that sound intentionally abrasive. More power to 'em.
Dang, Third/Sister Lovers. I friggin love Radio City and #1 Record, and I have to assume those are on this list somewhere. But this one is tough. It's a sad, half-cooked mess. With Chris Bell and Andy Hummell gone, this was a different band than those two records, and it almost seemed like Alex Chilton and Jody Stephens had one foot in, one foot out on these sessions... and even they didn't exactly see it as a Big Star record at the time.
There's some good stuff here, but if you didn't have the first two albums under your belt, I'd bet you'd wonder what the hell the big deal was about this band. Stroke It Noel, For You, Blue Moon, Thank You Friends, Kizza Me, these all work for me. Mostly nothing else really does, even as "difficult art". Even the semi-catchy single "Jesus Christ" is like... really? Is this a Christian band? WTF is happening here?
There's nothing happy about the Big Star story, other than a) Alex Chilton was celebrated 15+ years after Big Star broke up by the Replacements, and had a subsequent reappraisal and could do some victory laps before he passed away, rather than languish in obscurity, and b) that Jody Stephens is (2023-2025) doing gigs as "Those Pretty Wrongs" and writing decent songs.
But most of their legacy is based on the first two records, not this one.
I imprinted on the Beatles as a kid, long after they had broken up. It was "Beatles VI", "Rubber Soul", and check this out: my cousin gave me "Sgt Peppers" by hiding in a bush on an Easter egg hunt. My name's still written on it in her girlish font.
The White Album has occasionally been my favorite album. I used to assess my record collection annually, you see. This record topped the list a couple of times and has never been out of the top 25.
Look, these days I could do without "Rocky Raccoon", "Revolution 9" and "Good Night", and "Don't Pass Me By" should be half its length. But my god, for a double album to have 26-1/2 tracks that I'm still not sick of after a ton of listens? Incredible. But, I'm biased.
As I like to do, after I'm done writing and done listening I go check out other reviews. Everyone's entitled to their opinions of course, but some are seeing this record as only having a couple of good songs. To me, that's just plain nuts. Let's see: USSR, Ob-La-Di, Gently Weeps, Revolution, Dear Prudence, Blackbird, Birthday, all bona-fine pop-rock huge hit classics. Martha My Dear, Glass Onion, Mother Nature's Son, Long Long Long, Warm Gun, So Tired, Yer Blues, all revered. Helter Skelter is a candidate for the birth of heavy metal.
Certainly it can be hard to take it all in at once, I guess. It's overwhelming. But still!
Years ago I saw Bossa Nova as kind of a parody of itself. How could anyone possibly like it? It's like eating cheese, with cheese on top, right?
Well, no. One of the advantages of world travel, and living past your 20s, is gaining a smidgen of perspective of other cultures and being more comfortable with not knowing stuff. When it comes to enjoying new kinds of music, being a musician can help too.
I was into straight jazz and shunned all forms "latin jazz" at first, and had to circle back to wrap my head around this stuff to dig it as more than just background music for sipping cocktails to. It led me back to the fine musicians in Brazil doing amazing stuff from the '70s back to as early as the 1920s. Americans got hip to the "latin craze" in the '50s, with the Bossa Nova offshoot starting essentially with this album and exploding with the Getz/Gilberto album that came after, in '63 (you know, with "Girl From Impanema").
Charlie Byrd is an interesting figure in jazz guitar, a guy who can swing but who plays nylon string guitar with a classical influence. A lot of his stuff was marketed to the "easy listening" genre, but he sounds great here, especially on "Samba Triste". Getz's austere cool jazz approach fits well with this style and he treats the material with reverence and creative improvisations. The rhythm section is in the pocket and unobtrusive. Let me tell you, it takes great effort and skill to make music sound this effortless.
Yes these are Americans selling Brazilian music to other Americans. If it leads them to the original Brazilian artists, then they've done Brazilian music a great service. It worked for me. Get over it. Brazilians did.
It's a truism that that most non-Brazilians are still going to see Bossa Nova as background music to drink cocktails to. But that's just how it is. Lots of bossas and sambas were written with intense lyrics under oppressive governments and it's a trip to read translations of some of the lyrics. I encourage folks to explore. Joao Gilberto, Nara Leao, Antonio Carlos Jobim are great people to start with IMO.
Glad to get a lone bossa nova album on this list after almost all rock albums for the last month.
Early Talking Heads. Only "Take Me To the River" punched into the zeitgeist.
Like I've noticed about some of the albums on this list, many of these artists are here because they "are themselves". They are mining the same ore as other pop-rockers but they've opened up their own vein in their own tunnel.
"Good Thing" is the coolest non-hit on this record. Weird gang vocals that appear out of nowhere, jagged guitars, a bass part that ascends to its highest possible notes, Byrne's herky-jerky vocals, sometimes melodic, sometimes abrasive. "Stay Hungry" is the runner-up.
I like how they take the analog delay of dub and throw it on the snare drum on "Warning Sign" for a song that is nothing like dub. With some washes of reversed-sounding effects as well, this is avante-pop, which in 1978 much have been something else. I hear Brian Eno was involved, so...
Sometimes the approach doesn't work for me; "Girls" is just awkward filler. The only thing I like about "Found A Job" is the robot funk outro. And so on. It's not a perfect album, it's a little blurry at times, but when it comes into focus it's great!
It took me awhile to adapt to Billy Bragg. So many UK artists don't so overtly retain their accent in their singing voices. But boy Billy Bragg sure does. Beyond that, the first stuff I heard from him was all just him and an electric guitar, and it was either relationship songs or anti-government songs.
I ended up getting really attached to a few of the songs on "Don't Try This At Home".... certain lines just jump out and get you... "like a pale moon in a sunny sky, death gazes down as I pass by". The "Mermaid Avenue" project with Wilco had some great stuff on it too and it was good to hear him with a full band.
Somehow I avoided this record even though it was a friend's favorite record of his. Glad to have a chance to hear it. I say all this as a way of saying I was fully prepared and dialed in to Bragg's ethos, voice and approach.
"Ideology", is that Dylan's "Chimes of Freedom" lurking underneath the surface? Yes it has to be. Instead of "Chimes of freedom flashing" it's "sound of ideologies clashing". Hmm. Odd. Awkward, I'd say.
The production choices are interesting, he never really goes full rock band, but most of the songs have extra stuff.. backing vocals here, a bass there, strings, or a snare drum, some echoey effects, a tack piano, a gang-chorus on the union song, and so on.
I like the personal songs better than the political ones. "Greetings to the New Brunette" is a classic of the mid-80s indie rock world, up there with the Smiths and the Cure, oddball romantics all. "The Marriage" is right behind it, cozying up more to Prefab Sprout and its ilk. This was a good listen from a good bloke with a huge heart.
***
As for other reviews, how about this one "I don't really know what I'm on about but I want to complain aimlessly and I think I'm smarter than I really am"? That reviewer was writing about himself, not about Billy Bragg. He and a few others see these lyrics as "complaining" or "songs of woe". What? What kind of lyrics do you want? Because if you could divide most pop/rock music into two categories, it's "songs of woe" and "songs of love". Sure there's Frank Zappa and Robyn Hitchcock and "song about frogs", or '90s/'00s indie rockers and songs about fuck-all, and the narrow swath of protest music, but damn, man, how ignorant can you be? As for complaints about his voice, I get it. It takes getting used to. I was turned off by it at first, but I'm super-comfortable with it now. Like coffee, I guess. Despite that, as I've said before, why take this 1001+ albums journey if you're going to be immediately turned off by something. Open your mind, or your heart.
Side note: this album has 12 tracks. If you find a version with more, just stop at "The Home Front".
Man there was nothing quite like the B-52s (especially in Georgia!) when they came sidewinding out of the gates with this record in 1979. "Planet Claire" takes the "Peter Gunn" riff and turns it into a garbage sci-fi epic. Kitschy, punky, new wavey, mid-fi, repetitive, mostly bass-less, arty, goofy, poppy and always fun, it's nonetheless a small miracle they had national success. It's probably largely because of "Rock Lobster", which was the party anthem of the next 5 years at junior high and high school dances and beyond.
Not all the songs are great. Some sound like riffs that tried to become songs but never quite made it. "Downtown" is a weird cover choice and REALLY sounds like filler.
Have to mention Ricky Wilson's guitar: so much of the musical weight falls on him. Often the keyboard serves an auxiliary role and there's no bass player. The keyboard sometimes does a bass part, but the guitar playing is really underappreciated in those early B-52s songs. It sounds aggressive and loose, yet it's clean and precise and in the pocket at the same time. Kudos!
If Rock Lobster were the only decent song on this record it would still rise to 3 stars. There's enough here that makes it better than that.
My familiarity with Marvin Gaye's music is the What's Going On and the Let's Get It On records, and some of the Motown singles of the '60s. I Want You and Here My Dear are big records of his that I'm almost totally unfamiliar with, so I'm glad to get the chance to hear this.
Unfortunately, you can tell pretty quickly something is wrong here. This is a relationship-falling-apart record. The grooves are immense and undeniable but, I mean...
"And on top of that, you have scandalized my name
What I can't understand is if you love me
How could you turn me into the police?
Didn't I love you good and try to take care of you?"
Talk about airing your dirty laundry. These songs are SO personal and SO pointed, that you almost feel like you walked into a room where two people were having an heart-felt argument, and you want to say "Oh, excuse me" and shut the door and let them have their privacy.
Thankfully, some of the songs, especially later on, aren't so specific (Sparrow, Time to Get It Together)... but they're also not particularly memorable. Anna's Song has this lazy groove over which it sounds like Gaye just made lyrics up on the spot. "Funky Space" sounds like it's over around 4 minutes and then goes on for ANOTHER 4 minutes....
I won't ramble on any further. It just feels unfocused and rambling to me. Gaye could sing the telephone book and it'd sound great. Maybe somewhere in here is a tight single-LP that'd get a higher rating from me, but with no hits or big hooks, and a bummer of a journey, this kind of fell flat for me. I'll try it again down the road some time though.
