Growing up in the 1980-90s meant hearing the most popular songs by Billy Joel on the radio but having no context or sense of chronology. The recognizable singles from The Stranger (Only the Good Die Young, Movin' Out (Anthony's Song), She's Always a Woman, and the overly sentimental Just The Way You Are) are here with the dated production of the era: accordion and saxophone solos, string sections and melancholic whistling smothering some incredible lyrics and melodies. Even the iconic "Scenes From an Italian Restaurant" is positively restrained by the sterile conditions of the studio. It is Possible that having heard powerful live versions of this material prevents me from fully appreciating this essential album.
Classic arena rock with ambient dream pop tones, distorted vocals and swirling guitar solos. Sounds like a heavily reverbed Paul Simon collaborating with M83, with some interesting sonic textures, warm and repetitive, strumming and pulsing! A more accessible Bob Dylan style vocals echo in such a way that lyrics are rendered obscure, hooks are incidental. At other times it sounds like Bruce Springsteen being produced by Phil Spector, or a less memorable My Morning Jacket. "Burning" transcends the pleasant pulsing familiarity that otherwise makes this album generic indie rock from the early aughts and twenty-teens, though it does remind me of Dancing in the Dark. Considering I associate the War on Drugs with an internet mediated feud with Mark Kozelek of Red House Painters and Sun Kill Moon (that was mostly Kozelek being an aging curmudgeon and tangentially related to competing performance slots at a music festival where Kozelek complained about the volume of their music), but never felt inspired to listen to The War on Drugs before now.
Malian blues! A collaboration between Ali Farka Touré and Ry Cooder. Although I am more familiar with the call-and-response style of Wassoulou associated with the incomparable Malian vocalist, Oumou Sangaré, and tend to associate African blues with Taureg ensembles, like Etran Finatawa, it was wonderful to listen to a true cross-cultural collaboration. Bringing the blues back from the Mississippi Delta to the country of its origins. Some songs have an obvious "Highlife" influence with the chiming arpeggiated guitars.
Iconic double album of infectious British punk flirting with rockabilly, dub reggae, ska and New Wave, London Calling has been justifiably considered essential and topped critics' lists since 1979 (1980 for the United States). Every single song feels vital and timeless!
All the controversy and critical acclaim inspired by Eminem's debut album "The Slim Shady LP" still feels justified. Tori Amos covered '97 Bonnie & Clyde on her album "Strange Little Girls," recording it from the perspective of the murdered woman overhearing the conversation between father and daughter, but art should inspire debate and response. This material is just as shocking, skillful and inventive, even if the cultural references are a little historically specific allusions to Bill Clinton's sexual misconduct in the Oval office reads like the Kent Starr Report 26 years later. A relic from that era where rap albums were half skits and interludes. "My Fault" is incredible and irresponsible storytelling about giving a recovering heroin addict an accidental overdose of psilocybin, "Role Model" establishes the Eminem/ Slim Shady public persona of trickster and violent clown, underprivileged, underdog, industry outsider with open eyes calling out the moral hypocrisy of American culture. The Dr. Dre production does feel like Freshman year in high school, Eminem's skills as a rapper is prodigious. "Cum On Everybody" is brilliantly irreverent and antisocial. "Rock Bottom" yearns to go from minimum wage to overnight stardom, but might resort to crime instead and will run "up on someone's lawn with guns drawn." The violence and misogyny of Slim Shady as blue collar avenger, full spectrum addict, antisocial, raw doggin' everyone to impregnate the cultural consciousness and walk away with a rainbow coalition of sexually transmitted diseases, a bullied child gets his day on "Brain Damage" and "As The World Turns." Parents outraged by a commercially viable white rapper selling violent records to their white suburban adolescent sons, but unconcerned about economic inequality and systemic racism have missed his point about artistic freedom, the first amendment and fiction: "My baby Mama's not dead." "Bad Meets Evil" is brilliant and lacerating. "Still Don't Give A Fuck" depicts "A lyricist without a clue" who " can't rap anymore, I just murdered the alphabet" rebelling against "all the people {he} offended." The homophobia is less pronounced than I remember, perhaps the GLAAD protests were related to his follow-up album? But, everyone who criticized or supported Eminem both gave him ammunition for subsequent inventive diss tracks and a bloated discography.
Back in the late 1990s, Amazon used to allow users to create publicly posted recommendation lists of their favorite albums, books, films and I recall seeing the surrealistic and iconic cover art for Nick Drake's Pink Moon on quite a few. It was before Gilmore Girls name dropped the album as a way for Rory to pretend to have common interests with her crush, Season one Dean (before Supernatural turned him into Sam), but the title track had already been featured on a Volkswagen advertisement. This third, and final, album from Nick Drake was my adolescent introduction to the artist, and its beautifully melancholic and unaccompanied acoustic guitar made it challenging for me to appreciate his earlier Chamber folk albums that sounded a bit busy with their background singers and orchestral backdrops. Every single song on "Pink Moon" is timeless and engaging. Rather romantically associated with Nick Drake's depression and death, although the album was actually released to critical indifference and hostility two years before he joined the "26 club," most contemporary critics and fans see Pink Moon as a suicide note of elegiac beauty. But, there is joy here that can't be overshadowed by his overdose.
Billie Holiday always wanted to record an orchestral album arranged by Ray Ellis for most of her career, but her previous record labels solely sought to sell more commercially viable jazz material featuring Lady Day. All of Billie Holiday's recordings are powerful and influential, some prefer her earlier recordings for Columbia Records 1933-1944 for the youthful and expressive flexibility of her unique vocal range and impeccable sense of phrasing, and her collaborations with Teddy Wilson and Benny Carter. Others love the emotive darkening of her vocals on Verve records, as all her vices and legal issues took their toll proving that Lady Day truly lived the life of intense despair depicted in her songs. Ray Ellis was disappointed with the deterioration of Billie Holiday's voice on her penultimate record, Lady in Satin, solely because he was looking at it from a technical perspective and not from emotional resonance. Deep, somber, reedy, choked, vibrating with a control, her voice was a peculiar instrument that eschewed the multi-octave "sophistication" and scat-singing improvisation of her peers. Not initially blessed with the best material, her unique mastery of timing and ability to make the most of her limited range helped to invent and expand the American song-book. For many Lady in Satin is the last great album by Lady Day, her Last Recording sessions were manipulated by the producer who adjusted speed and pitch to compensate for her ravaged vocals. It is rumored that Holiday was in such poor health during the Last Recording session that she was propped up on a stool in the studio, barely able to keep her eyes open. On Lady in Satin the weariness is present, beautifully orchestrated, cinematic and somber, elegiac. Nothing swings, Lady in Satin is entirely slow, heart aching ballads with the occasional ghostly background vocals, clarinets, horns, snares, and strings ("But Beautiful"). "I'm A Fool To Want You" begins with such a deep note of despair and sets the tone for a bitter maturity enveloped in strings, the break on "love" and the choking on "time and time again." "Glad to Be Unhappy" makes you believe it, "Unrequited love's a bore, and I've got it pretty bad." The vibrato gargle on "bad" rends my heart. "I'll Be Around" was the original final song of the album (before it got reissued with studio outtakes) and it is perhaps a grim reminder that she would not always be there enduring unrequited passion with patience, is it a resigned promise or an evasion? "The End of a Love Affair" (Mono Take 4 with Vocal Overdub Take 8) is beautiful.
Jeff Buckley, tortured pretty boy bohemian, the music industry wanted to brand him a nepo-baby decades before the concept entered the cultural consciousness. Buckley never knew his father, 1960s folk troubadour, Tim Buckley, and resented having his music connected to the man who abandoned his mother. Being seen as a scruffy, grunge era heart throb affecting an Elvis Presley pose on the cover of his debut album Grace, may have inspired some casual listeners to deprive themselves of his powerful music. Unfortunately, his drowning in the Mississippi, while recording a follow up album in 1997, meant that his limited studio output his been accorded a tragic mythology and left fans wondering what might have been. His voice is mystical and transcendently passionate, Buckley considered Sufi devotional singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan to be his Elvis Presley, and the influence of such global classical, multi-octave singing is evident on "Grace" and "Last Goodbye" whose string sections sound a little like Bollywood instrumentals. But, the guitar playing is also electrifying and the band is beautifully cohesive. Jazz standard "Lilac Wine" starts as a delicate vocal and electric guitar strumming before the brushed snare drums and cymbals come in and build to retreat, leaving Buckley's voice unaccompanied, fragile, tender and stunning. "So Real" comes in waves, earthly and ethereal, building to a guitar feedback battle that ends in a seductively whispered "I love you, but I'm afraid to love you." His acoustic Leonard Cohen cover, which inspired the Canadian songwriter to perform it in a similar style (like how Jimi Hendrix's cover inspired Bob Dylan to perform his "All Along the Watchtower" differently), is probably the most ubiquitous of the songs from Grace (it was also similarly covered by Rufus Wainwright and associated with the soundtrack to Shrek, before it inexplicably became a widely covered "Christmas song" (proving that Christians are quite literal in their assumptions about faith and incapable of interpreting texts (like poetry or the Bible)). "Lover, You Should Have Come Over" is iconic and the lyrics are incredible. Though I have been listening to this album for years the front half tends to stick in my mind a lot more than all of the songs following "Corpus Christi Carol" but "Eternal Life" rocks and "Dream Brother" has mystical, swirling, Middle Eastern guitar melodies and powerful vocals. "Forget Her" is a bluesy closing number that I, ironically, forget. It is such an incredible song, although a fadeout ending is kind of a slap in the face to both artist and the audience, especially since Buckley and the band sounded like they were in a groove and the singer was beginning to vocalize as the song fades to silence.
Britpop for the American mainstream rock fan meant "Wonderwall" or "Song 2" and the UK music press mediated rivalry (perhaps "Connection" if you were open to female fronted Alternative bands), Although there are some 4AD disciples who would argue that the shoegazer genre proliferated during the 1990s with My Bloody Valentine producing record label bankrupting albums of blissful sound and fury, it just wasn't being spun by Casey Kasam. Britpop aficionados would protest apoplectically about Pulp, Cornershop's Brimful of Asha, St. Etienne, Suede, The Stone Roses and any number of NME's Next Big Thing on an Island, but some of the retrospectively revered were obscure in their own time. Eventually Britpop both would and would not reach a fevered pitch with perpetual critics' darlings, Radiohead. The Boo Radleys had a hit record and single in 1995, but it flew above or under my radar. Giant Steps starts out with guitar feedback and audio samples, a staple of what passed as underground music in the UK (see Huggy Bear's "Our Troubled Youth" a split LP with Bikini Kill), and it builds to a catchy neo-psychedelic hook laden "I Hang Suspended." "Upon 9th and Fairchild" is build on a Reggae rhythm adorned with feedback saturated guitar. "Wish I Was Skinny" is melodic power pop with handclap beats and strummed guitars, vocalist is trying to out-Dando the Lemonheads vocalist with sweet yearning, but the music is more complex than anything on "It's a Shame About Ray." I appreciate the chameleonic nature of the Boo Radleys, their consistent distorted guitar unifies everything. "Leaves and Sands" begins softly strumming before a jarring dynamic shift, effects pedals deployed strategically as the guitar tone evolves throughout the song, alternating between soft and ear bleeding. Butterfly McQueen begins as an homage to the Beatles "Blackbird" before morphing into the horn heavy psychedelic wall of noise from Magical Mystery Tour, before becoming a stummed power pop song with vocal harmonies, and then swirling psychedelic tones. "Rodney King - Song For Lenny Bruce" is better than the best My Bloody Valentine track, lurching like a psychedelic merry-go-round. "Thinking of Ways" starts like "Scarborough Fair" that morphs into Syd Barrett demented chamber pop with Beach Boys harmonies and inevitable The Velvet Underground noise with Freakbeat tape experiments. "Barney (...and Me)" reminds me the Cure's "Just Like Heaven" and then the flute comes in, stunning! The Boo Radleys don't seem content to simply let a simple pop song exist without melding it with studio experimentation, sonic allusions, dynamic and genre shifts. It doesn't make Giant Steps an easy listen because the comfort of repetition is discarded, melodies start off find a groove and then the song changes completely. Not every song works, "Spun Around" is just buzzing distorted vocals bereft of melodic ideas, interrupted by backwards vocal samples and nothing memorable. "If You Want It, Take It" comes to the rescue, vintage organ and guitar noodling. "Best Lose the Fear" starts off sounding like the theme song of a 1970s sitcom before it becomes a breezy pop song. "Take The Time Around" has the feedback freakouts of Dinosaur Jr. and quietly contemplative pop passages. "Lazarus" sounds like a dub outtake from the Clash's Sandinista album, shimmering tones alternating in stereo until it hits the one minute mark and it turns into a distorted horn section over electric guitar, before becoming a soft summery pop song with chiming strummed guitars and "ba ba ba ba" background vocals. "One is For" plucked guitar and ambient noise. Considering that the album was originally mastered to seamlessly transition from one track to another, listening to digital versions with even momentary disruption is a less than ideal introduction to Giant Steps. This album demands repeated listening. "The White Noise Revisited" (which name drops the Beatles) and "I've Lost the Reason" are a bit too heavily invested in effects which make it sound like the vocalist is singing into a rotating fan blade, the unadorned pop choruses are not enough to temper the distracting stylistic choices.
Guns N' Roses represent 1980s hair metal, Slash is a gifted guitarist and Axl Rose has an instantly recognizable voice but this entire era of music leaves me generally underwhelmed, even when I was a child at the height of its popularity I always thought that there was something cringe-inducing about the videos on MTV. "Welcome To The Jungle" was ubiquitous, "It's So Easy" with Duff McKagan on lead vocals was surprising but not consistently interesting, "Nightrain" is dull. "Out Ta Get Me" is melodic and engaging but that industry insiders are masquerading as outlaws in leather jackets is laughable. "Mr. Brownstown" sounds like "I Want Candy" (perhaps intentionally?) until it doesn't, decent ode to heroin addiction. "Paradise City (is seven minutes long?!), this is "Sweet Home Alabama" for California motorcyclists, every generation has its music of adolescent rebellion. My Michelle, cowbell! "Your daddy works in porno/
Now that mommy's not around/ She used to love her heroin/But now she's underground/ So you stay out late at night/And you do your dope for free/ Drivin' your friends crazy/ With your life's insanity" Sounds like every LA story in the 1980s and the genre's justification for continuing to have sex with every adolescent groupie from a broken home. "Think About You" is almost a tender transition song for "Sweet Child O' Mine" which is a great song. "Rocket Queen" is incredible!
A sonic palette cleanser following the excess of black leather jacket clad, white, heterosexual, male angst of Guns N' Roses "Appetite for Destruction," Fishbone's "Truth and Soul" is a funky, politically astute merger of ska and metal that sounds as fresh and relevant today as when it was released in 1988. The album begins with a hardcore cover of Curtis Mayfield's "Freddie's Dead" proving that urban African-American communities were still suffering from the same system of exploitation, poverty, addiction and racially motivated political indifference and hostility; although Reaganomics and the CIA introducing crack cocaine to the inner city reflects a level of white supremacist corruption that even Youngblood Priest would find shocking. "Ma and Pa" sounds like an update of "Shame and Scandal (In The Family)" except it comments on a bitter divorce that destroys the child used as a pawn during a custody battle. "Subliminal Fascism," "Slow Bus Movin' (Howard Beach Party)" and "Ghetto Soundwave" all still sound fresh and, sadly, relevant. Although these days in America Fascism has become less subliminal and more mainstream, it just got re-branded as MAGA. The fight for racial equality is still a very slow mode of public transportation driving on deteriorating infrastructure while the billionaires find ways to eschew pay taxes. Ghetto Soundwave could have been describing Amadou Diallo in 2000 or George Floyd. "Change" ends the album with a spiritual and political optimism.
I remember that Pavement's celebrated debut "Slanted and Enchanted" appeared on multiple music periodical lists in 1999; critics retrospectively called it "summery," probably because of the paradoxical first track/single "Summer Babe (Winter Version)." Following the transition of "Alternative" from post-grunge to Limp Bizkit, I relied heavily on Rolling Stone's End of the Year or "Fin de siècle" lists to pursue music that would otherwise not be played on the mainstream radio. Having missed the era of MTV's 120 Minutes Live or even Unplugged, I found artists like Liz Phair, Yo La Tengo, Pavement, Built to Spill, PJ Harvey, Tori Amos via back issues of music periodicals. Unlike some of the artists I listed Pavement was a band whose debut was my introduction to their discography, for the subsequent releases I relied on my local library (which only had a badly scuffed copy of "Brighten the Corners"). I didn't get a copy of "Crooked Rain Crooked Rain" or "Wowee Zowee" until Freshman year of college, so both of those records never inspired the same level of appreciation and heavy rotation as the ones I listened to while in high school. "Silence Kit," begins with an intentional false start and caught dialogue, before a cowbell percussive breezy guitar melody...Stephen Malkmus's slacker lyrics read like an inside joke meandering at a conversational tone without choruses, it shifts into a cul-de-sac and then ends. "Elevate Me Later" sounds like spiritual sequel to "Loretta's Scars" ("Those who sleep with electric guitars/Range rovin' with the cinema stars...There are forty different shades of black/ so many fortresses and ways to attack") Clever lyrics and overlapping guitar textures, incidental hooks and accidental choruses, tossed off time signature changes (Stop Breathin"). The college radio quasi-hit "Cut Your Hair" launched Pitchforkmedia with a sarcastic critique of the indie rock gold rush and a feigned indifference that reduced credibility to haircut aesthetics (but "ironically"). "Newark Wilder" has a 1960s spy movie vibe with snaky guitars, everything has a false ending...."Unfair" anticipated Weezer by a decade for asking to "burn the hills of Beverly" because California has "Manmade deltas and concrete rivers." Every song tends to blur together like they could have defined a perpetually shrugging and snide generation that distrusted being reduced to a marketing demographic. 5-4=unity (is a marvelous night for a Moondance), "Range Life" has a "Zurich is Stained" strum and weary desire to "settle down" but "Don't worry, we're in no hurry" before mocking both The Smashing Pumpkins and Stone Temple Pilots for being "nature kids" and "elegant bachelors." I guess if you can't be overtly political you can gatekeep the scene at a time when selling out mattered to privileged suburban kids passing as bohemian outsiders. "Hit the Plane Down" is terrible and "Fillmore Jive" feels like filler (1994 makes Pavement a few years too late to dismiss hair metal as passé). "Crooked Rain Crooked Rain" was a decently catchy follow up record that fell short of all expectations, because the final ten minutes are excruciatingly poor in execution. Some will argue that the best Pavement material exists on limited edition import singles and obscure compilations that were subsequently combined on Expanded Remastered Editions of their studio albums, which can be differentiated from standard issue by the colon and clever subtitle appended to the original album name (i.e., Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain: LA's Desert Origins adds 12 b-sides from singles and a second CD with two concert recordings and a John Peel Session). I am not reviewing those editions because I am not a completist.
"I live uptown, I live downtown, I live all around" utter banality from the bearded lips of the bloated Lizard King on the Doors final studio album, L.A. Woman. "The Changeling" is a feeble attempt at James Brown funk, a stylistic departure from the demented carnival music courtesy of Ray Manzarek's keyboards ("Love Her Madly"). "Been Down So Long" appropriates the title of Richard Fariña's book "Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me" and sounds like a pale imitation of Creedence Clearwater Revival. On "Cars Hiss By My Window" Jim Morrison has the white boy blues and attempts to imitate a harmonica solo with vocal improvisation. I have been actively dreading the buildup to "L.A. Woman," the album version is much better than I remember (it must be the eleven minute extended version that has the self-indulgent organ solo that feels like downing). L'America is gloomy. "Hyacinth House" starts off beautifully as the inspiration to every 1980s jangle pop band and then Jim Morrison opens his mouth. "Riders on the Storm" is really the only song where it all comes together with a memorable enough melody, production style and dark poetic lyricism that it transcends the pretentiousness of the rest of the album.
Not typically a fan of metal music, but Motörhead has the adrenaline paced energy, hooks, anarchistic attitude and subtle searing proficiency to appeal to punk, rockabilly and blues fans without alienating heavy metal enthusiasts. The title track is probably the most easily identifiable Motörhead song, but the entire album is transcendent and powerful, full of infectious melodies, Lemmy's growl makes the usual lust-filled cliche sound like a call for revolution. "Fire Fire" he sees someone's erotic and destructive potentials and loves the "conflagration." I can't condone the song "Jailbait," especially since Lemmy's sexual exploits are quite well documented.
A Keith Haring background with a heavily modified boombox with horns and feathers and a cheetah print handle adorns "Duck Rock." Malcolm McLaren the fashion designer and music manager who strategically aligned himself with the nascent UK punk scene, dubbing John Lydon "Johnny Rotten" and encouraging the Slits to wear nothing but mud on the cover of their Cut album. A sleazy misanthropic opportunist. Creates a sample based New Wave/hip-hop hybrid, global amalgam of spoken word Afro-pop ("Double Dutch") and Square dancing ("Buffalo Gals"). Hearing "When they do the Double Dutch, that's them dancing," and realize that Liz Phair was winkingly appropriating it for her, much better, song "Whip-Smart." The entire album is cultural appropriation by an cynical provocateur and may have influenced such post-colonial experiments by Lizzy Mercier Descloux and M.I.A. but at least those third-world rhythms felt honest and collaborative. "Punk It Up" and "Jive My Baby" sounds like the Indestructible Beat of Soweto, unsurprisingly McLaren did not credit any of the South African musicians on this record. If I hadn't grown up with the Talking Heads and Paul Simon's "Graceland" (which is not without controversy) and felt compelled to seek out original South African music, "Duck Rock" might have been a revolutionary exposure to global pop. Instead it just feels like exploitation from a misanthrope who courted controversy his entire life. "Song For Chango" in title has a smug condescension for the political conditions and revolutionary aspirations of African music. The Brit-centric slant of this list of essential records is quite obvious.
High school nostalgia, I will associate this album with PJ Harvey's "Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea" both have an optimistic pop sheen and stadium rock production (and both artists toured together at the time). U2 hadn't yet become a perpetual punchline although they were well on their way to becoming complacent celebrities with performative activism and albums of love songs. The first four tracks on a theoretical side A were all radio hit singles and product placed, comfortable on corporate playlists with Dido, Sting and Bon Jovi and the soundtracks of CBS sitcoms. "All That You Can't Leave Behind" was banned in Myanmar because Bono dedicated "Walk On" to dedicated to Burmese human rights activist Aung San Suu Kyi, which sounds a bit convoluted because she was under house arrest. I suppose it could be about the plight of refugees, exiles, and political prisoners, but it often just sounds like a bland affirmation of "moving on," although it had a different meaning after 9/11. After getting to "Kite" I realized that the remainder of the album is a mystery to me, yet it offers no sonic innovations or surprises. Rhyming "new media" with "the big idea" is indolent. "In a Little While" does have a blues-inspired guitar and gritty vocal delivery that "elevates" it above the preceding songs. "Wild Honey" is saccharine and generic, all breezes, bees and swinging through the trees. "Peace on Earth" aspires to invigorate the album with political content but it just sounds shallow and insipid. If only lines like "Peace on Earth/Hear it every Christmas time/But hope and history won't rhyme" were more present in a song that contains this verse: "They're reading names out/Over the radio/All the folks, the rest of us/Won't get to know/Sean and Julia/Gareth, Ann and Breda/Their lives are bigger than/Any big idea." Though well-intentioned it just sounds superficial and clichéd. New York is an tuneless and meandering ode to the City that inspires countless better songwriters filled with generic statements like "in New York summers get hot" and "Irish, Italians, Jews and Hispanics/Religious nuts, political fanatics in the stew/Happily not like me and you/That's where I lost you." This is the sound of an popularly acclaimed band coasting on an established image and nostalgic fanbase. "Grace it's a name for a girl...it's also a thought that changed the world" such adolescent banality seeking to combine the poetic, philosophic and political into something profound, but just sounds smug and obvious.
Uneven but influential, Public Enemy's "Fear of a Black Planet" will forever be associated with Spike Lee's "Do The Right Thing" (because "Fight The Power" is perpetually blaring on the boombox of Radio Raheem). A lot of the sample based interludes expand the run-time but contribute very little to album cohesion. Flava Flav's "911 Is A Joke" and "Can't Do Nuttin' Fo' Ya, Man!" contrast with Chuck D.'s serious political tracks but both feel less than essential. "Who Stole The Soul?", "Fear of a Black Planet," "Revolutionary Generation" and "Burn Hollywood Burn" are salient critiques of institutional racism. And "War at 33 1/3" is impressive in terms of flow and content. "Fight the Power" is the obvious breakout hit.
I have hated Metallica since childhood and rolled my eyes seeing Master of Puppets as the next 1001 Album to Listen to Before You Die. "Battery" begins with Spanish style arpeggiated guitar playing before bashing away on a thrash metal rhythm, it isn't terrible and they are obviously proficient musicians who alternate sledgehammer noise with complex instrumental interludes. James Hetfield has a distinctive voice. "Master of Puppets" is an almost nine minute epic about governmental control with masterful dynamic shifts. "The Thing That Should Not Be" an ode to the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, with vivid poetic lyrics about hybrid-children watching the seas of madness for the old ones to arise. "Welcome Home (Sanitarium)" is beautifully melodic. This album benefits from not being the over-exposed MTV era post-1990s material, not recognizing singles or even potential commercial radio pop potential because all of the songs are longer than what corporate playlists would allow. "Disposable Heroes" is brilliant, how a culture uses abstract ideas of patriotism to compel young men and women to enlist, wage wars, and die alone in quasi-anonymity "clutching my gun" rigorously trained to be obedient and to negate identity, and in death called heroes but viewed as disposable. "Leper Messiah" takes on institutional religion "Make your contribution and you get the better seat" pew politics or a better place in Heaven. "Orion" a stunning instrumental. "Damage, Inc." thrashing final track, raging against a system.
Don Gallucci produced Fun House with some reservations about being able to capture The Stooges' live energy. The Stooges were much better proto-punk than the Doors, though their records sold poorly in the psychedelic pop optimism of the age of Aquarius, like the Velvet Underground, The Stooges would influence countless generations of rock imitators and journalists. Considering that punk is commonly associated with three chord primitivism The Stooges have more in common with their grittier psychedelic peers, while still sounding refreshingly current and accessible. "Down on the Street" swirling guitars, chugging rhythms and snarling come-ons and howling desire. "Loose" is loud, energetic, and sordid "I stick it deep inside....because I'm loose." "T.V. Eye" sounds muted and murky by comparison (I wonder if it is a remastering issue, or whether the original mix was that dramatically inconsistent? After listening to the 2005 remastered version which seeks to rectify the master volume disparity, it still sounds a bit restrained). I will always associate T.V. Eye with Ewan McGregor and Todd Haynes Velvet Goldmine. "Dirt" brings the volume back with a supple, seductive bassline and searing guitar that alternates with a chiming quality and a primal pulsing noise. Iggy Pop's Howlin' Wolf and Screamin' Jay Hawkins inspired vocals are profoundly and provocatively sexy...you can hear the entire discography of Joy Division being established by "Dirt." "1970" also sounds scuzzier and murky the volume disparity of tracks has to be intentional because the saxophone is louder than the entire band! "Fun House" is clearer and better mixed (Iggy Pop continues to "feel alright") but as the song progresses it starts to get quieter. L.A. Blues is chaotic dissonance and grunting animalistic sounds over feedback and a raunchy skronking saxophone.
That the first album by The Beatles recommended by the random 1001 Albums to Listen to Before You Die, is one that I never listened to as much as Rubber Soul, Revolver, or Sergeant Pepper. "Come Together" has the most distinctive opening percussion, bass and piano progression and it all seems intended to test production possibilities and stereo technology. The instruments hit you from different proximities that drift across speakers and headphones. The lyrics are Dadaist stream of consciousness jive. "Something" the bass is powerful, the guitars have a strategic strummed and rhythmic minimalism and the organ and string section, this song sounds pieced together but it still accessible pop music. "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" Ringo's drums dominate the mix, piano and synth... a goofy pub (granny) song about a medical student murderer. "Oh! Darling" is incredible and passionately gritty, an uncharacteristic intense vocal performance from Paul (evidently John though he should have sung it). "Octopus's Garden" Ringo Starr writing more proto-twee pop with some country western elements, but I kind of love it, a sonic sister to "Yellow Submarine" (a song I never minded). "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" John Lennon singing to Yoko Ono, the repetitive lyrics allow for instrumental complexity, time shifts and experimentation. That intentionally abrupt studio ending, because the tape was going to run out is so jarring. Side Two begins with "Here Comes The Sun" handclaps and vocal harmonies, an acoustic song with layered production and no John Lennon, followed by John Lennon's backwards baroque triple tracked vocal harmonies of "Because" with a Moog synthesizer adding some futuristic noise. "You Never Give Me Your Money" is the first part of the multi song suite is complex, shifting and devoid of choruses "Sun King" only connected by a sample of crickets is beautiful blues with swirling guitars and triple tracked ethereal vocals, Mean Mr. Mustard rocks with tambourines! "Polythene Pam" is an almost low fidelity blues jam dominated by percussion and vocals until it ends with a guitar solo (in this one song I can see the inspiration for Scottish indie pop band The Vaselines), She Came in Through The Bathroom Window is a more cohesive full band pop song "Sunday's on the phone to Monday, Tuesday's on the phone to me." "Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight" is probably the Beatles song most covered by global jazz singers, it begins as a ballad of intense longing and then transitions to a melodic march that is all chorus before reprising the melody of "You Never Give Me Your Money." The End is Ringo's only drum solo. "Her Majesty" is a goofy folk acoustic McCartney song fragment, it was intended to be part of the song suite/medley between Mean Mr. Mustard and Polythene Pam but McCartney had it cut because he didn't like the way it sounded incorporated into the medley, so it became a "hidden track." What more could be said about the Beatles? Abbey Road is iconic, probably more for the cover art than its actual music. The influence of interconnected medley/suites in psychedelic pop can be seen in albums from the Elephant 6 collective (Olivia Tremor Control and Neutral Milk Hotel).
San Francisco-based, poetic Alt-rock with echoes of jangle-pop, a Paisley Underground approach to Americana. R.E.M. was the most commercially successful of the folk rock weirdoes, but there were other equally talented and morose new romantics Winter Hours and American Music Club. Mark Eitzel had been a name in the back issues of my Rolling Stone magazines and the used copy of Spin's Alternative Record Guide that expanded by tastes in many unanticipated directions. But, until this list recommended California by American Music Club, which is only available digitally via their bandcamp these days, that I connected the name Eitzel to an unfamiliar album and band. There is a slight twang on the passionate "Lonely" but it still sounds like the Byrds and honestly Winter Hours is the best comparison for the persistent swirling melancholy. Other reviewers have evoked the ghost of Nick Drake and music periodicals which branded Eitzel the best songwriter of 1991 see visions of U2, neither sounds apt to me. "Bad Liquor" is a manic and grinding hardcore take on honky-tonk music, ominous bass, harmonica solo, gritty and shouting vocals I am reminded of Lone Justice with their underground Americana grit-punk spirit. Mark Eitzel is a profound storyteller, wandering the San Francisco streets from a dissatisfying sexual encounter to a brief connection with a serial killer who wonders what song he is whistling. "Jenny" is a bleak acoustic guitar song, it reminds me of adolescent Kristin Hersh (The Letter and Delicate Cutters). Western Sky is uplifting by comparison and reminds me of the Magnetic Fields, except the beauty of the object has also been tarnished. This is a somber and sad affair, not likely to inspire a lot of repeat listening. "Highway 5" more road weary blues with feedback "a beautiful California landscape dead ends in the sky." The closing "Last Harbor" is all Red House Painters, but Eitzel doesn't sound like his Slowcore or Sadcore peers, there is a sweet timidity and self-loathing to his voice and lyrics.
Late 1970s singer-songwriter cult solo album from Beach Boys' drummer, Dennis Wilson, the only surfer in the band who best exemplified the California Dream and has a nightmarish association with the Manson Family. River Song has a well-produced chorus of many to flesh out his ravaged by his vices voice. What's Wrong is a limping boogie rock and roll, Moonshine is unexpected soaring and electronic with strings, synths and piano. Friday Night starts like Pink Floyd and continues to sound like it, but Wilson's voice sounds strained when it comes in. Dreamer is delta funk from a tormented soul who witnessed the price of fame, it shifts to a redemptive piano and bells interlude before the bass harmonica, tuba and saxophone returns. Thoughts of You, is a piano ballad about the impermanence of nature and love, It becomes a more menacingly morose affair with echo-laden vocals and strings. Time begins with Wilson repeated "home" a destination where "she waits to share love" but he admits that he is the kind of guy to mess around because he knows lots of women, impressive tempo shift! Obviously this album would produce an elite, word of mouth, influence. You and I has a Yacht Rock sound but the opening line "I've never seen the light that people talk about" is the most heart-breaking pronouncement I have ever heard in a love song by an alcoholic heroin addict burning out. Pacific Ocean Blue is a bluesy rock adjacent jam "We live on the edge of a body of water/ Warmed by the blood of the cold hearted slaughter of otter/Wonder how she feels mother seal/It's no wonder the Pacific Ocean is blue" with a gospel quality. This song could have been a minor hit. Farewell My Friend is beautiful but these melancholy songs about estrangement, longing and disillusionment will always be limited in their interpretation due to the nature of his death. Rainbows is a life affirming and upbeat song. End of the Show is quite somber. We are in bonus track territory because Legacy records gathered and remastered Pacific Ocean Blue, recordings intended for his unreleased follow-up album Bambu and various outtakes. Not certain that I am in the mood to give another CD full of material, let alone four bonus track, a listen. Tug of Love was not that compelling, Only with You is better in fact the vocal melody is a bit more dynamic than everything on the official album and the piano playing is more assured. Holy Man, an instrumental whose Wilson rejected vocal take is forever lost to the world, on the second CD is a reconstructed version with recalled melody and lyrics performed by Foo Fighters Taylor Hawkins, but I am not likely to explore that. Mexico, not labelled an instrumental, but it is and it sounds like the saddest ode to a country known for bright colors and festive music.
Low fidelity debut album from Paul McCartney that was recorded at house in secrecy, all instruments were performed by Paul (except when the contributions were by Linda) and overdubbed on four-track tape. Short songs, minimal blues fragments, "Every Night" is the first song that feels fully formed, his vocalizations flirt with the melody of "You Never Give Me Your Money." Less experimental and electronic than his subsequent solo album but "Hot As Sun/Glasses" sort of is a preview of coming attractions. "Junk" a song about the economic impact on small businesses or nostalgia? "Man We Was Lonely" has a sort of "Our House" jauntiness, a duet of domestic bliss with vocals from Linda and then an affected Southern twang accent from an icon of British rock..."Oo you" has great cowbell and blues guitar swagger, a song about someone who walks, talks, looks like a woman. "Momma Miss America" is such a contrast to John Lennon's "Mother" from Plastic Ono Band, an instrumental comprised of two parts, funky bass, piano, searing guitar and rather rough percussion. "Teddy Boy," strummed guitar pop song about a child who becomes jealous of his mother's lover and escapes into his head. It seems like this album aspires to Syd Barrett solo albums of pop whimsy. But, with a lot of less than essential instrumental tracks it doesn't really seem like a cohesive album. Though it is intriguing to see what Paul McCartney sought to create from the comfort of his home. "Maybe I'm Amazed" is the sonic sequel to "Hey Jude" and the only single from this album that sounds like a Beatles outtake or future Wings material, but it has never been a favorite of mine. "Kreen-Akrore" is percussion heavy with monkey howls and then Beach Boys vocalization and then breathing, perhaps it was an homage to the experimental music being produced by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, but it just feels endless and uninspired.
British Blue-eyed soul singer Dusty Springfield recorded in Memphis in 1968 as an attempt to revive her singing career, unfortunately the album was not as commercially successful as Atlantic records had hoped. But, it has achieved posthumous acclaim for the "Wishin' N Hopin'" and "I Only Want To Be With You" vocalist who was trying to cope with the shifting pop cultural paradigm from girl group sound to Soul. Her sultry delivery seems a bit restrained at times, perhaps out of fear of being unfavorably compared to her idol Aretha Franklin (the inspiration for her signing to Atlantic Records). And the band has an interesting combination of Soul, pop and odd flourishes of rock and roll. "Son of a Preacher Man" would be recorded by Aretha after the quasi-success of Dusty's version. "The Windmills of Your Mind" is a bossanova ballad, also recorded by Petula Clark. "So Much Love" and "Don't Forget About Me" could easily be Northern Soul, proto-disco hits of yearning. The bonus tracks are stunning including "Willie & Laura Mae Jones" (a soul song about impoverished rural neighbors gathering together to sing and celebrate life across racial differences), "All the King's Horses" a faster paced song based on the nursury rhyme about never being put together again after falling in love, and her version of Carole King's "You've Got A Friend" are all iconic.
The Modern Lovers, proto-punk with a Warhol Factory connection via vocalist Jonathan Richman. "Roadrunner" an ode to the adolescent thrill of driving the Mass Pike with the radio on and hanging out at Stop N' Shop, nothing this infectious has been written about the power of Massachusetts since The Standells loved the "Dirty Water" on the bands of the River Charles and declared Boston their home despite the curfews at Women's college dormitories. "Astral Plane" has Velvet Underground inspired stuttering guitar and keyboard noodling, but meeting your lover on the Astral Plane otherwise you'll go insane is not gritty the Heroin vistas of a leather-clad poets and poseurs. "Old World," is an affirmation of loving parents, arcades, the 1950s and the old world, like a proficient version of the Shaggs "Who Are Parents?" "Pablo Picasso" is probably the best garage rock song about the surrealist painter that rhymes Picasso with "asshole." ("Pablo Picasso never got called an asshole....not like you"). Although Jonathan Richman would top this Modern Lovers track with "Vincent Van Gogh" from his Rockin' and Romance album. I associate the Modern Lovers with Big Star, both late 1970s guitar bands with unique subject matter and niche popularity. "She Cracked" about a girl who eats garbage and does drugs while Richman eats healthy and stays home. Punk that overlaps with twee pop finds its origins with this album. "Hospital," proof that the Modern Lovers can produce something other than propulsive rock, begins as a slow and somber organ dominated dirge and eventually it has a tangential tempo shift while Richman contemplates the ambivalence of loving a self-destructive girl, but he's in love with her eyes and walking down scary streets while crying, perhaps this is his Sister Ray, except he is "straight." "Someone I Care About" is the anti-sex and drugs rock song about wanting a serious relationship not a "cocaine-sniffing triumph in the bar." "Girlfriend" another art nerd ode to love with tongue in check allusions to Them's Gloria and the Shangra-Las ("G-I-R-L- F-R-E-N"). "Modern World" loves the USA and dropping out of BU, but hates cigarette smoking girls. Beat Happening would reduce this style of punk to two chords or less and talk about "Hot Chocolate Nation" and eating Bananas in Pajamas, but Jonathan Richman still has a jam punk sneer under the geek earnestness. Bonus tracks aplenty: "Dignified and Old" hating yourself because the girl you love won't call you back, but one day you can be dignified and elderly together. "I'm Straight" ponders why hippie Johnny is always stoned if this world and the girl he is with is so beautiful (Minor Threat eat your heart out). "Government Center" imagines having a rock hop to disrupt the monotony of bureaucracy, making all the secretaries feel better when they put the stamps on letters and ledgers.
Monks, a proto-punk, garage band comprised of American GI's stationed in West Germany, all the members sported tonsures and produced music that would inspire no wave doom duo Suicide, they also sound like a minimalist Silver Apples and British post-punk band from the early 2000s, Clinic. Slashing guitars and droning organ very simple and repetitive percussion, evidently the band preferred to emphasize rhythm and distortion rather than melody. At times it sounds like the Fugs or the Unholy Modal Rollers went electric, with a similar sense of irreverence and experimentation, at other times it is the early Velvet Underground fronted by Iggy Pop. Six-string banjo and floor tom for the vocalist it still sounds fresh and surreal.
Pet Shop Boys synth-pop British queer rave music that never had enough of an edge for me. Although some of the lyrics have that poetic queer yearning to be exciting, sophisticated, bored by the banality of everything around you, and perpetually young. This Must Be The Place I Waited Years to Leave has a Depeche Mode quality. This is only an essential album in Great Britain, Robert Christgau's critical discourse evasively calls" Behaviour" "likable" for "consumers attuned to its overriding aesthetic or individual vision." "To Face The Truth" may have inspired Yo La Tengo's "Season of the Shark" (I wonder if that is intentional?) It does seem to be a song that responds to the 1980s synth pop lounge of Everything But the Girl and influences Massive Attack, while simultaneously evoking classic jazz and pop ballads. "How Can You Expect To Be Taken Seriously?" is incredible, an incisive critique of a popular female singer courting media controversy and celebrity while attempting to seem an "intellectual giant" with cultural credibility. The album has subtle charms, wry intelligence, and camp sensibility.
An intriguingly theatrical and Germanic release from Dagmar Krause vocalist, formerly of British Avant-Rock group Art Bears and the German band, Slapp Happy. A modern attempt to present German-Austrian composer Hanns Eisler's anthemic, pro-communist works to a contemporary, English-language audience more familiar with Bertolt Brecht than someone exiled by the Nazis and the blacklisted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. It has become almost impossible to find this release, I had to stream it on YouTube. Fairly short songs that all sound bleak and sophisticated, but mostly for an audience idealizing the Weimar Republic as an era of bohemian smoke-filled cabarets, otherwise this is a chore. 26 songs is a lot.
The Band, formed as Hawks in Ontario, were famous for being the ensemble that toured with Bob Dylan in 1966, when he went "electric." There is something about them that I don't enjoy, it could be the vocalists. Although "Caledonia Mission" is more engaging and gritty and "The Weight" is iconic, but I must admit that in this case cover versions improve the original every time. "We Can Talk" sounds pretty good with the three vocalists on the track, "Long Black Veil" is an old country song updated with tuba and organ. Chest Fever attempts an Iron Butterfly inspired funereal distorted organ but then morphs into a minimal funk, the vocals are buried in the mix, but everything just sounds muddy on this track. "Lonesome Suzy" has a lot of shaky falsetto but solid instrumentation. Perhaps my queer generation associates "This Wheel's On Fire" as the theme song of BBC's Absolutely Fabulous, an ironic look at the counter-culture selling their idealism for suburban comfort while still clinging to their youth and waning cultural credibility (of course that version was performed by Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger & The Trinity and is a bit more avant-garde and intense than the Band).
The quiet Beatle is responsible for the epic "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," Revolver's opener "Taxman," and the local morning news perpetual background of "Here Comes The Sun." He also played sitar of several of the Beatles flirtation with non-Western instrumentation and philosophy, also remained devoted to the tenants of Hare Krishna "My Sweet Lord" a tender folk ballad to a deity who is perpetually young and jubilant. (Lora Logic, punk rock saxophonist of X-Ray Spex and Essential Logic has her own ode to Krishna entitled "Fanfare in the Garden.") But, if the Beach Boys could have a quasi-controversial hit with "God, Only Knows" (because Christians are literal and fear ambiguity) why shouldn't "My Sweet Lord" be the first single from All Things Must Pass? "What Is Life" is a song whose melody I originally heard in Khmer sung by Ros Sereysothea, the Golden Voice of Phnom Penh.
UK blues iconic probably for the participation of Eric Clapton. The Mono and Stereo mixes do seem dramatically different on my sound system.
The Marshall Mathers LP is the Follow up to the Slim Shady LP, when Eminem had to confront commercial success and media controversy inspired by the violent, misogynistic and homophobic lyrical content of his debut. The rapper's response was to double down on his antisocial persona with "Kill You" while simultaneously calling out the hypocrisy of parents who expect popular culture to be a babysitter in their absence. "Kill You" is followed immediately by the Dido sampling radio single "Stan" which inspired a millennial slang about toxic and pathological celebrity worship. "Who Knew" reflects on Eminem's rags to riches story while reflecting on "how much damage can one pen do?" His flow is prodigious and the production is much better than the debut, and after revisiting his debut I feel like the homophobic content protested by GLAAD was sort of blown out of proportion.
Karen Carpenter will always be associated with the eating disorder that claimed her too young and brought anorexia to public attention. I remember watching Behind The Music and seeing advertisements for multi-CD collections of the Carpenters or other Time Life compilations of soft rock so some sonic snippets are all that I was exposed to otherwise it was background music. "We've Only Just Begun" is an incredible pop song whose dynamic shift on the chorus is everything. "Love Is Surrender" is bossa nova lite. "Maybe It's You" snare drum, flute, oboe, piano and celeste, chamber pop with a swelling theatrical score. Organ, bass and woodblock, countrified soft rock on Reason To Believe, the harmonies are achingly beautiful. Help, a harpsichord and organ with percussion Beatles cover, not improved despite Karen Carpenter's technically superior vocal ability, it has a Bee Gees style sheen that makes the cover feel unnecessary. "(They Long To Be) Close to You" is the most popular song by The Carpenters, a lament of aching vocals and Hey Jude basic piano, the percussion is great if Karen if responsible for the playing and arrangement, guess it was Hal Blaine. A lot of Burt Bacharach compositions and covers. This version of "Baby It's You" sounds positively restrained compared to the blue-eyed soul of Smith. "I'll Never Fall In Love Again" competently performed. I can't help but wonder what it would have been like for the duo to have artistic control, evidently Karen's controlling mother dictated how her daughter could sing and wanted Karen to record all the drum arrangements herself, but the live performer was not accustomed to the technique required for studio sessions and though she is credited with playing the drums, Hal Blaine also consistently contributed to the Carpenters studio discography. Crescent Noon is an impressive ballad with heartbreaking vocal delivery from Karen, but the background vocals are a bit distracting. Mr. Guder is as irritating as it is startling inventive. "I Kept On Loving You" is a Richard led song that is poppier and less somber. "Another Song" has an intensity absent from other Karen hit singles and ends in an unexpected psychedelic jazz jam.
South African trumpet, cornet and flugelhorn player Hugh Masekela. I can't help but wonder if his 1972 album "Home Is Where The Music Is" appears on the list because it was recorded in London following his exile from South Africa, and this list has a heavy British bias. But, jazz critics also consider it a highlight of a very prolific career. Masekela had international commercial success in the late 1960s with original compositions but became better known for pop jazz covers. "Home Is Where The Music Is" dispenses with comfort of the familiar, Jazz vocalists were struggling to stay relevant when pop radio switched to rock and roll and Julie London was covering The Doors, while Carmen McRae dramatically interpreted Simon and Garfunkel's The Sounds of Silence. Hugh Masekela records an album of songs by South African composers and singers. It sounds mellow and warm. But, this isn't the Mbaqanga of South African pop music under apartheid that would inspire the cultural theft of Paul Simon's Graceland, this is not "world music" as signifier of cultural difference. In a way this Afro-jazz album transcends imposed labels, reviewers consider it to be a cross-cultural conversation between Western conventions and an unheard by Western ears, African musical heritage. "Minawa" is beautifully mellow and sprawling, "The Big Apple" bears a passing resemblance to "Summertime" before the familiar is spontaneously composed away.
Love Lies Bleeding is incredible, but the elegiac Funeral For a Friend is an extended instrumental tinged with mournful organ. "Candle in the Wind" about a queer youth identifying with the tragic and ephemeral beauty of Marilyn Monroe whose legacy lasted longer than her brief life of exploitation and manipulation. "Bennie and the Jets," "Saturday Night's Alright (For Fighting)" and "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" are iconic and overplayed. "Jamaica Jerk-Off" is questionable, but even Bonnie Raitt recorded a calypso song complete with "patois" in the 1970s.
War was released the year that I was born and "Sunday, Bloody Sunday" and "New Year's Day" were perpetually on MTV and corporate radio. Post-punk informed by Irish politics, but with enough pop sheen to become the background music of a generation. U2 sounds like late career The Clash flirting with dub reggae and slashing, angular guitar or Gang of Four without the Marxist critique and art school situationism. New Year's Day sounds more like the Cure and Echo and the Bunnymen, all bleakly romantic "blood red skies" and "beginning again." All the other songs tend to blend together it the crash of stadium rock produced percussion, and lacerating guitars, buried bass and Bono's voice. Drowning Man is quieter, chiming guitars and strings, Bono voice goes swoops between raspy belting and falsetto. The Refugee all frenetic tribal drumming and staccato vocals, Red Light is a trumpet and Kid Creole's backing vocalists the Coconuts. Surrender is surprisingly good and catchy. 40 a light melody with haunting harmonies is the shortest song on the entire album.
No one is the history of cultural appropriation has ever said "play that funky music white boy." Rhode Island Art school ensemble and CBGB headliner that came to embody NYC punk before transitioning to New Wave, Talking Heads are definitively 1980s like Patrick Nagel, Reaganomics, Don Delillo and post-structuralism. Talking Heads 77 is iconic, angular and catchy, Remain in Light is a critic's favorite that incorporates global grooves and Afrobeat poly-rhythms all while abandoning choruses. Radio and MTV hit "Once In a Lifetime" and "Crosseyed and Painless," which would later appear in the classic Jonathan Demme directed concert documentary "Stop Making Sense" are fractured funk pop with surreal spoken word lyrics. "Listening Wind" is a spoken word meditation on cultural imperialism and terrorism. "Houses in Motion" the death march of consumerism, while "Seen and Not Seen" is a Laurie Anderson inspired spoken word meditation on identity mediated by cultural media and narrative conventions. It is surprising how devoid of hooks most of these stream of consciousness songs tend to be.
Fascinating to find an obscure American 1960s band whose discography has been reissued on Sundazed Records. Elephant Mountain was recorded at a time when co-founder Jimmy Corbitt left the band, leaving Jesse Colin Young as the primary songwriter. Elephant Mountain has a surprising amount of instrumental interludes that at times resemble Booker T. & the M.G.'s. Psychedelic rock mixed with country jug band, but all the tracks do not add up to a cohesive album. Beautiful and Sham are worth revisiting.
The Velvet Underground's melodic self-titled third album, without Andy Warhol's "production," Nico's flat Germanic monotone or John Cale's classical dissonance, is my favorite. I guess today will be an opportunity to compare and contrast the "Valentin" mix and Lou Reed's "Closet Mix" Doug Yule sings "Candy Says," a delicate rock ballad about transgender Factory scenester and actress Candy Darling. "What Goes On" has that steadily propulsive Moe Tucker beat, guitar distortion (evidently the result of Lou Reed using multiple guitar solo tracks and mixing them all together to produce an overwhelming wall of noise), and organ. "Some Kinda Love" a cowbell and bass drum, with perversely literate Lou Reed lyrics, and mellow melodic guitars. "Pale Blue Eyes" tambourine and tenderness. "Jesus" has Doug Yule's bass playing something that sounds like an attempt to play Jackson Browne's These Days. "Beginning to See the Light" is incredible chiming guitars and bouncing bass, with a yelped exuberance from Lou Reed. The guitar solo from "I'm Set Free" inspired Galaxie 500, Luna and every other Dean Wareham album and most of Yo La Tengo's vast discography. "The Murder Mystery" is nine experimental minutes of simultaneous vocal contributions from every member, spoken word from Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison, and lilting tones from Moe Tucker and Doug Yule, unhinged piano solo and chanting, but it all sounds better than most of White Light/White Heat. "After Hours" is an acoustic song with vocals from Moe Tucker, I had no idea why it sounds distorted and scratchy with surface noise. The Closet Mix obscures a lot of the instruments, especially Moe Tucker's percussion, while the vocals tend to dominate the mix. "What Goes On" erases the background vocals and the multi-tracked guitar solo sounds flatter and less intense. While the vocal harmonies on "Candy Says" sounds more pronounced than on the Valentin mix. "Some Kinda Love" (Closet Mix) is a dramatically different vocal take, intimate and breathy purring. "Jesus" the vocals do blend better on the Closet Mix with some subtle reverb at the end. "Beginning to See the Light" (Closet Mix version 1), has a dreamier sound and the vocals seemed to be more embedded in the mix, some of Lou Reed's falsetto seems to jarringly leap out of the Valentin mix and the blend at the end is much better ("how does it feel to be loved"). I do miss the proximity of the drums in the Valentin mix of I'm Set Free, the focus on the vocals just makes the strangeness of the off harmonies more prominent, although the guitar solo sounds incredible. The Murder Mystery Closet Mix makes the voices sound clearer and is actually an improvement! Bass is almost inaudible on After Hours (Closet Mix), vocal echo is interesting.
Play was inescapable in 1999, topping every music periodical's end of the year list of best albums in the era of rap-rock. Evidently Moby was so demoralized by a critically reviled and commercially unsuccessful previous series of releases, that he intended this to be his final album before going back to college to study architecture. Every song was featured in diverse advertisements and on the soundtracks to television shows and movies. The first half of the album is comprised entirely of licensed hits and postmodern blues sampling euphoria, the second half tends to drift off into instrumental territory. I don't know that I ever made it through all sixty-four minutes of the original record, in fact I thought that "My Weakness" was an obscure Sigur Ros track whenever it was featured. "South Side" is better with vocals contributed by Gwen Stefani, but that mix appears to had faded into obscurity (it's not even featured as a b-side appended to the Deluxe Edition), "Honey," "Find My Baby," "Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad," and "Natural Blues" all feature samples of blues singers and are incredible. "Bodyrock" is hip-hop inspired.
Diane Charlemagne is everything on the "Inner City Life" part of the "Timeless" suite that is the 21 minute opening track of the Goldie album, also entitled "Timeless." Beloved in 1995 by the UK music periodicals and other trend-starved critical outlets gazing across the pond (Village Voice, Spin, Alternative Press), but most Americans are only familiar with Goldie because of his brief romance with Icelandic superstar Björk. Drum and Bass emerged from the UK Jungle scene, which translates as a variation on Techno, Dance Music and Electronica the finer points can be endlessly discussed by afficionados of the genre. I appreciate the propulsive lightness of "Saint Angel" "State of Mind" is harp, piano, synth strings and soulful vocals. Lovely, feathery, stuttering, ethereal....but ultimately background music that overstays its welcome.
The Jam's debut album, In the City is a personal favorite, mod-punk with a propulsive catchy 1960s sense of melodic vocal harmonies and an outsider's perspective of the British class structure and subculture. All Mod Cons has the band diversifying their guitar, mod and freakbeat inspired New Wave with a Kinks cover ("David Watts") and a couple of acoustic songs ("English Rose" and the opening of "Fly"). Paul Weller was experiencing writer's block on this third album and evidently cast aside a few songs that were later included on the album, but they mattered so little to him that lyrics were not included on the original liner. The first three songs have the sort of pop culture and social criticism of the UK found in the discography of the Kinks, this influence culminates in David Watts. "In the Crowd" has a similar lyrical sympathy with "Going Underground" and "Away From the Numbers" a sense of isolation in a culture, a subculture, a demographic, a generation, but it eventually evolves into a Freakbeat inspired guitar feedback rave recalling so many British Invasion bands. I don't know if this coheres into a complete and essential album, but there are moments of New Wave sheen that makes me recoil until the punk energy and attitude comes in.
Neil Young's After the Gold Rush peered out at me from my parents much neglected record collection with its memorable black and white cover art with gilded lettering. Though I probably sought out the 1960s folk rock of supergroup: Crosby, Stills, Nash (and Young) instead of the solo work of Daryl Hannah's other half. His voice is nasal and verging on Tiny Tim territory, like a choir boy castrato with hippie idealism. Folk songs about "mother nature" being "on the run in the 1970s" until an alien invasion signals the second coming. This is the album that contains most of the well-known Neil Young songs: "Tell Me Why," "Southern Man," "Only Love Can Break Your Heart," "Cripple Creek Ferry."
A morose record scratches in a rainy, black and white movie with cobwebs drifting in time with the quietly crooned ennui. Dummy is an immortal trip-hop record that combines James Bond soundtrack samples, live instrumentation and programmed beats. Beth Gibbons melancholic voice soars to a keen and sinks to a sensual register, the lyrics are best heard as a melodic articulation, not read as poetry. Every 1990s bohemian girl declared a sadly frustrated sexual autonomy to album closer, and soundtrack staple, Glory Box. But, every single track on Dummy still feels both vintage and futuristic.
This is not a single day listening challenge album, or something to casually put on in the background! That "The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter" appears on the 1001 Essential Albums further indicates that this reference tome is compiled by British critics because the rest of the sonic world would firmly situate it on the 50-100 strangest albums ever made with Os Mutantes, Alexander "Skip" Spence and other hip oddities intended for the smuggest of bargain bin scavengers and psychedelic damaged exotica collectors. In the late 1960s "acid" was being inserted in front of existing genres creating louder and more claustrophobic sounding musical classifications of existing idioms. The Incredible String Band would definitely be considered acid folk, and the Hangman's Beautiful Daughter meanders through fractured variations on traditional English folk music and instrumentation with lysergic Dr. Suess/Lewis Carroll rhyming lyrics that are almost spectacularly bereft of conventional melodies, pastoral instruments enter and exit a composition jarringly, a sitar plays on "Koeeoaddi There." I kind of love the intense creativity, but don't know that I can sit through an entire album... The irony being that I owned a CD copy of this album while living in Seattle and never listened to the entire record....still haven't.
I always return to the first three Elvis Costello records, perhaps because the local library had a copy of My Aim is True. As an adolescent I would tend to explore a new (to me) artist by listening to their most recent albums or whatever was in the Upper Hudson Library Catalog. I don't think that "This Year's Model" was available via inter-library loan, but when Rhino Records reissued Costello's catalog as double disc CDs I immediately bought My Aim Is True through Armed Forces. This Year's Model was a solid continuation of the accessible punk attitude of My Aim is True, without the abrasiveness of God Save The Queen. Every song is vital.
It was an era of second-hand sweaters and Buddy Holly eye wear, when irony was an accessory of every undergraduate poet/cinephile who wanted a Godardian existence of post-Marxist critique and guerrilla filmmaking with plaid skirted quietly rebellious girls with bangs and cardigans. It could have been the 1960s, or C-1986, or 1996 in Scotland when a bus-driver continued the low fidelity scruffy pop tradition of Television Personalities. Instead of stalking the reclusive Syd Barrett, Stuart Murdoch wrote about the bookish adolescent desire to kiss "for practice." Effete, twee, melancholic, catchy, clever in a, there is a vintage Kafka paperback on the album cover, quasi-bohemian art school elitist fashion. It is an essential album for Wes Anderson fans of nostalgic art school fever dreams of queer baiting poetry, sensitive aesthetes with wry affections, quirky teenage rebels who dream of horses and foxes in the snow.
