1001 Albums Summary

I admittedly don't have a super deep knowledge of The Cure's discography, and I think this was my first time listening to one of their albums straight through. You can definitely hear a lot of 2000s synth-driven pop presaged here, combined with a lot of decidedly 80s choices (especially in the gated reverb drums, and kind of strange vocal delivery). A lot of the songs here strike me as kind of patient explorations of the moods and shapes created by the short chord loops that permeate all of these songs, at their best (as in lovesong and prayers for rain) this can means a lot of interesting non-chord tones and dissonances explored against the shimmering echoey textures. At its worst this leads to songs like Pictures of You where the first 6 minutes is a snoozer vamp between the I and IV chords, with only the pleading prose (which is admittedly quite lovely and moving) to really give much shape or direction to the proceedings. I'm admittedly a harder sell on music that requires a strong engagement with text as one of the primary factors to making it work, and a lot of what makes this album feel like it doesn't quite hit me as hard as it could is related to that. For this to work as an *album* I feel like I need more shape or direction in the song to song textual material and overall tonalities of the music. The sixth song in a row written as a first person recollection of remembered comforts of lost love and it feels less impactful for the lack of real stylistic flexibility in how it communicates in the literal lyrics and from the fact that it's yet another midtempo reverb-drenched ballad with the same modes of interacting with said text. There are, of course, great standouts on this album. Even if it's not breaking any bold new ground in terms of harmonic construction, Lullaby is a great thematic departure from its surrounding moments (and I love how discordant the horrifying lyrics and hushed creepy vocal delivery are from the bouncy assured backing music). The propulsive toms work in Closedown is great, and I loved that the song chose to close on this ambiguous chord without any real resolution to it (making me wish the following song was more of a contrast/response to it). There are a lot of really committed vocal performances here that are almost load-bearing on their own, too ("Disintegration" doesn't need to be half as long as it is, but I love the conviction). I think this'll be an album I have to revisit in the future with fresh ears, there are definitely cool melodic elements sprinkled throughout here that I'm sure my ears were too tired to appreciate fully (especially some of the lovely bass playing operating as a rich counterpoint toward the end of the album). For now though, doesn't rise much beyond "eh, it's fine" for me.

My biggest stumbling block with trying to approach this album on its own terms is the fact that it's just not "cool" anymore. I have heard each of these songs 100x between innings at baseball games, during Nike commercials, rocked out to by elderly people at rural wisconsin sports bars. Any transgressiveness or shock it ever had has been so thoroughly metabolized into American monoculture I feel myself hearing each of these opening riffs with a hostile eyes-rolled posture. I loved this album when I was 15, I think every 15 year old white boy on earth has some sort of inexorable pull toward pirating this album, a jumping off point toward what came before (led zeppelin) and what followed (guns n roses). It's to the album's credit given all the aforementioned factors that a piece of the visceral impact of each of these songs remains miraculously intact. The production and recording on this album is so perfect it hurts, one shade the more one ray the less would half impair its nameless oomph. What the half dozen instantly recognizable songs on this album may lack in technical complexity, expressive range, or really anything other than brainstem minor pentatonic guitar riffs over flatly shrieked vocals, they make up on the backend with immaculate structural choices (each song seems to cannily know when the listener's focus might wander) and the quiet control and restraint of the band playing in perfect balance with no one ever trying to steal too much of the limelight. I like it less than stylistic cousins, the aforementioned guns and roses and led zeppelin both give us albums with much more interesting material that feels less disingenuous, for all of this album's popularity and visceral impact it's always felt very calculating and cynical to me. The drums never get off of the shit-stupid 4 patterns, every chorus is teed up with the same obvious prechorus, the lyrics of each one are the same gutrot 1980 innuendos that only boomers and old gen x-ers could ever find cool or alluring. But for generations to come there will be kids with their first electric guitars that feel nothing but awe and inspiration from this, and unironically that's not nothing. Ultimately listening to this album to me feels like the 1 in 100 meal at McDonalds where all your food turns out right and you get the fries straight from the fryer. It's not the most nourishing or interesting thing I'll eat that day, but in the moment I'm happy to enter a fugue state and just let the perfectly engineered proportions of salt and grease hit my brain where it's supposed to. Fave tracks here: Hell's Bells (best modulation on the album in the chorus, perfect buildup) Shoot to Thrill (the breakdown at the end here might be my fave thing on the album) Back in Black Rock and Roll aint noise pollution Least faves: what do you do for money honey Have a drink on me Shake a leg Probably a 3.5/5 for me for an album of extremes. Both brilliant and stupid at the same time, both meticulous and a bit lazy

There's something about this era of mid-60s production that always sets my teeth on edge, you can tell this was EQ'd for FM radios that didn't pick up high frequencies very well. I found myself having to listen to this in shorter chunks just because that keith richards telecaster sound as recorded is really only palatable in small chunks. This album is a combination of things to me that both song quite modern, and also stark reminders that this album is 10 years removed from the "doo-wop" era (and only about 30 years removed from the peak of delta blues). "Out of Time" is straight out of some righteous brothers recording, while "Mother's Little Helper" borrows modes from turkish café music to make some exceedingly bitter and wry commentary about class hypocrisy in drug usage (albeit with still dated conceptions of mental health and sexism). Such is the appeal of a lot of this era of music to me, where you can hear the new guard alongside the old guard and be forced to take part in a little bit of the same shock that contemporary audiences probably held. My favorite track on this album is probably "Sweet Lady Jane", a surprisingly tender mixolydian ode (supposedly to cannabis) that is really performed with a lot of delicacy and control by Mick and crew. I think the Rolling Stones are at their best when they're forced out of their stylistic and thematic comfort zones, and Brian Jones inspired use of extended instrumentation here really makes a lot of the counterpoint come alive. As Tears Go By and Wild Horses are the eventual results of this more tender and reserved kind of exploration. Now I'm admittedly not a lyricshead, unless the words are really clear and foregrounded in the mix I'm really going to only ambiently notice them, but this album is just really obnoxious and annoying conceptually in a way that's just unavoidable. On a long list of things that make this album a tough hang, that manages to be at the top of the list. It ages even more poorly next to the other transformative albums that came out at the same time, Pet Sounds and Revolver sound like brilliantly modern classics especially in comparison to this, both textually and compositionally. Overall this is a really unpleasant listen. The bracing reminders of acrid sexism here are a good reminder of how awful large parts of the counterculture were at the time (a fact that IMO gets glossed over when the era is described fatuously by boomers as a utopian vision of anti-authoritarianism). This could have safely been left off the list with nothing of value lost, and this is coming from a person that's deeply partial to music from the 60s. Ordinarily with albums I don't like I can abstract my way out to finding some compositional features I like or find interesting, but I have no real interest in doing that here. Beyond being caustic and stupid, this album is also exceptionally boring.

From the late 60s/early 70s era of rock I feel like most of the notable groups all have a signature feel to their grooves. The Stones at their peak had a kind of sinister edge and forcefulness to their sound, the Beatles at their best sounded precise and measured, CCR had the assured rhythmic chug of an old big band, but my overwhelming sense of Led Zeppelin (no doubt colored in part by my childhood interest in them) is just FUN. They play so loosely around the beat, each little fill or interjection could playfully add triplets or some weird chromatic passing chords. There's an attainable looseness to their sound, a misleadingly relatable and easy sounding approach that makes me want to join in. And while this album is not LZ operating at their songwriting peak, that spirited creativity in their performances just makes this such a pleasing and easy listen. I'm not going to wax poetic about each of the band member's contributions or how John Bonham's feel and sound is still underappreciated, too much ink spilled on those topics already, so the rest of this will just be little observations I've noticed across the songs as I listened (a surprising amount of this album was fresh to my ears, despite being a led zep fan I've only listened to this whole album a handful of times before). Kashmir is really the only song here I've listened to enough to have burned into my brain beyond any ability to listen to it with fresh ears. The sweet little major key phrases over that terrifying chromatic guitar riff still work to this day, and to my mind the song is one of the key tentpole examples of just how flexible mixolydian as a mode is, because this song can run the gamut from terrifying to ecstatic to reflective just by shifting whether it wants to be in D mixolydian, B minor, or G major. I forgot until I was really doing a focused listen through just how flipping long the bridges ("oh, all I see turns to brown...") are in this song, they're almost half the track's runtime! And idk, I get in part that the length and lack of resolution to the song are part of why it has the kind of hypnotic quality that it does, but I'm left feeling more than ready for the next track we'll before it wraps up (with all due respect to a harmonically adventurous classic!) Also this song would have sounded better with well-recorded strings instead of whatever awful synth patch they use In the Light was a new discovery for me on this one, even if the endless major key section at the end wears out its welcome several minutes early. I still have to love and appreciate the unexpected musical pivots throughout the song, and I love when led zeppelin (bands in general) take a stab at writing musical idioms that aren't in their stylistic wheelhouse. The eerie vocal multitrack that robert plant enters on imo makes really interesting choices that set an excellent contrast to the evil sounding blues that follows. And however stiff and awkward the playing was, the synth harpsichord interlude to take us back into the major key vamp is really unique and memorable. Led zep is at their best when they let their cultivated mysticism and love of renaissance musical idioms inflect their hard rock to make something a little richer and more nuanced. Of the "shut off brain and go into minor pentatonic world" tracks, In My Time of Dying was the obvious standout, Bonham's coming in with a half time feel at the end feels like such a proto-metal thing. I'm not even much of a "viscerally rocking out" kind of guy, and by the end of that 11 minutes I'm ready to run through walls. From an objective standpoint a cool document about how playing around the beat on different ways affects the whole tone of whatever you're playing. Just a banger showpiece for how well they fit together as an ensemble I feel like relative to other Led Zeppelin albums I hear more inspirations from music contemporaneous to them, Trampled Under Foot has the obvious Stevie Wonder clavinet as the underlying rhythmic motor of the song, Down by the Seaside has its swooning beach boys qualities to it. It's just especially disorienting with Led Zeppelin for me in particular, which always felt to me when I was young like some platonic ideal of rock that existed perfectly formed and untouched by anything else (save for the blues and roots music it liberally stole from). As double albums go, this sure is a double album. Personally I could lose the first two songs and the last four and not feel like the soul of the album had really been touched at all. This doesn't have the same peaks as Led Zep II or IV of course, but the musical ideas here are immediately memorable and well thought out. A band this good playing off-peak is gonna still be able to put out 4 star quality work like this, and the moments that fully click are just incredible.

I'm having a hard time deciding if this is a smart record pretending to be stupid, or a stupid album pretending to be smart, I think my gut is that it's the former. Some genuinely inspired arrangement choices and some virtuosic playing all around, coexisting with gobs of braindead blues rock and lead-poisoned lyrics about how sexy ladies are like sports cars. Highway Star is kind of an encompassing summary of the album in that way. The verses are dull monotonous melodies centered around the tonic while the rhythm guitar is doing neanderthal chugging underneath, and yet the chorus always feels so weird and off-balance. It's always a measure shorter than we'd expect, and the band always rushes slightly while going through the syncopations. And then there's Richie Blackmore's weird cascading scale exercise of a solo that works in what sounded like harmonic minor? This might be the first album I've ever listened to where my inclination is to just fast-forward to all of the guitar solos. "Maybe I'm a Leo" is by a good margin the worst song on the album, the most listless and unimaginative blues in the history of the British isles. The whole song is just every instrument clomping around heavily around minor pentatonic scales, no attempts at venturing away from the most generic bar blues-rock ever generated on earth. Give pat boone several sedatives and he'd still come up with a more visceral and compelling blues than this. My hot take on smoke on the water? The riff might be the worst part of the song. Honestly the verses here are brilliant, that free wheeling bass part works so well against the vocal melody, and the drum fills here are absolutely sick. Love the call and response chorus between vocals and lead guitar. Another corker of a guitar solo on this one, too, the 8 seconds where it switches to half-time is far and away the best part of the song, and I think they were a little short-sided to not use that as a bridge or post-chorus at some point. Every time the song goes back to the main riffs and the driving eighths you can feel the song downshift several times (an analogy deep purple would presumably appreciate). All in all I'd probably slot this in between back in black and physical graffiti for how much I enjoyed it. Some absolutely crazy performances in here, and you can hear a lot of more virtuosic metal being kind of grasped at here. In a lot of ways some of Richie Blackmore's playing sounds like Tony Iommi, where playing the blues and scales in fast motion gives you brief glimpses of what's to come. Still, there is a *lot* of filler on here, even for a 37 minute record. My gut is a 3.5 rounding down to 3 stars

I had a horrible day today, I'm going to give myself the small treat of not doing a a thorough writeup of this useless album. It's boring blues, and Clapton is a deeply uncreative player. There. That's my take. Get fucked Clapton, you racist piece of shit.

I'm having to use my better judgment as a ballast against heaping praise on the relief of not listening to more dad rock. This has cool thoroughly written arrangements! Long, interesting melodic lines that interact in surprising ways with the accompaniment! I know chanson isn't going to be everybody's cup of tea, the theatricality of it still makes me leave my guard up, but this feels way closer to being representative of the creative explosions within 1960s pop than anything we've had on the list so far. You can see where this would be in conversation with pet sounds (even if it's not nearly as radical in its construction). I'm going to put on air of understanding anything about the history of chanson and "pop chanson" here and take a wild stab that Jacques Brel has more of a foot in the past of historical chanson and it's renaissance roots than Serge Gainsbourg and some of the versions of the genre big with hipster music majors nowadays. Even starting with Greensleeves, one of the oldest surviving melodies in the entire musical canon gives a sense of historical heft and context here. The starry-eyed version of me that has a cultural fascination with the 60s wants to see his impassioned bellowing as representative of some historical crossroads, a large ship of cultural tradition being forcefully turned toward modernity and musical globalisation. I think a more sober-minded analysis probably points toward this being only a few nudges to the left of Lawrence Welk music, old wine in new bottles not really interested in fresh looks at old arrangements and idioms but simply providing slightly more muscular and gritty conveyances of ideas we've already heard. My occasional disillusionment with a lack of originality here does not dim the many laudable and lovely elements of this album. Tracks like tango funébre have some insane playing from the background musicians, the musette on this track in particular is wild, the woodwind counterpoints are as clean as a whistle. On my favorite track on the album, le plat plays, a woozy chromatic chord progression softens gradually with a surprisingly affecting theremin solo until the gentle strings come in at the end to carry it home. It feels uncharacteristically fresh in its harmonic language from the rest of the album, this sounds like something off of moon pix at some points. And even brel's lone vocal trick of getting louder and raspier as the track goes on is reasonably well-restrained here. Even some of the immediately stupid-sounding tracks here like Les jardins du Casino sound like they'd be fun as shit to play in the pit orchestra for. There's no cheap extended instrumentation here, everything is written out in full with expected mid-century rigor, and against my more cynical nature it makes the whole album shine more than it has any right to. Despite the elements of real care and creativity that pop up here, I suspect I'll be less than gracious about Brel when I think back on this album. I think of other live albums from vocalists of this era: James Brown live at the Apollo, Sam Cooke live, even Tom Jones live at the talk of the town. Maybe those are preposterously large figures to compare brel to, but my mind can't help but picture how much assured and rich the vocal choices are compared to what's given here. It just doesn't match up to what this era could do. Make this an album of true originals, keep the aces orchestra, and find a more talented singer. Then you've got a five star album on your hands

Lots of extended instrumentation, timeless and reliable song structures, top flight guest musicians front to back. I feel like when describing this album aloud it sounds in abstract like something I should be crazy about, but it just sounds *flat* over most of the runtime. I just don't why you'd pull together a studio setup this nice with a combo of the wrecking crew and the Doobie brothers, and you end up with something that sounds like a less creative Chicago on barbituates. My favorite tune on the album, "any major dude will tell you", is like a more moddish version of a rod Stewart ballad, has Walter Becker and Donald Fagan being gracious enough to allow some looseness within the ensemble, given it more of a resemblance to human expression than most of this album's runtime. The snoozer backing vamp, cookie cutter songwriting, and insufferably goofy vocals of Barrytown introduce this kind of terrifying antipathy in me. Hearing this kind of steely dan song is like staring at Mr. beast's eyes, it feels so calculating in a way that just leaves me in uncanny valley territory. Pretzel logic has all the groove of a player piano and might, against stiff competition, be the worst white guy blues we've heard in this project so far. In the interest of not just making this a personal diatribe, I will say that you can see cracks of light in this album. Genuine moments of cool original songwriting and arranging that remind you of Steely Dan at their best. Through with Buzz is a great palate cleanser track, well arranged and just the perfect length. There's some genuinely rhythm guitar playing in With a Gun, and a refreshingly active chord progression, elevating what I was worried was just going to be a shallow western pastiche. In my final reckoning here I still just find this music refusing to settle in further than skin deep for me. The marriage of this particular style of music with how airless and exact the studio playing had to be just isn't the steely Dan combo that works for me, the songs need to be properly *weird* and dense if they're going to be assembled this mechanically, there's a reason Aja is so evocative and moving! Sorry. I know there are Dan fans among us, I'm just not one, and this album isn't one of the works that makes me want to reconsider that at all