1001 Albums Summary

The first two singles from this album have to be two of the greatest of the 1980s. It makes it all the stranger how poor the rest of the album is. The two covers are well chosen but far too long - she manages to add more than a minute to each of them. The second half of the album is dreadful. I will say this for Cyndi Lauper - she has an absolutely brilliant voice; sweet as a bell and at the same time full of character and drama. It’s only this that makes trash like She-bop, I’ll Kiss You and Yeah Yeah listenable.

I was up and down on this album. Early on I was thinking it sounded dated in production and that Alanis over-eggs the pudding on every syllable she sings. But then about three quarters of the way through I was thinking this is just one good tune after another - hard to criticise this level of consistency. But then it outstayed its welcome with a weaker track (Wake Up) then the pointless remix of You Oughta Know and then the hidden track. Still, more cracking pop songs than a lot of folks have in a whole career.

One of the best opening tracks there has ever been in my opinion. Magic from the first second to the last. Then New Kid in Town - a beautiful, brilliant, subtle song. And then the album starts to go downhill. Life in the Fast Lane is decent - good riff, good hook, but not a top Eagles song like the two tracks before it. The rest of the album I find practically soporific. Pleasant enough sometimes (Try to Love Again) and absolutely dire at others (the embarrassingly tacky orchestral reprise to Wasted Time). I know not everyone will agree but for me the real failure of the album is The Last Resort. A huge chunk of running time is dedicated to this self-regarding dirge and it just isn’t good enough to justify its place. It beats you over the head with that same stupid snippet of melody for an absolute age and the lyrics are rotten. Those two opening tracks though….

It’s fair to say Rap is not my genre. But even by the limited parameters of my encounters with it I feel confident in saying that this was pure shit. There is virtually no musical interest here at all - half the tracks are 1 bar on a loop ( how many mics, zealots, the beast, cowboys). Even when all three of them talk over the top at the same time - they can’t summon the dramatic or intellectual interest to compensate for the utter banality of the backing tracks. There was also the classy karaoke (Killing Me Softly…), the absolutely excruciating karaoke (No Woman, No Cry) and the annoying, barely comprehensible skits. Just rubbish.

Live and Dangerous - Thin Lizzy. 3/5 The band sound great and play with tons of energy. A live album is always an odd one to review though. Do you give them credit for the quality of songs - even though that credit properly belongs to the studio recording? And regardless of how well they play (and Thin Lizzy really do play well) - you are listening to more than an hour of exactly the same mix of the same instruments. That calls for some endurance regardless of how much you love the band. I will say that I wasn’t bored though, 76 mins went in just fine.

This was too funky for me. I suspect it is objectively too funky. I almost didn’t have a good time.

My dislike of Green Day is longstanding but to be honest - this was the first time I sat down and listened to Dookie from start to finish. And I did try to go in positive and open-minded - I just found it a gruelling experience. Every track seemed procedural to me and deeply dull. There wasn’t a song I could say was better or worse than another - Basket Case I have never cared for in the slightest. I found myself regularly looking at the track timer at 1:30 saying to myself ‘I can’t believe there is another 30 seconds of this’. I can’t think of a less interesting album of guitar playing in musical terms either - it is just a dull stew of palm-muted power chords and sawed power chords. And I cannot stand Billie Joe Armstrong’s voice.

Great songwriting, great playing. Only The Heathen fell flat. And the string of classics on that second side is silly.

A pleasant enough novelty for half a dozen tracks but a little goes a long way with this procedural old-timey country stuff. Historically significant I’m sure but basically two-dimensional. A chore.

Much more to my taste or mood now than it was 25 years ago, when I first listened to it. Not as dense as I recall, but I'm probably remembering Ladies & Gentlemen. A lot more twee and sparse than that, flimsy almost, with obvious Galaxie 500 and Jesus and Mary Chain similarities. However, it is the moments where the droning singularity explodes into something bigger or more intense that I really enjoy - like Heroin by the Velvet Underground. This is frustratingly withheld for a minute in the middle of If I Were Her Now. Another clear nod to the Velvet Underground on Run.

None of this should stand up, none of it should have ever stood up: crass sloganeering; awful guitar sounds; tense-armed drumming; mismatched sections; melodic fragments; overcrowded lyrics. No element of it works, which is why the whole is so staggeringly impressive. In the face of nihlism and wilful grotesquerie, there is hope and beauty - somehow - there is some achievement worth the time and effort. Eternity clutched from the mouth of oblivion. Take all my stars. The lyrics of The Holy Bible are a shapeless, rambling, almost-stream of consciousness clash of some kind of political nihilism and body horror. They should be unsingable or at least fatal to any attempt to create music worth listening to. Yet James Dean Bradfield took them and forged melodies of such elegance and potency that he must be regarded here as a genius at the moment of his purest inspiration. These are great, grotesque songs and I still shake my head, on the hundredth listen, at their relentless pile-on. Half of them would make a terrific album. As it is, I think of this album in which everything seems to pull forcefully in one direction; the angular, ugly guitar and bass riffs, the coarse production, the striking choice of artwork, those still shocking lyrics, the name of the band itself (invoked here on Archives of Pain), even the clothes they were wearing and I am reminded of no album more than Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. More than pop music; Gesamtkunstwerk. And, which may be more, the best album of 1994. 5/5

Even after hundreds of listens, I am still unseated by the guitar solo in the second verse of Be My Wife, the early fade on Breaking Glass, the out-of-time synth stutters in What In The World. Although I am intimately familiar with every moment of this record, they never feel familiar. It is always juddering, shuddering and coming apart. Travelling at the speed of life, crashing over and over again, and disintegrating in the second half, where words no longer have meaning, are no longer solid in the mouth or on the ear. By Subterraneans, there is no pulse, no presence. Everything disintegrates. You will disintegrate. These five stars that I'm giving Low will collapse, then shoot out in all directions until the atoms of which they were once comprised are millions of light years apart from each other. David Bowie’s finest moment and Brian Eno’s finest moment, both of which is saying an awful lot. Unique and very, very beautiful. The list could be Low 1001 times and it would be a life well spent. 5/5

The term world music denotes a homogenuous, universalist style that freely incorporates elements of different traditions and results in an output that can't be equated with any one or two styles, any particular region, any musical heritage. It is just music of the world, nowhere more specific than that, to be listened to by people, that's as precise as it gets. Americana is much the same and, on Come Away with Me, the jazz is barely distinguishable from the folk and the country is much the same as the blues. In terms of perspective and delivery, there is no difference between a Hoagy Carmichael song from the 30s, a country song from the 60s, or Jones's turn-of-the-millennium pop. It is all buffed into the same smooth recognisable shape, with only the brief Joplinesque growl at the top of Turn Me On giving a sense of what was worked away. I don't know if Americana is meant only to be listened to by Americans or people who experience the world as if it was America, but even the accordions on Painter Song sound Cajun when they should evoke the Left Bank. 2 McVities sells the digestive biscuit in a packet of about 15. But Mr McVitie, like all civilised people, expects that you will consume them 2 or 3 at a time with a cup of tea. So were you to eat the entire packet in one sitting and then complain that it was only a poor meal you would be unjust. Norah Jones’ debut album has 14 tracks. But it is plain to me that when the third track ‘Cold, Cold Heart’ ends with a fade out that evokes the image of the band tip-toeing out of the room so as not to disturb the slumber into which you have just fallen, a civilised portion of Norah Jones has been duly dispensed. No one involved expects you to give these 14 tracks your full attention in one sitting. Indeed, Norah and the band satirise the whole idea of a listener making it all the way to the end of the album by signing off with a track called ‘The Long Day is Over’ and then, chuckling to themselves, playing one more song. In the course of 27 million copies sold there has been a trust between this album’s creators and its consumers - Norah Jones gets the prosperity and career security a very gifted musician may well be entitled to, and the listener nods off or at least stops attending after 3 tracks, content that they can now tell their friends that they ‘listen to Jazz’. This trust has been violated by the inclusion of ‘Come Away With Me’ in the ‘1001 albums…’ project. So the fault here is not Norah’s - it is the fault of the compilers of the list. This is why, after awarding this album the one star of which its music is naturally deserving, I am adding another star in protest; According to the packet: 55% flour, 16% wholemeal wheat flour, ‘raising agents’, and the rest is sugar and ‘partially inverted sugar syrup’. …shame on those who would serve up an entire plateful of this stuff and call it a meal. 2/5

My friend, John, drummed in a scratch band that backed Damo Suzuki once. I wasn't there, unfortunately, but what an incredible experience it must have been making that music or even to be there as it came into being from nothingness. I can never fully get into a Can record, precisely because of the distance from that spontaniety. The record is the lingering light of a star, long dead. But even a dead star gives off radio waves, a pulsar or pulse - a groove? - we can tune into and tune out of. Every moment of Halleluhwah I tune into, I love. Every moment of Aumgn I tune into, I don't love. I am never tuned into the whole thing, however, and I have no more sense of what Aumgn is than Halleluhwah. If I'd just been in the room, though, not even in the band, I would have known everything there is to know - not just of Tago Mago, but of all cosmic shit and stuff. What a groovy experience this album faintly documents. 3 I came to this album today under difficult circumstances. Yesterday the list gave me Norah Jones’ debut album and I scorned it, rightly I think, and yet while I was listening to Tago Mago today I couldn’t help but feel the weight of its proximity as an almost moral burden. There I’d be trying to enjoy listening to some member of Can fellate a microphone (‘blubelubbelubelblubelblub’) and I’d sense Norah’s album at my back saying ‘I get two stars and a pissy review for trying to make nice recordings of carefully rehearsed songs and what’s this nonsense going to get? You’re going to give it 4 or something aren’t you, you prick?’ Well, Norah’s album has a point of sorts but I can only hope that my preference for Can’s album is more than my own superficial sense that while ‘Come Away With Me’ sounds not only like music that my squarest Aunt would buy but also music that she might make if she had any skill, ‘Tago Mago’ sounds not even like music made by a cool Uncle - it sounds like music made by someone who is not a member of my extended family at all. Some of Tago Mago sounds really good - but it’s not as good as it sounds. Drums are a difficult instrument to make sound so distinctive and they are continually fascinating here. There are a lot of interesting choices made in the mix - particularly with the vocals. There is a great sense of colour in this record (which almost by itself counterweighs the beigeness of Norah Jones’ accusing ghost). After my first listen I made the mistake (I think) of reading a bit about Tago Mago and the weight of critical praise for it really is astonishing for its plain injudiciousness. The oddest critical motif seemed to be the insistence on the indispensability of every moment on Tago Mago - the concision of it. Yer hole. It’s all well and good to change the face of popular music but must you take 73 minutes to do it? It’s a bloated, indulgent album by the standard of any genre. I read one account that insisted the first side of the double album was ‘in Sonata-Allegro form’ (bollocks) and the album was actually a symphony. Well 73 minutes is long for a symphony. You had best be Beethoven 9 or Mahler 5 and Tago Mago ain’t by a long shot. In conclusion, Mushroom is brilliant, the drums sound awesome, the guitar solos are lame - especially by the standards of 1971. 3/5

Tasteful playing, considered songwriting, thoughtful arrangements - although they mostly seem to peter out. It is the vocal harmonies that dominate however: high, ornate, and, while tracked, double-tracked, and triple-tracked, still strangely thin. Somewhere between sacred harp singing and Simon & Garfunkel, without the emotional welly of either. Unlike Simon & Garfunkel, Fleet Foxes are not all gone to look for America, but have rather retreated into a Waldenesque fantasy of America, with fake folk songs, fake snow, and fake women in the woods. Perhaps 'In the Airplane Over The Sea' is responsible for all the multi-instrumental Salvation Army indie bands that came in the decade that followed, but, in Jeff Mangum, they had a genuine fantasist, an electric eccentric. The Fleet Foxes' romance is more artisanal than artistic, running off a small generator in a national park campsite, while pretending to be pioneers. If I must have drums worn with a strap, interweaving vocal lines, and musicians in old style coats, living ahistorical fantasies, then I want it to be fun - the real Kings of the Wild Frontier are Adam and the Ants. 3 I find this album very easy to admire and impossible to love. The songwriting is excellent - or at least the music is; the lyrics will certainly do very well, although being American West Coast rural fantasy nostalgia of the mid-Noughties they draw inescapable comparison with Joanna Newsom’s Ys from a year or two before and feel very slight by comparison with the vivid, arresting poetry of that album. But the production… here is a cautionary tale of an album. I can only fantasise about how I might love this set of songs if they had been given any sort of edge by a producer with a vision. As it is… Youse love yer reverb anyway don’t yous yis c#*ts yis? 3/5

On record, Marianne Faithfull is only ever a foil for other people: Jagger and Richards weaponising her innocence; 90s hitmakers revelling in her back story and her pedigree - PJ Harvey, Nick Cave, Beck, Billy Corgan, Jarvis Cocker, Metallica. Even her interpretations of Weill, Mercer, and Kern or settings of Byron and Shakespeare rest on how her deep, rasping croak feels like a debauchment. Having her vocalise at all seems like decadence. Broken English is the most significant of a handful of records that prioritises Faithfull's contribution as artist rather than interpreter. However, she was not an artist in that sense and she was not a lyricist or a melodicist. Backed by an egoless new wave band, rather than more successful musicians as on most of her other records, she falters a little as the main focus, so the band never really takes off. Songs like Broken English and Guilty simply aren't as rich or sophisticated as others that she would perform in her life and they never seem to go anywhere. The covers, The Ballad of Lucy Jordan and Working Class Hero, stand out, although the latter sounds odd in the mouth of a patrician such as Faithfull, regardless of how low life laid her. Probably 2.5. The cover art for Marianne Faithfull’s Broken English looks like satire on an imagined collaboration between Joni Mitchell’s Blue and David Bowie’s “Heroes” I will also confess to laughing out loud a couple of times while listening. Ultimately though, I appreciated that I wasn’t supposed to be laughing. This is terribly dull, witless music. Four-square phrases played by a band of no musical distinction. Marianne Faithfull certainly has a characterful voice but no melodies worthy of it. The lyrics are rotten stuff - pedestrian couplets (sometimes laughably contrived) and mangled common metre. By the time ‘Why‘d ya do it‘ tries to grab the listener by the scruff with its cocks and cobwebbed fannies it is too late - that track feels merely like a grotesque and slightly desperate addendum. Covering The Ballad of Lucy Jordan was, no doubt, a bright idea although its dramatic potency emerges predictably from the obvious and crass conceit that Marianne Faithfull at this time ‘fit’ the character. Covering Working-Class Hero was a terrible idea. 1/5

As a man in his forties, it is a challenge to listen to Bob Dylan at the height of his success - heights not many individuals match - carping at the downfalls and shortcomings of others. Even if 'Like A Rolling Stone' isn't about Edie Sedgewick's degradation in New York... Even if 'Queen Jane Approximately' isn't about the uncool Joan Baez and unhip Pete Seeger, now outgrown by Dylan... Even if, as some Dylanologists suggest, these diatribes are hard self-reflection on the effects of fame on the singer, they are bitter, sneering, and callous. They are the postcards sold at the hanging - takedowns exploited for coin. These are brilliant songs, of course. As are 'Ballad of a Thin Man' and 'Desolation Row,' although both fuelled by contempt for the listener: are you smart enough to know that there is no there there? This may be a clever response to the constant questioning about meaning he received in 1965, but sixty years later is hardly an edifying experience in itself. In comparison, John Lennon responded to similar inquery with 'I am the Walrus,' which is funny, charming, and welcoming. It is telling that this abuse and debasement is absent or tangential in tracks 2-4, three joyless slogs of no musical interest. Without the fire of self-righteousness, nothing sparks. I may have been the same when I was that age. Or I might have been if I had the cultural capital that Dylan could afford to torch. But, looking down the near end of middle age, I have enough acid reflux of my own without dealing with Dylan's. If I want to listen to a twenty-something who thinks he's smarter than me and everyone else, I'll take a call from my son. It would be the same length and there'd be no bloody harmonica. 3.5 It has been a few years since I sat down and listened to Highway 61. I have long had a mental picture of it as essentially two giant songs sandwiching a mixed bag of very good, somewhat goofy songs and dull, goofy blues procedurals. This time it changed for me. The curtailed phrasing and premature wail of delight that makes special It Takes a Lot to Laugh… and the marvellous, loose interplay between Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper in From a Buick 6 have become unexpected highlights for me. Tombstone Blues and Just Like Tom Thumbs still fall rather flat despite their energy but on the whole - this is a terrific album. 4/5

I criticised Bob Dylan for his spite and bitterness on Highway 61 Revisited yesterday. It would be hypocritical of me to enjoy it when someone else does it. I will own up to it when it happens, but this is not it. However, the goofy juvenile misogyny isn't really the problem; it's his relentless verbiage. A Gilbert and Sullivan operetta that's all patter. At least Biz Markie sang the chorus of Just A Friend. And, for all Eminem's dexterity, the only parts that cut through for me are the clunkers. 97 Bonnie & Clyde is unpleasant for many reasons, but it is the exposition that appalls me. Who is he trying to convince that this is a toy knife? The baby? The clumsy extension of "quit tryna climb out," where the desperation for the rhyme makes for a contrived and clumsy mode of expression. And the questions put into the child's mouth - "where's mama?" "that smell?" - it's the cheap device of every amateur monologuist trying to justify sharing their every thought in situations where real people are silent. I don't know if Eminem gets better - he probably does - but this is all talent over discipline. And it's boring. 1.5 There is undoubted pleasure to be had in being beat around the head for 4 or 5 minutes at a time with a single bar of music; the evidence is everywhere. That pleasure, however, still eludes my personal experience. Perhaps some happy day I will encounter a lyrical and dramatic performance in the Rap genre that lays bare the musical value of having almost no musical value. But it wasn’t to be today - not this particular set of witless, adolescent sniggerings over fantasies of the humiliation, rape and murder of other people. Oh well, my loss again. 1/5

Honestly, I enjoyed this more than I enjoyed yesterday's Slim Shady LP. Not enough to give it a higher score, but I felt the difference: the beats are less goofy and more groovy and it comes closer to the sci-fi promise of sampling culture. The piano on D. Original is fun for a bit and I liked You Can't Stop the Prophet, but I wonder why, when Straight Outta Compton surely comes upon us, I will accept "life ain't nothing but bitches and money" from Eazy-E when I find Da Bichez from Jeru so embarrassing. He says he's not a misogynist. He says he can't be sexist or racist. I guess it's just as embarrassing when Lupe Fiasco points out that 'bitch' is bad and 'woman' is good ('lady' is better, by the way). Maybe it has something to do with conviction. I really don't know. 1.5 It was illuminating to hear this next to The Slim Shady LP. Here I appreciated both the more interesting samples, the more absorbing beats, and the clean, uncluttered delivery of the lyrics. It was 20 minutes shorter. I laughed out loud at least once (possibly not on cue). The hideous cover art was less hideous than the Eminem album’s. So many advantages and yet only half a star more? It seems unjust but sadly there are other albums available for comparison and Jeru the Damajah, like Eminem, made a profoundly dull record. Every track is one bar going round and round and round and the lyrics, regardless of their moral character relative even to Eminem, are, like Eminem’s, just rubbish. 1.5/5

After two consecutive hip-hop records, it is worth noting sample fatigue: it is not just that you are hearing the same music looped, but the same recording. The exact repetition is exhausting on the ear. So, while Spacemen 3 may hang on a single note for minutes on end, there is the change in timbre and attack and phase, the human differences that mutate each bar. That only takes you so far and, for much of Playing with Fire, it is the moments rather than expanses that pay off. Not any specific moments. But, every once and a while, you tune into and think "That's pretty nice." I think the Pierce songs are probably a bit better, which explains why Spiritualised do the same thing, but probably a bit better. 2 Most people who have ever found themselves listening to a Spacemen 3 album arrived (as did I) as Spiritualized fans. So it is difficult to hear Spacemen 3 on their own terms. Sonic Boom’s compositions dominate here and Revolution was the single and is the centre-piece of the album. But I still can’t escape the temptation to hear it all as proto-Spiritualized. This is fatal not just to my ability to sympathise with Sonic Boom’s less naive, less earnest delivery but also to my ability to hear the two jewels of the album - Jason’s ‘So Hot (Wash Away All of my Tears)’ and ‘Lord Can You Hear Me?’ as anything but mere demos for the later, much grander Spiritualized recordings of those songs that I love. So it’s an album I find easy to listen to with affection, but difficult to get a sense of as a work of art. If any kind of sober judgement were possible - I’d bet that it’s probably a bit of a mess. And the artwork is certainly poop. 2.5/5

Too groovy to be a grind, it is a genuine surprise that 1999 is a double-album of only eleven songs, not one under four minutes. That's not how I remembered it. The title track is full of so many ideas that it doesn't show its six minutes at all. That's not always the case here. But starting the album with exemplars of two forms Prince mastered - the religious good time funk of 1999 and the aching sex ballad of Little Red Corvette - leaves it nowhere to go but down. Not far down. Not as far down as other people's best efforts, but it never reaches those peaks again. Let's Pretend We're Married justifies its full running time and everything after makes a game effort, but the title track is more diverse and dynamic than the last seven tracks together. You could make a reasonable argument for any one of these tracks on the album, but you would need Prince's ego to make an argument for all of them. It's a truism that there is a great single album in any decent double album and I don't care to make claims on what that single album could be here, but it should end on Free, obviously - that's the thematic conclusion to whatever eschatological ecstasy 1999 throws up at the beginning. 3.5 Decadence. ‘Let’s Pretend We’re Married’ - 7 minutes. ‘D.M.S.R’ - 8 minutes. ‘Automatic’ - 9 1/2 minutes. ‘Lady Cab Driver’ - 8 minutes. Even the title track - known and beloved as a 3 1/2 minute pop masterpiece, is an extra 3 minutes long on the album. However long the track stretches it’s always ‘good’ in a sense; every musical elaboration is slick and imaginative - infectious call and response, brilliant solos, silk smooth backing vocals, comically intricate syncopations, and momentary interjections of virtuosity on every instrument - almost all of them designed and played by bloody Prince. Even the sleazy monologues are dramatically effective and amusing. Here is an artist and musician endowed with seemingly limitless talents and he displays them here with all the humility and restraint of Adonis streaking at a football match. On streaking - the well-judged streak will last 10-15 seconds at most and at that the endeavour will generally have the goodwill of the crowd behind it. There will be chuckles and applause, especially if the game has been dull. Once the streaker has had this time, it is just and appropriate to submit to a steward and a blanket. But were a streaker to keep it going thirty seconds or more, dodging every lunge from an official and perhaps embarrassing a professional athlete or two by accelerating quickly away from their irritated grasp, some in the stands will begin to feel that they are being deprived of something. Boos and ‘for fuck sake’s will break out. Streakers! Remember your audience. 3.5/5

I haven't yet developed the skills to adaquately evaluate a hip-hop album. Do I admire the magpie eye and silver ear that samples Peg and Standing on the Dock of the Bay in the same song? Even if those moments don't go anywhere? That's unfair - Eye Know is great, but is it as great as Peg? Do I admire Eminem's dexterous music hall flow over the more pedestrian De La Soul vocalists? Even when they are warmer, more fun, and welcoming? I don't know. I like the Bonzo Dog Band, so I'm not opposed to skits in principle, but do they have to make the records so long? Are mixtapes that long? Are they actual C-90s? I don't know. I suppose a classic rap record should be something like the experience of a soundsystem at a street party. Three Feet and Rising is definitely the closest to this that we've heard: it feels like they're mixing in real-time, rapping in the same room. A positive addition to my 2345 train to Larne. Almost forgot that De La Orgee is awful. 3 The energetic sample-splicing is fun. And it almost felt sometimes like it put this album more in touch with Prince’s 1999 (yesterday’s album) than with the two rap albums at the start of the week (Eminem and Jeru the Damaja). Some of the raps were amusing - I enjoyed Tread Water especially - even if they felt a little flat in delivery. I think De La Soul genuinely uncovered a little musical gold as well - Eye Know. But… the skits are tiresome and after an hour I can’t have a sense of their ‘album’ as anything but an utter shambles; a 15 year old’s messy bedroom. Nice kid though. 2.5/5

Familiar with three of these recordings to begin with - Wild is the Wind, Lilac Wine, and Black is the Colour - all of which are remarkable performances by Dr. Simone, both as a vocalist and pianist. She meets that standard again several times on the album - Four Women, Break Down and Let It Out - although is less well-served by the standard RnB shuffle of I Love Your Lovin' Way and the less focused If I Should Lose You. Either Way I Lose suffers from an easy listen arrangement that doesn't showcase either of the good doctor's strength. That is the risk of compiling out-takes and off-cuts. Simone is about the performance in moment, however, and an album is about something other than performance - we might work out what that is across the years of this project. Just over a week ago, I think I credited Marianne Faithfull's cracked vocal for communicating her experiences of degradation as an individual. Dr. Simone's is much more than that: the pain more painful, the experience more than just her own. 3.5 Despite powerful, committed vocal performances all the way there is no unity to this album. The heart of the album, its best tracks, is Four Women, Lilac Wine, Wild is the Wind and Black is the Colour… It is almost absurd to encounter these brooding, intimate songs side by side with polite, preening lounge ballads like What More Can I Say? or Why Keep on Breaking My Heart? Simone’s voice commands your attention even on fluff like the opening and closing track but when an artist is at the peak of her powers like this - not just as a performer but as a writer - why are those throwaway songs present at all? 3/5

I met Andy Summers once. He was very nice. Polite. A quiet man. It's understandable why he is bullied into the background of so many of these songs, constrained to tight, tasteful chiming so that Sting can gulder and Copeland flail more freely. What charm there is here is down to Summers: the ringing 9ths of Message in a Bottle; the dub chording of Walking on the Moon. But every one of the handful of guitar solos is more staid than any bar of Stewart Copeland's drumplaying. All feel and no thought. It is anyone's guess what those fills have to do with the songs in which they're played. But I understand why Copeland doesn't want to listen to Sting too closely: those vowels. It is surprising though that the battle between the biggest ego and the freest spirit can produce such a banal, bad record as this one. It's Alright for You is awful. On Any Other Day is embarrassing. Does Everyone Stare is dumb. The Bed's Too Big Without You thinks it has a chorus. But imagine Contact performed by Gary Numan! Someone with a bit of style! 1.5 Well I hated this. I might have felt the second half of the record was comically bad if I had listened to it first but as it is I had long since run out of good humour by the time On Any Other Day started up. Message in a Bottle and Walking on the Moon, when I encounter them on local radio sandwiched between Kajagoogoo and Ed Sheeran, sound almost profound. Here, in the cold, 5 minute long light of day, both those songs are dishwater dull. There are no songs here at all. This is essentially practice room grooves and Sting making ‘reggae noises’. If there is anything truly memorable here it is only the numbing shock of contemplating that the ‘The Bed’s Too Big Without You’ was a single from a million-selling album and that ‘It’s Alright For You’ is on any album at all. 1.5/5

I usually listen to each album four or five times before committing to anything, but I couldn't listen to Licenced to Ill a second time. Not today anyway. The object of the satire here is clear and, like much satire, there is the risk of the satirical object enjoying the work at face value - look at the DJs who played Girls and Boys in Ibiza. I know the Beastie Boys took a lot of money from the frat bros they were ridiculing. Why shouldn't they? I know they moved away from that model pretty quickly too. Why wouldn't they? Regardless, that scene is so far removed from my life - geographically, culturally, chronologically, my current spot in the male life cycle - that I don't care about its success or failure either way. In my early twenties, I had neighbours who partied like this every Saturday night and it made no difference if they were sincere or lampooning all the other parties. It was noisy, aggressive, puerile, inconsiderate, and self-indulgent. I was on the other side of the wall then and I feel on the other side of the wall from this record too - I only care to the extend that I have to put up with it. Even if the 1986 Beastie Boys were acting as my personal hypemen, I would find it obnoxious more than edifying. Those neighbours always regretted it the next day - I could hear that much as well. I understand that the Beastie Boys regretted it to some extent too - the party got out of hand. I was going to give them some credit for that, but, apparently, they don't care for Kerry King's solo on No Sleep Til Brooklyn - the highlight of the album - so I'm taking that credit back. It's mine. Get your own half a star, Beastie Boys! 1 I read the Wikipedia page about this album and, incredibly, there is no reference in the whole entry for Licensed to Ill to the (plain) fact that it is a comedy record. I can’t comprehend that there is any other way to hear this album other than as 13 variations on the same joke. I don’t know much about rap or hip-hop but it is very difficult to see that this shares a genre with, to take recent examples I have encountered, De La Soul, Jeru the Damaja or even the puerile provocations of Eminem. Sure, those other rappers tell jokes but here rap is not so much the medium for jokes - rap is the joke. Surely? Anyway, there’s no music here worth criticising. Even the rhythmic patterns of the raps themselves are so lumberingly simple as to be unmistakably satirical, notwithstanding everyone on the planet’s apparent mistaking them for earnest genre gold. So let’s focus on the jokes. ‘A lot of beer, a lot of girls, and a lot of cursin’/ 22 automatic on my person’ That’s funny. There are lots of other funny bits (some essentially this same bit) and there are enough of them to justify about 3 good joke songs. All the same - there are 13 tracks here. 2/5

It was my wife's birthday, so I didn't give this as much attention as other records on the list. It's Steely Dan, so the smooth, clean production will slide right in one ear and out the other. You've really got to be listening to catch the bitter lyric pills in the cheesy jazz. Should it be taken aurally or orally? I don't know, I wasn't paying enough attention and got my metaphors mixed up. I need to give it more time and focus. I'll come back to it some day when my wife has left me - it's lonely men who dig Steely Dan, right? Theoretically, I dig this too. I will say that, for all our recent complaints about sampling repeating snippets over music to death, hearing "You know they don't give a fuck about anybody else" just once is underwhelming. 3 A minute into the first track it occurred to me that this stuff, suitably re-recorded, would do well for Mariokart course music. Perhaps this was fatal to my attempt to listen justly to the rest of the album; I couldn’t let go of the idea. I didn’t like any of this regardless. I found this music overwrought and shallow. The lyrics aren’t bad but neither are they arresting in any way - all mere solutions to the problem of feeling obliged to have a lyric to sing when all you really wanted to do was solos and fancy turnarounds. The production is wretched - ‘smooth’ is the word I suppose and I can’t deny that that is what you get when you diligently remove all the rice pieces from rice pudding. The drums and guitar lack any edge, and even the xylophone and pedal steel guitar manage to sound castrated. The effect is pathetic. There is a moment at the very end of ‘Pearl of the Quarter’ where the piano player quietly throws in a bum note - a moment which must have had them all hooting in the studio at the daring of the transgression. In the ten thousand notes the guitar player goes through on this album he does not once allow himself the luxury of a ‘wrong’ note. And yet somehow they’re all wrong; this is rotten stuff. That nimble solo at the end of ‘My Old School’, to single one out, runs through so many technical ideas, and none of them are any good because there are absolutely no melodic ideas in the solo at all. I have spent much time recently scoffing at rap music for its mind-numbing lack of musical content, so I ought to thank Steely Dan for reminding me that an abundance of music can also be crushingly dull. 1.5/5

I tend to think of Murmur as has having a green cover, but look at those blues and browns! That just goes to show the extent to which my memory of the album is a little off. In my mind, it is one of my two favourite R.E.M. records beside New Adventures. There may be some element of effortful cool in that, but also, by favourite, I don't mean best. It came out two days before I was born and, later, I bought it in Germany on a school trip, but couldn't listen to it until I got home, which happened to be the day when the Good Friday Agreement was announced. It feels like it has to be special. Listening to it now, I think it largely is. Certainly for the first three quarters. Much like Chronic town, the legend that the band came out fully formed doesn't bear out: 100000 and Stumble aren't great. Niether are Shaking Through, We Walk, and West of the Fields. But they don't have to be for the album to act as an incredible introduction. An introduction to whom though? While each player is somewhat limited in what they can do, the band itself twisted and changed within those limitations. Michael Stipe improves as a vocalist over the course of their career, though parts of Talk About the Passion are bit low for him, aren't they? Peter Buck is never this interesting as a guitarist again. Mitch Easter and Don Dixon's production, which is playful here is more brittle on Reckoning and then we never hear from them again. The backing vocals that make the debut so unique become less important as the records go by or they signify the band less as it becomes a studio creation. That band, in a bastardised shape, would have a thirty year career, so these observations don't really affect an album that has, at least, two standouts from that career: Laughing and Perfect Circle. Two career highlights probably doesn't amount to a best or favourite record, but, having listened back to a few R.E.M. albums over the last few months, I think the career - from Murmur to New Adventures - is bigger than the records. There are highlights from every release of that period, but no one record comes together completely. Some come much closer than others, Murmur's one of them. But it is special because it shows a great band that is not formed and never takes a full form until after it breaks up. 4 Michael Stipe’s delivery struck listeners as being unforthcoming at the time and the effect is even more marked in retrospect knowing what a powerful, confident voice was a few years away from breaking out. Still there is nothing uncertain or coy about the melodies he sings here, they are odd and unexpected and very beautiful. The first four tracks are as good a start to a debut album as I can think of. Perfect Circle still mesmerises. It’s an uneven album but it is magical. 4/5

I was pleasantly surprised by the first two tracks on Bayou Country. Born On the Bayou and Bootleg both sound like Dr. John, but for Vietnam GIs instead of freaks. Dr. John would go that way himself in the 70s, but, for '69, Fogerty's twangy licks and powerhouse vocals will do for the normies. However, being straight will get you only so far in rock'n'roll. While Fogerty expressly never did drugs, Graveyard Train blocks the album like that one of those big balls of defecate that you pass when you're on a long course of morphine. Too large and consisten, it congests the bowel, tears the rectum, and clogs the toilet in turn. Then, when you think it's finally gone into the system, there's this awful version of Good Golly Miss Molly. The counter-argument to a stodgy cover of a rock'n'roll is the stodgy original of a rock'n'roll classic: CCR's Proud Mary sounds more like Whippin' Piccadilly than the dynamic Tina Turner reimagining that people love. Fogerty's just too straight and normal to get it or to do anything with it. He probably doesn't even know what it is. Despite the final exhortation to continue choogling, to honour choogling in my heart and try to keep it all the year, I can't - choogling sounds cringe. 2 I expected, but can’t say with absolute confidence that this isn’t, verifiably mind-numbing, four square, barroom blues poop for slack-jawed, baseball hat wearing, beer-bellied, backwater savages because, fortunately, I listened to this while driving today and I suspect that as a result principally of hearing it while bombing down a motorway I really enjoyed it. There is just a successful concept at work here - slovenly swamp rock. The relaxed drumming with its brilliantly stupid almost-rolls that most of the time can’t be bothered to make it off the snare. The rhythm guitar hacking out the same dopey 7 half-chord for ages. Keep on Chooglin’ only has one chord, but it lasts 7 1/2 minutes - I was really rooting for that chord by the end. The lead guitar lines, full of character, but with the element of one-take-and-leave-it sloppiness in them. Don’t know what to say about the singing and bass - they were just great. Even the cover photo seems to fit. The album has peaks and troughs and the large watery ditch that is 8 minutes of Graveyard Train but even there I enjoyed the harmonica solo. While driving of course. I worry how this album would sound at home in the quiet of the evening as an accompaniment to physical weariness and a cup of tea, the motorway is obviously the best place for chooglin. 3.5/5

After Bayou Country, we know that I will side with the freaks over the squares. When the square go full square, it's boring, but, when the freaks go full freaky... well, it could always just be my fault for not getting it. That hardly applies here though. For all Joseph Byrd's credentials - an early associate of La Monte Young; kicking off his career in Yoko Ono's Fluxus loft - The United States of America never goes too far out. Released the year after both Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Surrealistic Pillow, the record vacillates between both. Elements of McCartneyesque corniness sit next to pounding Airplane-style rockers, collaged together via snippets of calliope recordings - George Martin would have done a much neater job of that. Yet, I don't think it is purely imitative of the prevailing psychedelic styles. The primitive ring-modulation and electronics isn't done as masterfully as on Silver Apples self-titled album of the same year, but, then, that album doesn't have any of this cranky violin. Maybe that's cribbed from The Velvet Underground and Nico (also the year before) or Joseph Byrd crossed paths with John Cale at the Theatre of Eternal Music. While it may be a hodge-podge of what was going on in experimental rock at the time, it is obviously not a cash-in. They are having too much fun and are too interested in pushing in different, contradictory directions. I side with the freaks and I have to give them benefit of the doubt. 3.5 This was difficult to judge. I did listen several times but could not get past two ideas that gripped me on my first listen. One is that there is a difference between experimental music (even experimental recording) and perfectly conventional records ruined by the interpolation of funny space noises, however freshly minted those noises may be. The other is that this is openly derivative of Sgt Pepper’s and Revolver - the two most recent Beatles albums when this record was made. Something like Tomorrow Never Knows is a classic example of the integration of experimental recording technique into composition; the loops running in reverse are an inextricable part of the music. On The United States of America I often struggled to make that connection - what I am hearing is conventional musical gestures and phrases occasionally punctuated by loud space noises (Hard Coming Love, Garden of Earthly Delights, Where is Yesterday, Coming Down). In any case - The Beatles thing was much more the fatal issue. The ‘American Metaphysical Circus’ is this album’s opener and it is plainly evocative of Being for the Benefit of Mr K but with none of the lightness and comedy of that track. Ok - there will be fantastic feats of mind-expanding wonder, but who will assure the public that this production will be second to none? No one presumably, because they all know this will be, at best, second to Sgt Pepper’s. Even when the United States try humour - it feels second hand. By the time I get to ‘I Won’t Leave my Wooden Wife for You, Sugar’ it can only feel like Ringo’s track - albeit Ringo’s track if he was in the Velvet Underground rather than the Beatles (in 1966/67 anyway). There is an Eleanor Rigby knock off surely only one rung out of The Rutles’ league. The descending turns of the violin on Cloud Song recall the vocal turns of Harrison’s Love You To and the mood of Within You, Without You. The closing ‘synthesis’ track - ‘The American Way of Love…’ cannot, by the end of all this, feel like much but a tribute to A Day in the Life. If that particular comparison is a superficial one it also raises a lesson that the United States didn’t learn; what makes Day in the Life special is not the stuck-togetherness of it but the haunting unexpected chord substitutions and melody of Lennon’s opening section and the clever, neat modulations of McCartney’s. And the big string bit - which is far better than the string bit in this track. Still. This isn’t exactly bad. 2.5/5

Given the focus of my reviews so far this week, the generator is really putting the rat among the pidgeons. Frank Zappa isn't a normie, but neither is he a freak. He makes that very clear on Freak Out. What is he then? A cynic. A sneerer. A sniggerer. He has something of '65 Dylan about him: his fuel is disdain; we'll never understand things the way he does. Maybe there's nothing to understand. He's smart. He's funny. And we'll just have to put up with it. This takes something of a backseat on the largely instrumental Hot Rats. There's not so much puerile humour, not so much satire, but the source of Zappa's whiffy unpleasantness is still there. While Dylan could and would simply toss off an idea, Zappa has to orchestrate everything down to the most minute detail. The only thing he is expressing here is his own need for control and it sounds like it - the big drumroll that opens the record feels like it was whiplashed into LinnDrum sterility. There is no let up on Peaches En Regalia, bars and bars of densely organised music, and nowhere for the humanity to come through. Even harsh taskmasters like James Brown and Duke Ellington expected real people to dance to what their well-honed machines were playing. It isn't all jazz without freedom, but it takes the appearance of Captain Beefheart to make this genuine fun. The violins too sound like they have a bit of life to them. Still Zappa's guitar is all mastery and no parity. What room is there for a listener to make anything of all this music? Frank Zappa doesn't care. He wants you to submit, he doesn't want you to enjoy. 2.5 For all the supposed freakiness and eccentricity of Zappa - and to be fair plenty of Zappa is eccentric - Hot Rats strikes me as mostly rather square music. In Peaches en Regalia and Son of Mr Green Genes in particular there seems to be more disregard than is usual in Jazz or Blues Rock for concealing the edges of a phrase of 4 or 8 (or 2!) bars. You are presented with one chunk. Then there’s another chunk. This process is perhaps a bit stupid but I think it was also intended to be a bit entertaining because of the silliness and colour of some of the combinations of instruments and it is, sporadically. This doesn’t, however, create so much the ‘movie for your ears’ that Zappa proposed as put me in mind of the finale of the BBC’s ‘The Generation Game’ in which a member of the winning family sits in front of a conveyor belt and watches different exciting prizes go past. The contestant then gets 45 seconds to name as many of the prizes as they can remember and they take home all they can name. If you listen to Hot Rats enough times you will win all its prizes. As it is with the half dozen times I’ve heard Hot Rats - I always find myself struggling a bit and falling back on ‘Cuddly Toy! Cuddly Toy!’ the prize no one really wants but which everyone knows was there. This is Zappa’s guitar solos. They are just wallpaper. He is a very good musician and he knows his scales and his tricks and he is fast but he has nothing to say as a guitar player. Why is there so much of it? It is the weakest section of Gumbo Variations by far. Most of Willie the Pimp is a waste of time. 2/5

There's probably no point going over old ground about double-albums, because a double-album that is also a concept record has even greater challenges. The White Album could potentially be winnowed down to a single disc, but The Wall couldn't. The benefit of telling a narrative is that, if the story is strong enough, you can be excused a few musical lulls - it happens in opera all the time. But, like Wagner, you need incredible moments to balance those interminable quarters of an hour. I don't even like The Wall all that much, but I recognise that the almost title track, Comfortably Numb and Mother are big songs that hold up the rest of the record. I borrowed The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway from Belfast Music Library in 1999 or 2000. I still have no clue what the story is. The three songs that taped from the CD to keep were the title track, Carpet Crawlers, and Counting Out Time. These are still three songs that stick out for me, although Counting Out Time is obviously not good. Neither tunes nor tale are holding up this pair of platters - it cannot be streamlined, but it is also lightweight, almost vapourous once you reach The Chamber of 32 Rooms. What would one cut? There is so little variation in the music and not much cohesion in the story. By contrast, their previous album, Selling England by the Pound, has more musical diversity and more engaging storytelling in any single song. Compare Counting Out Time with I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe) or In the Cage with Dancing with the Moonlit Knight. Although, let it be known that this 2.5 is not equivalent to the 2.5 I gave Hot Rats by Frank Zappa. This is more like the 2.5 I gave Bayou Country by CCR. There are things to like in the musician, if not on this particular record. Oh, I gave Bayou Country 2. Shame on me. Scoring music is hard. I only had time to listen once to this album which I am encountering for the first time. But my impression is that it is silly without irony and has the quality of feeling like the work of a clever music student who has earnestly set out to make The Greatest Musical in the Universe. This is exactly what young people who don’t yet know their trade should be doing and I credit Peter Gabriel and co for their energy and self-belief. This is pretty bad stuff. The main problem, I think (only 1 listen) is that the lyrics dominate everything else not just because there is so much of them but because while the studied slickness of so many 5/8 and 7/8 time bars gives the veneer of meticulous planning and rehearsal the lyrics force the top line to work against all that. No compromise was made to the contour or rhythm of the melody - no word left behind. It all had to go in. This would be dandy if there was an ounce of real poetry in The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway but it’s all excruciating. There are end rhymes but there’s no sense of rhythm or metre; no elegance of language whatsoever. I won’t quote any but since ‘it’ was the last thing on the album and thus the last lyric that positively bowled me over I direct the reader to that atrocity. 2/5

I have listened to and sang along with this record all weekend. I can't get my thoughts in order, but I don't really think it is a difficult record to understand. I bought the Movie Lovers compilation in the late 90s and found Venus As A Boy incomprehensible then, but that was because I wasn't ready to accept the very simple lessons Bjork was offering. Perhaps it takes a whole record. Nothing here is as experimental, quirky, or laboured as some of the other reviews suggest. Many of these tracks could be basic, layered, white label dance tracks. Some could be easy listening. Some are plainly neither. But what elevates them all is Bjork's sincere and gracious welcome to - not experiment, not eccentricity - but exuberance, the enjoyable side of excess. She gives and gives - gives you a full performance, an extended melody, an out there production idea, a deep emotion - but always in the spirit of exploration. If you dare to go further, you may find more. "It takes courage to enjoy it." 4 This is terrific. I think it lacks unity as an album - partly through diversity of sound and ideas and partly through, in my opinion anyway, an odd ordering of the (brilliant) songs; very little of it seems to run on and Human Behaviour to open and Play Dead to close always strike me as baffling. I can’t say much else against it. Every track justifies your attention. Björk is a genius of melody and a great performer. I don’t think there is a better set of singles from anyone’s debut album and there is much gold besides - One Day, Aeroplane… just great. 4/5

As I understand it, the Low End Theory is to sample some jazzy double bass and stick a rigid beat on stop, suffocating whatever swing or groove might have been in the original. Not so expansive, expressive or exploratory as the jazz records it collages, but simultaneously lacking the hooks and earworms that De La Soul were able to pick out of their record collections. That's a real bass on Verses from the Abstract and it sounds like good playing, but feels disconnected from everything else. I understand, however, that the lyrical dexterity and content is the important thing. Personally, I found it difficult to parse the lyrics as they flew by, so I wouldn't want to make any comment on them. Infamous Date Rape sounded rough, but, compared to the explicit misogyny we've heard on other hip hop records on this list, I'd want to give it a closer listen before I passed judgment on it. "You can ask Stephen If the vibe ain't right" - Honestly, I don't know. 2 I know next to nothing about Rap/Hip Hop. Jazz I only know the basics. Jazz, famously, is typified when a group of technically gifted musicians come together and play the same two bars of music in 4/4, again and again, exactly the same way, at about 100 bpm for 4 minutes or so. It is only a grasp of these basics that allows us laymen to credit the many gushing critical statements on The Low End Theory that identify the album as an ingenious musical bridge between Jazz and Hip Hop. Otherwise we might make the mistake of thinking that Tribe Called Quest was just the same old shit that rappers always do but this time in a pork pie hat. As I say - I can only credit Tribe Called Quest second-hand for their successorship to Miles Davis because I am only a tourist in these genres and must defer to critical consensus. Let’s talk poetry though - I feel I can give Tribe all the credit they deserve for articulating their puerile view of the world through doubtful couplets. ‘I keep a tight net with my brothers Ken and Kenny/ If the question is of rhymes, then I'll tell ya, I got plenty‘ Oh Q-Tip, if only that was the question. 1/5 ‘Get the fuck off the stage’ Miles Davis

In the jingle jangle boring, am I right?! I am mostly or partly right. These are not Bob Dylan's best songs, especially the ones that Bob Dylan didn't write. Compared to the first half of Bringing It All Back Home, which was released a few months earlier, these takes are wimpy. "I wore my fringe like Roger McGuinn," Edwyn Collins once sang, "I was hoping to impress. So frightfully camp, it made you laugh." Well, this is all fringe: floppy and wispy with nothing to hold on to. Tellingly, Jack Ashford, the tambourine player for the Funk Brothers, wouldn't make his most significant contributions until the following year: I Heard It Through The Grapevine; You Can't Hurry Love; Going To A Go-Go. This is the dancing spell that the Byrds (and even Dylan) fail to cast. Now that sound is something both limber and robust. The Byrds even manage to take the groove out of the Bo Diddley Beat on Don't Doubt Yourself, Babe - there's a tambourine, but no dancing spell! Although I enjoyed some of the record innocently enough (I Knew I'd Want You), ending on a terrible version of We'll Meet Again is throwing down the gauntlet. I'll meet the Byrds again, but probably not this record. 2.5 This bored the arse off me. Every track is the same smothering cloud of tambourine, jangly guitar, flaccid drums and edgeless vocals. Mr Tambourine Man is a great, great song and this zombified version is somehow widely preferred to Dylan’s. I always find it an alienating shock to contemplate that. What is wrong with people? Dylan wrote four terrific verses. The Byrd reduced it to one verse and they sang that one horribly; their decision to castrate its last line by pausing before ‘I promise to go under it’ and squaring out the phrase where Dylan barrelled ahead with magic effect to create the song’s best moment is incomprehensible. I can’t even talk about what they did to We’ll Meet Again. The Byrds are monsters. 1.5/5

After the lace and filgree arrangements of the Byrds, it was nice to hear something that sounded like black leather. Hard rock is the real American folk music. The album starts well: excellent vocals, unashamedly graceless drums and guitars, a sort of swagger to scatter the fey folkies. Now, I know nothing about Bad Company, so it was a surprise that they weren't American at all. A British supergroup, you can see where Judas Priest and Def Leppard come from - excessively leathery. However, I've listened to the album's short runtime a few times today and I can't really hear the back half. At some point through Don't Let Me Down, I drift away from it. I know the title track, but can't give it my attention. I don't know why. Paul Rodgers sings incredibly well, but about absolutely nothing. Perhaps it was learning that members of the group had previously been in Mott the Hoople and King Crimson that foregrounded how unconfrontational Rodgers' swagger is. Ian Hunter is erratic and Robert Fripp lets the spirit speak through him, but Paul Rodgers is going through the motions, like a tired priest. He may believe the doxology or not, but he's got to do it ever Sunday and you have to listen to it. It doesn't give the old Mott and Crimson much to play off. 2.5 (a genuine 2.5, not like the 2.5 I gave the boring Byrds yesterday) For all the good things that can be said for Bad Company I can’t escape the feeling that rock music, especially rock music made in England in 1974, should not be this clinical. Consistently listening through this record it was the Rolling Stones that kept springing to mind; the piano on Ready for Love, the piano and gospel-style backing singers on Don’t Let Me Down, the lines of the horns on The Way I Choose, the left and right speaker guitars on everything. But there is none of the wildness of Mick Jagger’s voice, the louche sloppiness of Richards lead playing, or the (studied) naivety and looseness of Charlie Watts. These are such spotless, serviceable, nicely-played, polite rock tracks. No one is drunk. Admirable but not loveable in my opinion. 2.5

Few albums have, on paper (on the sleeve?), such a powerful opening trio. Just the names - ...Baby One More Time, Crazy, and Sometimes - kick the brain into nostalgia mode, where everything sounds sweeter and stronger than you remember. And those songs are all remarkably catchy, tightly paced, and well-arranged to achieve their intended orgasmic end. But they don't work as a trio. These were all produced as late-90s singles. They were designed to cut through all the other songs on radio and MTV. They were not intended to sit side-by-side. They're meant to shoulder other songs out of the way. While they don't have the effect of that Durutti Column record with the sandpaper sleeve that scratches up the records on either side, there is no sense of cohesion, no flow, no album per se. You may as well be listening to a pop station that plays 'only the best new music.' If you did that, you would skip some of the filler, which, for all the producer's expertise in the genre, can't touch the exquisite Born To Make You Happy. In 2000, when Billy Corgan was breaking up Smashing Pumpkins, he said that he could no longer fight the good fight against the Britneys of this world. He could have meant a lot by that, but he was coming out of a struggle with Virgin over whether or not he could release a triple album. He would leak the unreleased portion of the Machina Mystery onto the internet, essentially breaking up the album into downloadable shards. His grand artistic statement was not supported by the music industry. Britney's debut album makes no grand artistic statement, but it is as fragmented as any attempt to piece together Machina. It is one polished shard after another and they make no more sense together than apart. Pop albums have always been like that, to some extent, but, in 1999, it was starting to become clear that albums were on the way out. There are four songs here which, juiced up by nostalgia, are better than most songs on the albums generated thus far. That should clutch this album a respectable score, but it's not an album - it's a greatest hits compilation with seat fillers taking up space while the other hits are waiting to be written. I don't know how to score it. 2.5 Yesterday Peter Mandelson, British Ambassador to the United States, described Donald Trump as ‘a very consequential President’. It is a just statement. Ambassador Mandelson obviously feels it beneath his job description to say anything less than complimentary about the President but beneath his self-respect to say anything contradictory to the truth that Trump is working for the destruction of civilisation in the West. ‘…Baby One More Time’ is a very consequential album. Even if I had the inclination, I am not historian enough to trace either the scale of the (immediate) impact this album had on popular culture, the music industry, society I dare say, nor its true relationship to its cultural forebears - Elvis, The Beatles, Madonna…etc. What I will say is that I remember well this album’s appearance in everyone’s lives and I remember too the unmistakeable sense that some standard, perhaps several, had been successfully lowered. I tried today to give this album as fair a hearing as I would any. I listened twice. I listened attentively. Britney Spears’ debut album is utter trash. These songs represent musical and lyrical proceduralism of the lowest order. (You drive me) crazy is 3 minutes 19 seconds; it features the chorus four times and a bridge which is essentially the chorus with a sloppily modified harmony. Soda Pop, almost exactly the same length, features its same unmodifed chorus 6 times. The lyrics have the quality of having been quickly composed on the back of a napkin during a coffee break; each the mere unfolding of the conceit of its title with as little thought as possible. ‘Thinkin’ About You’ comes off as if it lacked even that first humble draft. That and the track which follows it, ‘E-mail my heart’, represent the low-point of an album that shouldn’t be capable of low-points, but there it is; the trough within the trough. This is an album as cynically disrespectful of its listeners as I have ever sat down with. That it was right about them, that it won, that Britney Spears was elected, none of that makes no difference to my conviction here. This was and is wrong. Shame on the people who made this. 0/5

I had so many interesting thoughts while listening to this record, but they were all about the Beatles and it seems unfair to consider the album in that light. I'm not sure how I could consider it ahistorically - the production is completely of its time, even if the artist had no past or present. Without that history, would I focus on the corny choices - lyrically, in production, in sequencing? The melodicism? The bricolage structure of the title track? The tasty, rather than tasteful bass tone? The incredible singing voice, especially in Nineteen Hundred and Eight-Five? But can one enjoy this nice guy character taking the lead across a whole album? For all his faults and strengths, no McCartney album can escape Beatle thoughts. However, with Band on the Run, it isn't so much "But this guy was in the Beatles" as "Well, this guy was in the Beatles." 3.5 Well I like this music but only because it sounds good. It achieves catchiness without merciless repetition. The songs are structurally imaginative without losing their identity as pop music. The arrangements are neat and the singing is good. Still there is an emptiness at the heart of Band on the Run. Could be the lyrics that aren’t about much in particular or the (polite) diversity of style and arrangement, but something leaves me wondering what holds the album together. Paul McCartney was obviously looking for some guiding principle but in the end the album had nothing to do with the cover/title song or with travelling all the way to Nigeria (to record ‘Let Me Roll It’?! Why?) - it was just time to make another album. John Lennon wants to tell his listeners what keeps him up at night. George Harrison wants to tell you the Good News. Paul McCartney wants you to like him and buy his record. And I do and I did, so I’m not really complaining. 3/5

This is the first album that I approached with trepidation. I disliked Licence to Ill immensely and, while I understand from lore and the radio singles that the band broadened their palette and appeal, I was not confident that I would enjoy this anymore than that. And I didn't. The ethnic samples are pleasant and Sabotage is fun, but, when the trio hectors or hollers on any of the less dynamic tracks, it is an ordeal. The vocals and much of the music are so blown-out and distorted that they are unfathomable. It feels like dissociating at a club. There are all these sounds a rhythms, but you are not a part of them. They're happening over there, beyond a grey haze. It doesn't feel real and you're just getting through it. They're not real either, just an animatronic band at a kids restaurant, grinding through the motions and none of the staff notice or care that the music is growing more distorted, is getting lower, is slowing down. I dunno, maybe you've never dissociated. The shocking thing is that this is their fourth album. Where this the follow up to Licenced to Ill, you could mark the progress and personal development. But, if this is number four, I don't think there is room for both me and the Beasties in this Venn Diagram. Unlike Elvis Costello, this doesn't have attractions for me. In fact, I would like Elvis Costello to walk out and interrupt this record: "I'm sorry ladies and gentlemen, but there's really no reason to do this album tonight." 1.5 A couple of weeks ago we had ‘Licensed to Ill’ in which, posterity has noted, the Beastie Boys parodied something called ‘Frat Rap’ but accidentally epitomised Frat Rap. This was very sad for the Beastie Boys but now here we are two weeks and three albums later and the Beastie Boys have left this unfortunate misunderstanding well behind them and become their own earnest thing, having risen safely above the fandom of unsavoury young white men and the contempt of serious hip-hoppers. Good for them. I love a redemption arc. So even though ‘Ill Communication’ is a load of shit we must take a minute to acknowledge the grown-upness of it. If these sound like the same rappers, possibly the same raps, that made up ‘Licensed to Ill’ it is, crucially, very hard to be sure. The vocals are buried beneath so much distortion and delay that very few words are comprehensible. This is presumably just like spotting someone you haven’t met since school and, seeing that he has grown a beard, feeling assured that he has reached intellectual and emotional maturity. There are also several instrumental tracks here (Sabrosa, Ricky’s Theme, Transitions) in which the influence of Miles Davis (apparently…cheers Wikipedia) has told so far on the band that Wah Pedals have been purchased. Following my encounter with A Tribe Called Quest’s album last week I now carry increasingly acute hopes that no one else in the next thousand albums or so has been influenced by Miles Davis. In any case - here we have another sticky layer of musical adulthood with which we can credit Beastie Boys 4.0 In conclusion - Sabotage is one awesome track, just like No Sleep till Brooklyn is one awesome track. I’ll leave the rest. 2/5

Try as I might (and I'm not trying that hard), I can't think of much to say about Dust. For all its energy and pleasing organ sounds, for however many variations on She Said She Said, it isn't a patch on K by Kula Shaker. 2 For all the time and effort that clearly went into making it there isn’t much to say about this album. It is eager to please its listeners but irritatingly so, like an overattentive waiter. Amid the smug smorgasbord of sitar solo, harmonised organ solo, mellotron riff, celebrity guest spot, cello, arch electric piano break, oversweet backing vocals etc… is an overwhelming sense that the band is smiling all the time. That may be the crux of why this is a thoroughly mediocre record - it is all light and no darkness. Everything carefully worked out and nothing felt. Everything offered and nothing risked. The melodies are pleasant and the lyrics about nothing much. No instrument is played (or recorded) with any character or distinction. The mix is oppressively benign. Another notable album of carefully wrought blues rock was released a couple of months after Dust - TOOL’s ‘Aenima’. It is an album I thought of several times while listening to Dust and the comparison elicited only pity for the Screaming Trees’ album. Kula Shaker’s ‘K’ came out in between them. It’s better than this too. 2/5

Let's set aside the illusion that we are writing these reviews for anyone other than ourselves. If other people read them, fine, but this whole project is about us sharing our exploration of these records. Well, Malachy, with Screamadelica, we've already been there. I have a very vivid memory of you talking me through the whole album in the old Waterstones, before it burned down. It must have been late '98 or early '99. Paul was there, but I don't think he was listening. You retold the record like you would retell the plot of a genre-bending film. "It opens on an acoustic... then bam! It's gospel... you think it's going this way, but, no, it's that way... it's house... it's rave... then horns... but you're not expecting the country ballad." No album could live up to that and Screamadelica didn't. Not initially and not entirely. I did try to get Peter Barronwell to follow me into the Orb's of Higher Than The Sun, but it was too much for him. Your approach was the better one of course, as the album is experiential - it must be taken as a whole and it is the swerves and dips that keep you going. All the songs are very long, but none feel that long, because you are riding a wave. I presume it is supposed to describe the experience of taking ecstacy, but I wouldn't know much about that. This saves me having to do so anyway. I don't feel that I ever need to, knowing Screamadelica is here. It's like experiencing a rave through a VR headset. That it is the work of multiple different producers feels wrong - surely it was masterminded by Andrew Wetherall. Anyway, I have come to enjoy the album a lot (probably after Exterminator sweetened me on the band) even when it sounds like new age music, even when Bobby Gillespie sings vague hedonist good vibe bromides that would make Noel Gallagher cringe, and especially when Bobby Gillespie isn't singing - not true; Higher Than The Sun is the best. It loses its potency after Loaded. That's probably just the nature of the comedown, so maybe it needs to be there. Our last 4 star album was Debut, which is a collection of great songs. Not all the songs here may be so good, but it is as good, if not better as a record, an experience. Though never quite as good as your 5 star retelling of it, putting paid to the lie about dancing about architecture. 4 I loved listening to this today. How brilliantly stupid is this album. Five minutes into ‘loaded’ when Bobby Gillespie, presumably referring to the recent reentry of the horns, suddenly yells ‘AH YEEAA AAHH’ I always chuckle. He only does it once and he doesn’t do too much else in the 7 minutes. It’s a moment both ridiculous and sublime. That is Screamadelica in a nutshell. It has two paragons of concision worthy of any of pop’s music’s best writers - Movin’ on Up and Higher than the Sun each packing 10 minutes of musical action into about 3 1/2 minutes. It also has ‘Come Together’ and ‘loaded’ which pack about 2 minutes of musical action into 10 minutes and 7 minutes respectively. Those tracks are also, somehow, perfectly crafted. Come Together is, I reckon, one of the quickest 10 minutes in pop music despite having so much of that stupid squeaky rubber duck-sounding keyboard in it. What a stupid idea. What a brilliant idea. Slip Inside This House is an inspired reimagining. Inner Flight, this album’s heart and the sound of the album’s cover artwork in my head anyway, has a naive, wild beauty worthy of Eno/Bowie. Damaged is lovely and worthy of the band it rips off. The saxophone solo on I’m Coming Down….Ridiculous. Sublime. I hate Don’t Fight it, Feel it. It’s 7 minutes long. I am utterly indifferent to the ludicrously titled ‘Higher than the Sun (a Dub Symphony in Two Parts)’. It’s 7 minutes long. Shouldn’t that be fatal to my affection for this album? I don’t know why it isn’t. It’s just more of the inexplicable from an album of quantifiably bad ideas - possibly beginning with having Bobby Gillespie as the singer - which come together to make something magical. I love Bobby Gillespie’s voice by the way. Ridiculous. 4/5

One of the greatest concerts I ever attended was a piano improvisation by Terry Riley in the Whitla Hall. It was gentle, hypnotic and very moving. An hour of harmonically simple, but beautiful music never to be repeated. As impressive as Keith Jarret's playing is here, I wouldn't describe it in the same terms. Jarret's stylistic range is broad and, while the transitions from mode to mode are masterful, the whole is a remarkable jumble. He grunts and moans, like Glenn Gould, another furious brain. He races through a thousand ideas, but not to arrive at any particular place. Never gentle. Never hypnotic. Never moving the listener because it is always itself in motion. Of course, I wish I had a modicum of that ability. But if this sounds like criticising something for what it's not, rather than what it is, I completely agree. This is a live performance, not an album, and, where I there, I would experience it differently and perhaps I would be as affected as I was as Riley cycled through all those Is and Vs. As an album, it is buoyed more by its story and its audacity, than by its musical content. Still, for story and audacity alone, it warrants a 2.5-ish. I gather from a quick perusal of the Wikipedia page for this concert that there is quite a bit of mythologising about it, taking in the physical and emotional state of the performer, the story of the little piano that everyone underestimated, and of course the fact of a live solo jazz piano record that sold millions of copies. I am glad this music has all this fascinating backstory because it needs it. It’s very nice. I would be happy to eat at this restaurant and I would tip the performer. A lot of the time the left hand is purely hypnotic. In the right there are sweet and tasteful dashes of melody - creating classy ambience for you and your date. If conversation isn’t flowing there are distractions and prompts to be had as well. Ooo this chunk is very fast, isn’t Jazz fun? Oooo this chunk sounds like Rachmaninov. Do you like classical music? No? Me neither really. What music do you like? Rap? Oh fuck off, Rap isn’t music. It’s just the same two bars of music over and over again and some dude talking. Aye granted that’s a bit like what this fella’s doing but this is jazz, I think, so he could do something else if he wanted - and he might - and there’s all sorts of thinking going on here; probably, I haven’t been listening. Sorry if I was rude about the music you like just then. Rap can be fun. I know all of the words to Rollin’ by Limp Bizkit… 2/5

The impression I've developed of Elton John's output is an unending grapple between his personal flamboyance and Bernie Taupin's tortured, homely doggerel. Taupin will write about farmhands, but John will perform it in sequins. Of course, they recognised this conflict themselves in naming a later (and, in my outsider's opinion, probably their best) album: Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy. However, this grapple is not a creative tension or a compelling paradox, it is just a bar fight between a glam queen and a trucker: it couldn't happen without both participants, but it begs more questions than it answers. John's renowned facility for setting Taupin's lyrics in twenty minutes or less demonstrates his considerable musical ability, but also the insignificance of the words to the process - he doesn't have to (or doesn't bother to) assimilate them, consider them, draw out their meaning with his music. The words are only a vehicle by which to explore melody and, while some of the melodies here are gorgeous, the mismatch of word and tune is sometimes awful. Listen to the pained articulation of "blu-oo-ooze" or "row-ow-owed" in Goodbye Yellow Road. Those vowels can't withstand such contortions. So, despite the praise John gives his writing partner, it is obvious he doesn't care about the lyrics. Why should he when they are so laboured and unrelatable, so self-satisfied, but unsatisfying? The result is that John hollers lyrics that mean nothing to him (they certainly mean nothing to me), so there is nothing under the performance, no heart, no depth. He is a more than credible rock vocalist - a little McCartney and little Little Richard - but the performance is always one-dimensional singing Taupin's words, because it may as well be a page from the instruction manual for the synthesiser or a screenplay handed to him, hopefully, by his coke dealer. This double album is a lot of music, a natural consequence of churning out songs in a third of an hour. It is the second album he released in 1973. He released another album in 1974 and two more in 1975. However, each one is no more than a document of his coked-up productivity; they're not albums per se. Well, except the obscurely autobiographical Captain Fantastic. That's not to say that the coked-up Elton John and his excellent band didn't document some incredible musical product. The first six tracks here constitute a great half hour of music (if not song - the lyrics are no good!) and that's 75% of a reasonable compilation. Throw in I've Seen That Movie Too, Saturday Night's Alright, and Harmony and the musical experience would be pretty good. If he had spent more time in the songwriting - writing less, refining more, asking what does any of this crap mean, adding discernment to his obvious talents - he might have produced a distinct artistic statement, rather than another link in the glittery sausage of his early 70s output. An Elton John with self-control doesn't write Jamaica Jerk-Off, let alone put it on a record. 2.5 Elton John is a natural entertainer, in the way he writes music as well as the way he performs it. His melodies are lovely and he always creates a terrific sense of momentum in his piano playing. Elton could, as they say, sing the phonebook and it would be good but, unfortunately, he sings the lyrics of Bernie Taupin instead, so it’s bad. That’s about it. I don’t think anyone, Elton fan or not, argues that Bernie Taupin is a good lyricist. Perhaps some people think Elton John‘s music elevates Taupin‘s words. I think Elton John is a hack because he didn’t care enough to send these lyrics back for a second draft. It’s not good enough to say ‘I’m not a lyricist’ - words have sound and texture so in a song they are music. Verdi never wrote a libretto but he put his librettists through hell demanding redrafts, sometimes dozens of redrafts, over years. Elton received a lyric from Taupin, snorted a line of coke, and sat down at the piano to set it in stone. And there those lyrics are; rhythmically illiterate, brain-fart English from a transparently nasty little egotist. The best bits of this album are the bits where you can’t make out the words Elton is singing. 2/5

I enjoyed this. Still it makes a person feel guilty to like Damon Albarn's Mali Music more and any blues record I've ever heard less. 2 I have this a first listen without reading up about the band. It was fine. Nimbly played, blues grooves to dance to and lyrics in a language I don’t understand - nothing to fall in love with here. I then did my reading about the band and why they are particularly worthy of our attention. It seems that they fled persecution and were ultimately befriended by Damon Albarn and Julian Casablancas. I am very sorry for their troubles on all counts. But even in the glory of its tragic context, their music is just nimbly played blues grooves to dance to. There were, however, a few moments that reminded me of Ocean Colour Scene, a band that won’t be on this list since they have never had to flee persecution and, I daresay, have no friends. So I went and listened to a little OCS. Profit in Peace is a banger. 1998! They weren’t wrong - ‘we’ did gotta fight some more. They had the 21st Century’s number. Do Songhoy Blues’ songs (now a decade old apparently) have that kind of perspicacity? I have no idea, thirty seconds research on Google didn’t turn up the English translation so I gave up. 1.5/5

I would appreciate if someone better informed than me could explain hip hop's evolution to being the most popular musical form of the early 00s.The samples are less hooky and drawn from a much narrower range of sources than those chosen by, say, De La Soul or A Tribe Called Quest. At some point, the art of collaging sound became divorced from hip hop entirely, left to the Avalanches or someone, returning sampling to avant garde tradition starting with Pierre Boulez. Or something. I don't know. I'm not an historian. Perhaps these aren't samples anyway. Maybe they are just beats. In which case, when did it become the prevailing aesthetic that beats should be tinny, plodding, and cluttered? Perhaps these beats are groovy or slinky or something, but the timbre of everything is so course that I can't feel it. The vocal is mumbled and hard to follow, so any complaints about the lyrical content aren't coming from me - I don't know what they are. Of course, hip hop became the most popular musical form of the time by becoming pop music of the time. As the title suggests, this is a project aiming to make 50 Cent rich, but, in the trying, something definitely died. While I was listening to wildly different things that was how it felt to me at the time, that this was product + pose, with nothing else to it. Listening to it properly now, that seems about right. 1 I have grumbled about every rap record we have encountered so far and my common complaint is that the backdrop to the (mere) talking is always little more than one or two bars of music on a loop. Well here is a record that dismantles that preconception like…let’s say shooting a person until their brains come out. Not only does Get Rich or Die Tryin’ have someone footering on a keyboard a good portion of the time - 50 Cent actually sings a bit! Even more surprising is that in this act of what seems to me something like daring, 50 Cent has made the worst rap album I’ve heard yet. Wow. How little I know about rap. Now 50 shows me how little I want to know. 0.5/5

I notice that all the four and five star albums were foregone conclusions. They were albums that we've listened to plenty of times before. Is it possible for an album to get four or more on the first listen? Or can one only make such a big statement after familiarity and scrutiny? This isn't my first time listening to Rust In Peace, but it is my first close listen. For all the distortion, the production remains crisp and clean. The guitar-playing is precise and articulate, as though Mustaine and Friedman had been playing together for years, rather than this being their first record together. Yet, even with such accuracy, there is the sense of spontaneity and the risk that some of the solos might go off the rails. They don't though. Most satisfying is the breadth of the musical palette. It sounds like thrash, of course, but there are moments when it sounds like Led Zeppelin, moments where it sounds like Soundgarden, like Helmet, like the Melvins. And very frequently it is groovy. What would familiarity do for this record? Would it excuse some of the jarring transitions, accepting them as one accepts the warp on a cassette tape you've listened to hundreds of times? Would it excuse Mustaine's strangled vocals when he sings? The croaking vocals whenever he does whatever that is on Dawn Patrol? The study period lyrics? I've certainly forgiven - or accepted - equally dubious things from artists that I love, because I love them. Or I love them because they make some dubious choices. This is just who Dave Mustaine is and I don't know if that is something will enchant or annoy me in the long term. I am confident, had I committed myself to metal as I have committed myself to other areas of music, that I would recognise Rust in Peace as a four if not five star record. But, without that commitment, I am not confident to say it is now. 3.5 Silly cover, silly lyrics, silly vocals, silly guitar solos. Silly! Yet the dramatic commitment as well as the energy and conviction in the carefully wrought music runs very hot. It’s serious, sincere work and I really enjoy it. Of course these comments can be applied to a majority of Thrash Metal so it should also be said that Rust in Peace has its distinctions even beyond the outstanding technical achievements of the individual musicians. Five Magics is my favourite Megadeth song not just for its absorbing structure and Marty Friedman‘s beautiful little solo at 3 minutes (my favourite of an album of terrific solos) but for those mesmerising incantations. It has the poetic, or at least theatrical, instincts of Mercyful Fate - a rung above what Metallica were capable of even in their best lyrics, in my opinion. 3.5 Magics/5 Magics

Not the first time that I've listened to The Stone Roses this week. What was it about wanting to turn off 50 Cent that made me think to put this on? Mumbling probably. I Wanna Be Adored has the poorly enunciated swagger that would come to characterise gangsta rap and the Oasis Brothers in the 90s and 00s - and I would be lying if I said I didn't enjoy it more here than there. However, I am baffled as to how such bravado manages to convince so many people that it is deserved and how many listeners roll over and accept Oasis's 'best band in the world' schtick. All these loudmouths throw their names into the conversation and credulous fools accept it as an impartial observation. The myth that The Stone Roses' debut is a great or significant record is not born out by listening to it. John Squire's status as a guitar hero is undermined when all he does is hammer-on and pull-off or wah wah wah. And, as for his status as a visual artist? The cover is sophomoric nonsense. A legendary rhythm section is revealed to be groovy only when augmented by bongos, whereas a comparative, Byrds-inspired four-piece, The Smiths, manages to sound full and funky at the back, with more ornate arpeggiating, and a more articulate self-aggrandising, conspiracy-theorist vocalist up front. In fairness, Mani will go on to be great in Primal Scream and Screamadelica is a much more complete ecstasy record than this. The top of the album powers through on familiarity. Indeed, I know Waterfall backwards. Their debut record and they are already out of ideas, scraping the barrel with one track reversed and a cringeworthy extrapolation of Scarborough Fair. The rest is basic and tedious. Bye Bye Bad Man, Sugar Spun Sister, etc. is bad music played badly. Only I Am The Resurrection is any fun at all, but is that braggadocio ever unearned! The final nail in the coffin of the myth is that the original UK release doesn't even include their too long, too repetitive, to mumbly masterpiece, Fool's Gold. The beauty of that song is that you don't have to listen to it the whole way through, the small quantity of musical material you remember of it is all you need. 2 If there’s one thing preventing this record from being the best and most important record ever made it’s that a lot of the music is no good. And several other things. The opening and closing tracks are good; I wanna be adored and (the first three and a half minutes anyway) of I am the resurrection. In the ‚nice enough’ column we have She bangs the drums, Waterfall, the chorus of Made of Stone. The rest is dull except the stuff that doesn’t even deserve that designation because it is simply a waste of a listener‘s time - Don‘t stop, Elizabeth my dear, and the jam session sellotaped onto I am the resurrection. Fool‘s Gold, as all civilised people agree, isn’t on this album. The album is poorly recorded and generally sounds like shit; Ian Brown can’t sing well so making him do it in a school corridor was a poor decision. I like the cover art. 2.5/5

On reading some of the reviews, I discovered it was not an original thought to hear the album as Variations on a Theme by Don Henley. Each identical drumbeat has that same quailty of watching a high speed activity in slow motion that makes Boys of Summer so evocative, but here it is only evocative of Boys of Summer. Everyone else is right of course: there's 80s Springsteen, 80s Rod Stewart, Dire Straits. Also there are echoes of The Big Music - The Waterboys, 80s U2, Big Country - but the Big Music aimed for the epic and anthemic, whereas this is anemic. The first song ends with a long noisescapes, such as other bands would leave for the closer, indicating that the climax has been reached and all the coherent energy spent. This load is shot too early and its only a puff of retained childhood air. 1 This album is bluntly derivative of other rock music; Dire Straits, Springsteen, Tom Petty and Bob Dylan (specifically ‘Oh Mercy’) all spring to mind. However, there is nothing here of the desire to please an audience that is indicated in the absorbing, storytelling lyrics of those acts. Indeed there is no real songwriting here at all - just 80s American heartland rock ‘vibe‘. These lyrics, fragmentary evocations of Springsteeny backwater life in the streets in the darkness on the edge of town and the river and some girl or other (unnamed but presumably Mary, Jane or Wendy) are for the most part muttered in a manly Mark Knopflerish way from a bath of reverb and delay. Which sounds alright except once you’ve gone off and checked what the lyrics are the whole thing feels like the work of an A.I Springsteen lyric generator. Here’s a snippet: ‘There’s a cold wind blowin' down my old road/Down the back streets where the pines grow/As the river splits the undertows/ But I’d be lyin' to myself if I said I didn’t mind/ Leave it hangin' on the line…’ And another: ‘On a drive, I'm takin' back roads/ High against where the rivers are flowin'/ I didn't think that our love had grown…’ Not even through the courageous act of pinching melodic fragments from Dancing in the Dark or I’m on Fire or Tougher than the Rest to set them to, can this nonsense be redeemed. Still - those Springsteen tracks are only pop song length and these War on Drugs tracks are really long so they are bound to be profound; the greatest album of 2014 the critics said, and for all I know they were right. 1/5

This process is teaching something of what we mean by album. Any of us who were around at the time remember downloading live recordings of the songs that would become Kid A and Amnesiac. There were obvious highlights among them, but the album itself wasn't obvious at all. An album cannot be made of highlights alone - a Best Of compilation can be a fun listen, but it won't satisfy artistically. The idea that Pyramid Song doesn't appear on the album seems ridiculous, but there is no place for it on Kid A. Kid A itself may not even be the best album that one could make from all those songs, but the qualities that make it work where Amnesiac doesn't are clear: flow, continuity, consistency, thematic cohesion. The National Anthem and Life In A Glass House are both successful jazz exercises, but the former integrates the jazz band into both the song and the album as a whole, whereas the former distinguishes and isolates itself from the other songs. One could not be swapped out of one record and placed on the other. Perhaps Treefingers could be replaced with Hunting Bears, but the only way to know is to try and I presume Radiohead did. Another quality that we might consider a successful album to have is that it represents a snapshot of an artistic moment in time. Kid A feels like a progression and an encapsulation, whereas as Amnesiac sounds occasionally like the past (Knives Out), occasionally like the future (I Might Be Wrong would fit easily on Hail to Thief) or, with it's more unusual efforts - Life In A Glass House, Like Spinning Plates, Packt Like Sardines - out of time altogether. But being on an album does something for a song, giving it context and clarity. Dollars and Cents is hardly worthy of discussion, but for that it is on Amnesiac. Whereas Pyramid Song is elevated, not just a perfect single, but the lead single of an album and of a tour, the fulcrum around which an imagined alternate to Kid A Mnesiac revolves. This is turn says something about the song - how did it (and select other tracks) elevate a collection of cut-offs and discards into a mystery bag of potential? 3 I could write hundreds of pages on Amnesiac but I’m really not sure what to say about it in a short review. I’ll never forget the very first time I heard Life in a Glass House, freshly downloaded from Napster, through big headphones, sitting in a big leather chair in my father’s study. I was so taken with Jimmy Hastings’ clarinet part that I took up clarinet for a while. My first lesson was on 9/11. I can’t think of another track by anyone like Like Spinning Plates because I love the song so much and yet never want to listen to its studio recording. I have been listening for nearly 25 years but I change my mind about I Might Be Wrong and Knives Out every time I hear them; are they great or terrible?; are they exquisite and thrilling or stupid and boring? As the years have gone on I have found it more difficult to hear Amnesiac out of the shadow of Kid A, though I don’t recall it being an issue for me at the time in the least. The recent joint anniversary reissue in one box with Kid A ‘Kid A Mnesia’ certainly didn’t help. I don’t know. When it came out I recall hearing it as a (flawed) album in its own right and now I am much more inclined to the feeling that it is the mere outtakes of the Kid A sessions. It has, unquestionably, a couple of Radiohead’s very best songs on it (Pyramid Song and Life in a Glass House) but also worthless studio indulgence - (Pulk/Pull.. and Morning Bell/Amnesiac) and somewhat uninspired studio recordings of songs that deserved better (You and Whose Army, Dollars and Cents). Amnesiac isn’t a great album but I love it. Amnesiac isn’t an important album but it was important to me. 4/5

In the late 90s, I bought my first - and only - Frank Zappa CD in a shop in Barcelona. It was a compilation that was largely comprised of Freak Out. For all Freak Out is a concept record, I don't think the material was helped or hindered by my listening to it in a fragmentary manner. After all, the album's twisted mix of contemporary pop pastiche and musique concrete isn't meant to be stylistically coherent. It is more like listening to an AM radio station - but an AM radio station that hates you. The snide critiques just keep on comin'. Until the final offering breaks down into chaos. This ain't the hit parade either, because nothing really sticks out. An obvious comparion is the Bonzo Dog Band's The Doughnut in Granny's Greenhouse, from two years later. There is the same variety, the same high and low humour, and the same reflective commentary on both the normies and the freaks. But the Bonzos welcome everyone, Normie and Freak alike, into their silliness, whereas as Zappa is content on keeping everyone out. No silliness, but frequent meanness. Still, the music is not as gruelling or punishing as Hot Rats, which we listening to a few weeks back. Of course, this isn't really Zappa's music. This is him messing around with music that other people like. It is not so exacting, not so rigid. But it isn't exactly loose and funny either. 2.5 This is hard to judge. It isn’t bad music, for the most part, but it is slathered in such a thick layer of irony that it is hard to credit it with much but adolescent contempt for music and people that aren’t as cool as the Mothers of Invention. To put that kinder - it consistently has the quality of the smartest kid in the class being merely facetious. It is also worth pointing out that nothing here is actually funny - Dylan and The Beatles (both of whom are conceivable targets of some of the pastiche here) were both very funny in their songs when the mood took them. That said, the effectiveness of the comedy is not so much my problem with this stuff. I know Frank Zappa is clever and good at music but what does he love? There’s the rub. There is no risk in anything here because there is no sincere attempt to create anything that people might love. He’s a wee prick, that’s about it. 2.5/5

There is a strange fascination with the new here: New Church, Newboys, a New Day Dawns. It seems to fit in with the Damned's recent debut, the first UK punk single, New Rose. However, the Adverts are insistent, on Safety in Numbers, that they were "always there anyway, without the New Wave/What about the New Wave?/Did you think it would change things?" This speaks somewhat to the contradictions of punk: new, but old sounding; challenging, but rudimentary; aggressive, but childish. Never as primitivist as it makes out to be, One Chord Wonders has more than three chords and irony rather than the truth. Is that the Andalusian Cadence? Very sophisticated. Or just Runaway by Del Shannon. It's hard to tell if the Adverts sounded new or not at the time. They won't let on. However, elements of post-punk are already present in their punk - bits sound like the Damned, but even moreso there are yelps like Dirk Wears White Sox and the intro of Bombsite Boy is practically The Virgin Prunes. Is it any good though? It's fine. I like the bass. 2.5 I have never heard this before and I really enjoyed it. Good songs, well sung. 3

Great musicians playing great music... needlessly. The ambition to play Mussorgsky as a power trio or supergroup is self-explanatory, isn't it? If you can play it - and they can - why wouldn't you? It's in part to show off and, in part, to meet the challenges that music offers the player and, in part, it's funny to do so. Pretension played to puncture pretension. The question is probably: what does it add? The timbre of certain of the synths is squonky and unpleasant. The three-piece often lacks the clarity and separation of the symphonic forces, degrading into mush. The concluding Nut Rocker demonstrates more of Keith Emerson's organ dexterity than the wide I-V chording required to replace the strings in the Mussorgsky. Is either instance a better display of his ability than Knife-Edge? Carl Palmer is also very frequently at a loss. Orchestral music generally has an implicit rather than explicit beat, so what's a drummer to do? Repeated snare snaps on every beat as in Promenade Pt. 3. It's not his fault, what else is there to do? But we all do things live to keep the performance interesting for ourselves. And the fact it exists is interesting and entertaining enough. They're having so much fun it would be a pretence on my part not to have fun either. 2.5 This was a terrible idea well executed. I quite enjoyed it and I thought it was funny too - although at times it is genuinely difficult to gauge how intentional is the humour. It was also funny because we got a punk rock record yesterday. I half hope we get another punk rock record next. 3/5

How can something so dense remain so light? Guitar chords thick with extensions, but airy as folk. Arrangements full of instruments, but generally lively: the L.A. Express does a lot of work, probably too much, that flute is certainly grating on Just Like This Train. The lyrics are a lot, the subject matter heavy, the scansion often tumbling, but Mitchell's melodic writing and preternatural voice often turns that tumbling into dancing, that heaviness into profundity, and a lot into everything. Not every time here, but she can do it when she wants to. For all that praise, this is not my favourite Joni record, not by a long chalk. But, as with kidneys, the margin between favourites is slight and the best living is done with the full complement that nature has granted. You'll be happy you have it. 3.5 The six studio albums from Ladies of the Canyon to Hejira is one of the best runs in pop music. In my opinion Court and Spark is the least of them, which is no great criticism by itself. The songs are terrific but the arrangements are overwrought and the production queasily slick. Same Situation doesn’t need the chimes and the oozing pedal steel guitar (almost nothing ever does but here it is on most of these tracks) and the string section. Troubled Child doesn’t need the chorus of muted horns. Down to You is the worst offender - a great song and I wish it was just Joni and a piano. Strings and horns is the least of it; clarinet, cor anglais, flute, and a harp all pop up adding some extraneous line - all luxury window-dressing. This is the Mitchell album for the people that kept an additional clean copy of Dark Side for testing new Hi-Fi components. And all those celebrity guest spots. Decadence. Utter 70s Decadence. In terms of lyrics Court and Spark might also be Mitchell at her most self-obsessed, not necessarily a deal-breaker (Blue is probably taking silver) but then the album ends with Twisted. I have never liked this track - there is something unpalatable about Joni Mitchell trying to ironise thinking you are a genius when she is, demonstrably, a genius. ‘Cheech and Chong’ not being geniuses doesn’t make it funny. 3.5/5

I don't really get the point of playlists, overlong groupings of songs thrown together to fit a mood, a vibe, an ambience, or style. The playlist that is simply a depository for all the songs you've ever liked makes some sense, but seems needlessly complicated to navigate. I used to tape the songs I liked from CDs I borrowed from the CD library, but, honestly, I never went back to the tapes. I just made them so I would have the songs. If I actually wanted to listen to the songs, I would have to integrate them into a proper mixtape. A mixtape that, like an album proper, would have a flow, highs and lows, transitions and juxtapositions. A journey rather than a mood. Arranging songs by vibe feels like collecting together swatches of the same colour in different shades, a paint chart instead of a collage. That's what Exile On Main Street is: a playlist, not an album. Songs the band liked - that you may like too - thrown together, one after the after. A decent ear will recognise different genres of Americana, but really all of them of a piece - you see the family resemblance, you know why they were put in the Main Street bin rather than the Sticky Fingers one. But not one song connects to the next, they don't clarify or edify each other by sitting side by side. One song doesn't even know the other ones are there. That is a form of variety, I suppose. Or that's how often feels. Really I hear two types of song here, some that are inward-looking and some that are outward-looking. The inward-looking songs sound like the band is a circle, playing to themselves, enjoying the camaraderie of walking through their favourite styles and influences. This is most of them, documentation of a good time that you missed out on - like the party atmospherics on that first Beastie Boys album. The outward-looking songs sound like Mick Jagger is facing the audience, the band and backdrop behind him. Shine A Light, for example, is for us. Too much of the record is for them. Knowing that a playlist will go on indefinitely, with no indication of where you are in its length, you keep an ear out for highlights, for little things that grab you. Plenty grabs me here, but only for a moment, full songs are hard to grasp or care to grasp. That those little things on Exile On Main Street are the playing of Nicky Hopkins, the brass arrangements, and the gospel backing vocals says who knows what about my feelings for the Rolling Stones. 3 While it is clearly impossible to deny that the Rolling Stones had a better time making this than anyone has ever had listening to it, it’s still quite good to listen to. They had perfected the art of building more or less mundane musical material into brilliant, ecstatic finales - Rocks Off, Rip This Joint, Tumbling Dice, Sweet Virginia, Loving Cup, All Down the Line. The sloppy(?), inconsistent production actually gives a sense of variety and certainly contributes to the spontaneous, party atmosphere of the record as well, although there is very little sloppy about the playing - the piano particularly is absolutely terrific. But the real key element in why this album is so good is Mick Jagger’s ability to find some convincing melodic hook every time (Keith Richards finds one too to be fair) and then deliver it with terrific energy and drama. Rocks and Shine a Light are two of my favourite Stones tracks and while I don’t particularly love anything else on this record I don’t think it ever sags in quality. Actually that’s not true - I love I just want to see his face. And all the horns. And the backing vocals. And Charlie Watts drumming. 4/5

I remember waking at 6.30 and, unusually, checking the news before I left the house. I got to listen to Where Are We Now? once, knowing I would have to wait all day, through work, before I could hear it again and work out the very obvious meanings of the lyrics and video. The song lingered that whole time. It was a magical moment. The Next Day is weighted with context and historicism then. Not only in the surprise of its release, but in the self-consciousness with which Bowie plays with his past. It is all about past, which is subtly different to legacy. Follow-up, Black Star is about legacy, because it knows what is to come. But The Next Day, despite its forward-looking title, has no clue what's coming. The Next Day is a response to a brush with death; Black Star faces death down. As a result, The Next Day doesn't really know what to do. Where Are We Now? harks back to Berlin, with some of the cod grandiosity of "Heroes." I'd Rather Be High could be an outtake from Toy. If You Can See Me sounds very nineties. Heat is a powerful tribute to Scott Walker. Most of the rest is an extension of Reality. This pose of elderly reflection works well, in the record's historical context, the latest Bowie identity: super old man. But it's a fool's pose, looking backwards - the crucial step is forward into oblivion, where Bowie becomes pure identity, free from materiality, free from personal life, family, friends, etc. He will then be only the thing he created, an image. On The Stars, he sings of himself and other celebrities "we live closer to the earth, never to the heavens." But, only three years later, his spirit "rose a metre and stepped aside." Look up there, he's in heaven! The Next Day is a material record, the result of historical factors that I don't think one can ignore. It is about those historical factors, in as much as it is about anything. For Bowie's awareness of these things and his playfulness with them, it is clear that he hadn't yet grasped the material, mortal reality of aging and death. Perhaps he had in private, but he didn't have the artistic vision in place yet. An ahistorical listening of The Next Day is probably unfair to this small, doting record. It is not one of 1001 albums you should listen to before you die, but it is an illustrative point in the twenty-five albums David Bowie made before he died. Even if that point is only he was only an old man. 2 The drums are brash - dry, compressed, almost aggressively four-square at times (Love is Lost, Valentine’s Day, Dancing Out in Space, How Does the Grass Grow?, Set the World on Fire) the bass is often bouncing quavers on root notes, the guitar work defined by short, bluesy riffs and stabbed half chords with no more sonic dressing than a light distortion. The songs are majority hook-laden, up-beat 3-4 minute guitar pop sometimes with arch ooos and las and saxophones honking. So what is there here to set The Next Day apart from the work of, say, the Kaiser Chiefs? Well there are a few things but nothing that properly redeems The Next Day from the suspicion that at least a few of these tracks would suffer no artistic injury from the inclusion of multitracked Ricky Wilsons howling “uuuuggghhhhhEeehhhhhhhhhAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA” to a crescendo in the pre-chorus. This is a bad David Bowie album. Whatever flattering light was cast at the time because of Bowie’s long absence or what pathos it can claim since Bowie’s death is all falsity. This album stakes everything on the quality of the songs because, as observed above, there is almost no sonic or structural interest here at all (although there is a game of spot-the-Bowie-song-reference). Well the songs aren’t much good. Occasionally they are excruciating - ‘I’d Rather Be High’ is a rancid stew of Kula Shaker and…something far, far worse than Kula Shaker. The lyrics are rarely comprehensible as much beyond randomly collated obscurities - no risk is taken with the personal or the poetic. If that was, to Bowie, by no means a new method of composing his lyrics that hardly excuses the lack of inspiration in lines like: “Kennedy would kill/ For the lines that you’ve written/ Van Ronk says to Bobby/ She’s the next real thing/ Crouched in the half light/ Screaming like a banshee/ You’re in the boat babe/ We’re in the water” Forget the meaning; these words just _sound_ like shit; which sets them apart from a good deal of Bowie’s work whether we’re talking about The Bewlay Brothers or New Killer Star. And The Next Day is full of stuff like this. If ‘Where Are We Now?’ seemed poetically profound to me and plenty of other listeners at the time because it had German places in it, time (and visits to Germany where this kind of poetry is to be had everywhere) has shown this advantage to be superficial: “Sitting in the Dschungel/ On Nürnberger Straße/ A man lost in time/ Near KaDeWe” What absolute rubbish. But to be fair to WAWN - it is also one of the best things on the album (along with ‘Heat’ and ‘If You Can See Me’) because here is a sense of Bowie’s carefully crafting a melody instead of just vibing one in a couple of notes over a rock groove (the title track, Stars, Love is Lost). The careful crafting thing is very risky of course - for a man of Bowie’s age it could easily have made him seem like an old man scornful that young people can’t write like Bacharach. Well I wish Bowie had old-manned more. Here is one of the greatest writers there has ever been in pop music and the overwhelming sense I get from The Next Day (a sense I don’t get from Heathen or Reality, of which this album is the musical sibling) is of a man (men possibly - hello to Tony Visconti, Earl Slick et al) working in fear of his own artistic irrelevance and his waning energy. 2/5

After the recent string of hip-hop records, I was dreading another dense, drawn-out dirge of muddy drum-programming and diarrhetic flow, but I really enjoyed this. Missy is funny ("You soggy-breasted cow stomachs!"), musical (Back in the Day may be awkward nostalgia, but she can sing), and refreshingly sincere - skits are always embarrassing, but Missy's commentary here is sweet and tender. Timbaland's production is sharp and the beats are genuinely bounce, when so much 00s radio hip-hop sounds like grinding robots. The samples are neatly integrated into the whole and the features are all good - who is that kid on Gossip Folks? I don't know that I understood much of it. This rating might go up or down depending on if I ever understand what is happening. For now, it is enough that, after I did my due diligence, I put it on again, thankful for access to all these Missy Elliott exclusives. 3 This wasn’t exactly ‘Good’, in any sense of the word, but I must say it was entertaining. For one, I really didn’t see the twist coming when the ‘fuck poor people’ track transitioned into a reflection on loss and the nature of the afterlife. It was funny, possibly unintentionally, and touching. Intention, generally, is difficult to untangle on this album. In recent weeks I have been disgusted at the frankly psychotic misogyny on open display in the lyrics of Eminem and 50 Cent. Despite the (seeming) protestations and clarifications of the odd spoken word sections my sense after a couple of listens is that Missy Elliot’s material not only doesn’t challenge their poisonous worldview but enthusiastically collaborates with it. Perhaps there are performative nuances or an element of irony that I have missed; I note this was ME’s 4th album, well it was the first I’ve listened to. Setting aside my repeated moral repulsion I quite enjoyed some of this, even where the musical content of the backing was a beat and a short, chromatic loop. Missy Elliot has a fascinating voice - singing and rapping - from which she builds mesmerising collages of syllables and heavy breaths. Sometimes she will suddenly turn rapping into snippets of sweetly harmonised melody. Sometimes the words are completely incomprehensible but the texture of the vocal fascinates enough to carry the track through (Gossip Folks). Sometimes it put me in mind of the many-voiced rantings of the demon in the Exorcist; as long as you can ignore the psychological attack, the slanders about your mother etc, you could listen with interest for hours (there is even some backwards stuff!) Credit to Timbaland’s production as well - I am a complete sucker for big compressed synths playing chromatic riffs over heavy beats; I enjoyed Gossip Folks and Work It - Slide was my favourite thing here. 2.5/5

I don't know much about thrash and can't say much about Anthrax. My meagre understanding was that they were big dumb rockers among the Big Four. Metallica were the exemplar; Megadeth were technicians; Slayer were extremists; and Anthrax were dumb. I don't know who told me that, but I guess they meant Anthrax are fun and sort of sloppy. Anthrax aren't dumb though. The obvious influence of hardcore makes everything more immediate than those other bands: the live feel, the short bursts of guitar solo, the barrage of chords, sometimes sludgy, sometimes sharp. Each song is like an album's worth of Black Flag songs put together. The metal tradition is more apparent in Joey Belladonna's high Halfordian vocals. The two styles meet in the subject matter, straight-forward social commentary with conscience - very Fugazi, but also there in Sabbath. Megadeth may take the germ of War Pigs and turn it into conspiracy theory, but Anthrax seem to get the point and sing it plain. Whoever told me Anthrax were dumb was probably also the person who told me that grunge was the meeting of punk and metal, but Anthrax were already there and sound nothing like Soundgarden, Green River, or Tad. Then the big four of grunge don't sound any more alike than the big four of thrash. Probably not worth comparing them, because, for all the enjoyment of Among the Living, I didn't enjoy it as much as Rust in Peace. 2.5 This one is hard to judge. There is much more declamation and call and response shouts than melody here. While that adds another layer of primitivism which isn’t inappropriate to thrash metal it doesn’t leave the casual listener much to grab hold of; Metallica and Megadeth even at their thrashiest are more accessible than this. I still enjoyed it well enough - if it is a little two-dimensional at times it does both of those dimensions well: it’s fast and it’s ugly. I’ll take it. 2/5

At no point this weekend - three days! - was I in the mood for Yusuf's limp acoustic guitar playing, his winsome warbling, and elongated vowels. Lacking the psychedelic whimsy that one gets with Donovan, Islam comes across as precious and sheltered. On Wild World, he is even condescending - she doesn't care what you think, dude, she's living her own life. There's not much to stomp or tap your foot to. Everyone on the record is sitting cross-legged, even the underutilised drummer - I don't think I heard a kick drum until the last minute of Miles from Nowhere. Maybe I missed it in the muddy low end of Wild World. I like Wild World though. I don't know why it's getting a kicking here, beyond the fussiness of the whole record. There are other good songs here, but it's not a good record. The thing that kept me coming back was trying to work out what Into White sounded like. It was My Secret Reason by Lisa Germano from Geek The Girl, although they don't actually sounds that much alike. 2 Here’s a strange album. There are a few songs I really love - Where do the children play?, Wild World and Father and Son - and I can certainly admire the rest. But I don’t think this is a good album. I hate Cat Stevens’ voice for starters. It isn’t easy for me to mark a record down for that because I’m a big Dylan fan and it turns me when people say he can’t sing; Dylan is a great singer - whether the notes are perfectly accurate or not (generally not but much more than people think) he brings a texture and character in his vocals that makes his recordings great. Leonard Cohen is an objectively bad singer -almost a non-singer - but it’s a voice that perfectly inhabits the gloomy, defeated world of many of the songs he writes and, again, makes many of his recordings. Cat Stevens doesn’t have any of this. He has a genuinely crap voice in my opinion; it’s completely uninteresting; slight, shallow with an unpleasant rasp. If God gave him accuracy it was, surely, so that he could demo these absolutely terrific songs effectively for people who were decent singers. The arrangements here are fine - although no musician distinguishes themselves even for a moment. The album cover is not fine - the font is rotten, the colouring hideous, the beige mount is awful, the perspective is wrong and the children look creepy. 2/5

"What's that? That's not an insect. That's your music, is it?" Not my music, but the xx's music. Not my words, but the words of my wife. But, if she imagines the sound of flies buzzing around this pile of a record, there's a good reason. 1 Ten years before COVID-19 there was The xx. When I think of their debut album I recall viral videos of xx fans being wrestled to the ground by security while they loudly denounced the onlookers, standing appalled in their Radiohead masks, as ‘Sheeple’. These xxers had had enough of music made by ‘experts’. It did no good to try to reason with them that The xx album was demonstrably worse than getting the flu. The Prime Minister went on tv and ordered everyone not to turn on BBC 6 Music unless there were 3 other stations playing different genres all on at the same time in the garden, or something. It did no good; the Mercury Music Prize, the Guardian Album of the Year, the NME end of year list, the xx listening party at Downing Street - these superspreader events guaranteed that the xx spread to a million copies. That was a crazy time. I didn’t listen to The xx myself until long after the worst peaks. It was awful; far worse than the flu. I was struck that it was exactly the same level of awful for 5 days; never better or worse. The strangest thing is that some people look back now and say The xx was great. Poor devils. They never recovered their sense of taste. 1/5

I can't ignore how the criticisms we've already levied at various hip hop records also apply here. Violent fantasy, frequently misogynistic, recounted over limited, repeated musical material. Of course, that's the murder ballad form and there is an argument that Cave and the same rappers we've rebuked are burlesquing the same tradition. What distinguishes the current record is the revelling in an out-dated - even out-of-time - tradition. The bitches and hoes referenced in hip hop are the women of a contemporary culture, whereas the murdered women here are all individuals and the subject of a literary tradition. This is a small distinction and the ability of the gangsta rap fantasists to blur the line between their fantasy and their cultural reality is interesting in its own way. However, Cave's position as a storyteller, rather than playing a persona, allows him to adopt different perspectives and is probably more successful when he subverts expectations of the murder ballad - if it can be considered a subverted expectation for the band named after William Marsh's Bad Seed to foreground a female pubescent psychopath. More significant than this slight ethical justification is the fact that I like the sound of people playing in a room together. The plodding ballad form can be exhausting and Cave's shtick here is wearing, but the musicians - especially Mick Harvey - occasionally let loose with a worthy lick. That said, none of Nick Cave's mid-period work is really it for me. Lacking the wildness of the Birthday Party and the consideration of the later Skeleton Tree, it all sits precariously between the two: neither fully haunted nor humane. 2 Reggie Chamberlain-King 8:47 AM (5 minutes ago) to me Somewhere near the beginning of this project I sneaked a look at an overview which showed that Nick Cave is among the artists with the most albums in this list. Assuming I make it all the way then, I will have opportunity to explore in detail my contempt for this artist I consider less a hack than a charlatan. For now then it will do to say that Murder Ballads is, in my opinion, trash. Turn your attention if you can from the hypnotic combination of self-regard and intellectual insecurity that blusters up front and listen to the band. They sound like shit. Most of this album is mind-numbing two bar grooves that feel barely rehearsed. It isn’t even recorded well. Where there are attempts at substantive arrangements or production ideas the result is often worse - the twee strings on Wild Roses or the plain daft backing vocals/dramatic sobs on Kindness of Strangers. As in most rap the music is a mere backdrop; just another excuse for the loudest, most abrasive boy in the sixth-form drama class to pursue the attention he needs. 1/5

After multiple listens, I have no idea where I stand on Don't Stand Me Down. I usually write my reviews earlier in the evening, but I am just about to go to bed and almost forgot to do it. Does that mean anything? No clue. I respect Kevin Rowland as a weirdo and the weirdo choices here are fascinating. The mumbled asides take the spoken interludes of soul and doo-wop to a comic extreme. Then the mumbled interstitials take that even further, past funny into the concerning - as funny as a rap skit and no funnier. And Rowland's assumed voices triangulating between Robert Smith, Elvis Costello, and Mark E. Smith. The sparse, crippled four-piece. The dead drum sound. The only element that doesn't fascinate is the songs themselves and it is hard to tell, behind all the other decisions, whether they are underthought or overthought. When Rowland sings on One Of Those Things that the songs on Kid Jensen all sound the same is he displaying a playful self-awareness or the true eccentric's obliviousness to how they are perceived? I've no idea really. A lot of the reviews here question how this baffling mess made it onto the list of 1001 albums you should listen to before you die, but I hope my record-listening career is full of such follies, curate's eggs, and artistic indiscretions. If I must spend three years working through them all, I want to be more challenged than listened to albums that demand four stars on the first listen. I already thought scoring records was largely hopeless - scoring Don't Stand Me Down won't help you or I understand it any better. 2.5 This album has a strange charm but I don’t think it is much good. I can credit it for sincerity - I don’t know what Kevin Rowland wants to say exactly (neither does he) but I can tell he means it. I can also credit the artistic feat of overthinking and overproducing a record but still ending up with something that, good or bad, is at once excessive and somehow light. It seems to me that about 90% of it is outro (the other 10 is spoken word and Werewolves of London). I love a good outro but I like to have the rest of the song first. 2.5/5

Did any band release their best album in 1997, at the tail of Britpop and Alternative Rock and before anything solidified to replace them? Tindersticks perhaps, depending on personal taste. Six Pence None The Richer, I guess. No, not the Verve. OP8's one fun effort, Slush, hardly counts. But from May 1997 until October 2000, it looked as though Radiohead would. Nothing else was as lauded, nothing else was expected to have the longevity. Other Britpop and Britrock bands faltered commercially when they attempted bloated, overlong records: The Great Escape, Be Here Now, This Is Hardcore. OK Computer is not bloated, it's rich, it's dense, expansive and, somehow, it succeeded commercially. A critical masterpiece and commercial masterstroke. Certainly they couldn't do that again. Surely this will stand as their greatest achievement. There are at least two other challengers for the position of best Radiohead album and, as we've already come across the lesser Amnesiac, I'm confident we'll come to the other two in time. Radiohead is a band I love, but that I'm not in love with, so I think I'm being objective when I say OK Computer isn't their greatest record. I don't think. It's Kid A. Or it's In Rainbows. And yet... OK Computer has twelve tracks and doesn't that feel more like an album? The other two have ten tracks each, which, undoubtedly, makes for a more concise, coherent, enjoyable listen. But, having started buying records in the 90s, on overstretched CDs, isn't twelve tracks, fifty-three minutes, an album? Their contemporaries sounded intumescent at the same length. They sound in control, sculpted, more powerful than Thom Yorke's bellyaching lets on. Actually, Kid A is only six and a half minutes shorter. That's one Paranoid Android. Would OK Computer be better without Paranoid Android? No. It hardly matters. I'm giving it 4.5 to allow some headroom for the other two to get 5, if I feel like it on the day. I'm confident that you'll give it 5 anyway, so it will be on aggregate and that feels most appropriate to me. It's a 5 star record, it is. I have to take care writing about this album not to get carried away with personal confessions. Here is one of two albums - along with Nevermind by Nirvana - I was introduced to at age 14 which I believe were formative not just to my musical habits as a listener or a guitar player but to my whole personality. I have listened to OK Computer hundreds of times and I know every bar in it like the voice of a parent. This makes it very easy to ignore when it’s on; not the case for me with music in general which I have always found utterly distracting from conversation or any kind of mental task. Here is my brain’s wallpaper. But when I do sit down to give it my attention, which I do perhaps once a year, I still find it very powerful indeed. There are moments in this record, the last minute and a half of Let Down for example, which I find almost unbearably moving. There is inescapable nostalgia mixed in there; the opening of Karma Police almost always puts me on a bus on Castle Street, the song playing in my headphones off a cassette tape while I pull a brand new cd copy of the album from a HMV bag and have a good old read/sniff of the liner notes. But I also believe that this music would stand as genuinely powerful art if I could strip it of all its advantage over me in the way of nostalgic associations. Or at least I must believe that - even in the horrible face of contemplating that there are people who believe the same about, for example, Dookie. Anyway I am happy with my position. I know there are lots of people who say that they wish they had been in the flush of youth in the mid 1960s so they could have experienced the Beatles or Hendrix first-hand. Well I love the Beatles and I love Jimi Hendrix but I am so grateful that I was 14 in 1997. I am grateful too to the people who introduced me to this music then - including my dear friend writing above. It would have been a terrible source of regret to me if I had, later in life, realised that a cultural moment like that had passed me by. Or, even more frightening, I might not care at all because I would be someone else entirely. 5/5

The Cure is undoubtedly one of my favourite bands: catchy; startling; melodic; expressive; simple, but profound; despairing, but a lot of fun. Although I don't like ranking or scoring things, they are likely a top-five act or five-star or whatever measure is best to use. The big paradox of the Cure for me is that, while they are a five-star band, they have no five-star albums - no, not even Disintegration. The impressive whole of the band's career is stronger than album part of that career and, in turn, many of the songs are stronger on their own than the album collection. But, then, they put together a setlist for a concert or compile a Best Of and it is a five-star experience lasting three hours at lease. What makes them work as this macro-level is the other paradox of the Cure: they are varied while being constant. The riposte to the Cure's image as doomy mopers is the string of pop hits and the stylistic variety of albums like The Head on the Door and Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss. But that variety is only the case half the time. For the rest of the time, the albums are consistent in tone and mood. They are either variable in their variety or inconsistent with their constancy. Seventeen Seconds is one of the constant, coherent records, honing in on a single icy vibe. The follow-up, Faith, will go further and Disintegration will go wider, but Seventeen Seconds is charmingly spare and surprisingly hooky for such dour raincoat record. The clean guitar tone is oddly humane, despite its mechanised chugging, and Simon Gallup's bass - never as showy as many of his contemporaries - sounds great. Lol, the worst drummer - nay the worst member - the Cure ever had, somehow makes his struggle to keep simple time absolutely compelling. Although the record does miss some of the sprawling jam band energy that will mark later albums and live performances. Over the years, I will get frustrated by Robert Smith's tendency to vamp on a semi-tonal shift - he overdoes it on Three here. As you focus down from the macro-greatness of the band to the micro-level, you find the flaws and impurities. I don't know if the Cure's coherent, single-minded records are better than the hot mess variety shows. Perhaps my problem is the fact that the first Cure album I listened to a fell in love with is the live Show, which manages to wrangle a wide range of dour and delightful songs into a cogent set-list - the different songs sound of a piece when played by that line-up with that sound. You can see how the flinty Play For Today has became the singalong set piece of every Cure gig - that is the place where the entirety of the Cure and the potential of every song is displayed. However, I wouldn't give up many of the albums, as they are imperfect nodes of the sublime quantum. 3 ‘Unrelenting, remorseless, unremitting’ I can’t remember for which GCSE text Mr Campfield originally coined this mantra because it seemed to apply to most of them. But if we had been reviewing Seventeen Seconds on the exam - there’s 3 marks in the bag. The examiner would say to themselves ‘Yes, these young men all listened to all of Seventeen Seconds and although it’s odd that they all went for exactly the same three words in the same order those are exactly the same words, in the same order too, that occur to me.’ It is limited fun to listen to but I respect the artistic conviction that created it. It has an identity - not a small thing for an album made by very young men. 2.5/5

'Unrelenting. Remorseless. Unremitting.' These are the three words that come to mind to describe Live At The Harlem Square Club. Maybe not remorseless, but they come as a trio and two out of three ain't bad! Even when he threatens to slow things down, Cooke and his band go full throttle and it's a delight to hear the audience respond to it so enthusiastically. No wonder it's only 36 minutes, you could never keep up the pace - it's like the Attractions shows in '79, when they were so full of amphetamines that they did everything in double-time. That's probably one reason that live albums are such a chore - they're the length of actual concerts, but without the mitigating factors. This has the decency to be album length and not even a Best Of album, just a regular album that contains many of his best cuts. Some live albums benefit from being Best Ofs, others suffer, but some, like this and Show, which I mentioned yesterday, reveal the best. While this undoubtedly soul music - Sam Cooke was the King of Soul - Cupid, You Send Me, Twistin' the Night Away are very much pop songs and it a thrill to hear pop sound as gritty, phlegmy, and coked up as the Beatles in Hamburg or the Ramones anywhere. A great recording. 4 Well I have already done a bit on puzzling over how to rate a live album vs rating a studio album and although it all applies here as well I’ll skip it. I loved this. ‘Portrait of a Legend’ is played regularly in our house and I have often said that Sam Cooke is my favourite singer but I’m obviously a bad fan because I’ve never listened to this before. It knocked my socks off. The singing is incredible but I loved the crowd noise as well - they are having a great time and they are all in fine voice themselves. Cooke is feeding off their enthusiasm and his energy just grows and grows through these tracks. This rendition of Bring it on Home to Me is magic. And the ad-libs… “Everybody get them out for me. Get them handkerchiefs out.” That’s a level of civilisation that will never been seen again at a gig this exciting. So I am going high with my rating, but taking a mark off because Greatest Hits shouldn’t count as an album and because this is too short. 4/5

Culture has been cruel to impressionistic music. Whether Debussy or Evans, once innovative theorising and playing has become background listening, never definite, but just an impression. When it is difficult to grasp the melody, you only get a sense of it and a sense of the harmony and a sense of the structure. Such washiness sounds like a Sunday - lounging, lazing, lacking the structure of the rest of the week. Perhaps there is nominal determinism at play here. No doubt, a keener ear, better acquainted with jazz, may hear more structure, more melody, more direction. However, for me, it is all hard to distinguish behind the gentle murmurs and clapping, not because they are undeserved, but because the balance between the artist and audience is exactly the same as between diners and café background playlist. Sunday brunchtime probably. I don't enjoy writing any of that - the drums sounds great in parts; the bassist is ; Evans is obviously an exemplary pianist - but so what. 1.5 This is nonsense. Sure it‘s not *really* nonsense but… This is a closed shop. What is the particular brilliance of Bill Evans‘ ‘touch’ as a pianist to those who don’t play piano or listen religiously to recordings of piano players? What is a key recording in the history of the development of modal jazz to those who wouldn’t know Lydian from Adam? What is a watershed moment in the democratisation of the jazz trio to those who have heard less than three of them in their whole life - and didn’t (and couldn’t) pay close attention to their music even at that. The answer is, as most of the people present (and audible!) when this recording was made clearly knew, that the only thing this music really offers most of us is something pleasant to ignore while we chat to each other and get bluttered on a Sunday afternoon. Well it’s Tuesday and I’m sober. Even worse - yesterday we had a Sam Cooke Live record from the same era and it was everything this show wasn’t - a document of music-making that was irresistibly social; not just acknowledging of an audience but dragging them into participation and responding to their energy in turn. Humans, together, instinctively grasping the inexplicable power of music. That was worth recording for posterity - this wasn’t. This was worth recording for students of Jazz. Good luck to those students. 1/5

This sounds nothing like the Goldfrapp record my ma used to have in the car in her faltering middle-age. That double-pedalling is unexpected! I accidentally listened to The Seventh Tree by From Crisis to Collapse. But this Goldfrapp album doesn't sound like the Goldfrapp record my ma used to have in the car in her faltering middle-age either. That one had stomping glam beats. This doesn't really have anything like that: meandering dreampop with the odd flourish. I like Alison Goldfrapp's voice less on these ballads than on the earlier bangers, but neither is interesting or necessary. 2 There is very little worth saying about this album. In its gush of mellotron, backwards guitar, McCartneyish basslines, plonky Penny Lane piano, and dramatic strings it recalls 66-67 Beatles less than early noughties Oasis. Who else would combine all those elements with melodies as lumbering as Free Bird, Happiness or Some People? To be fair to Goldfrapp they do a much slicker line in turd-polishing than Oasis and they have that breathy ASMR vocal going for them. 1.5/5

Traveling today, so only able to listen through this album once. Would a second listen be more fun or exciting? If we accept that this record is a hip hop record, then it is more inventive, lively, and engaging than most of the others we've heard. It is real people playing in a room together, focusing on call and response, group singing, and interaction rather than flow and spitting bars. That may not be the artform at its most technical, but its welcoming and enjoyable. Some of the reviews here say that it sounds dated. Yeah, antedated. This is yesterday's tomorrow today! 3 There is plenty of liner note to go with this record I see. The opening track especially, I am to understand, is terribly original and important; it blew minds and opened doors and such. Someone calls it ‘a profound record’. Well that may be, but it sounds like complete shit to me. I found much of this album about as edifying as a room full of 1st years who have just discovered the DJ button on the keyboard. Still - I like the Beverly Hills Cop soundtrack a lot and I sense it owes a debt so I am throwing in another half mark to verify that this is better than the Bill Evans Trio. 1.5/5

I got into Pixies on the release of Death to the Pixies. Also my introduction to 4AD and the artwork of Vaughan Oliver. Strange stuff, an uncanny blur of rock - a decent description of the cover and the sound. Working back to the records proper meant a version of Surfer Rosa with Come on Pilgrim stuck on. It was a long album then, with the Best Of bits already familiar. It wasn’t the record itself. It’s hard to think of it as only 34 minutes of music. In 1999, Fight Club came out and made an album track into a cultural touchstone, maybe even a lodestone - Where is my Mind? was only fourteen on the track list, last of the six Surfer Rosa/Come On Pilgrim songs - but, to read some of the reviews here, it is the only song of merit. At the time of release, if we are to believe Fool the World, the oral history of Pixies, Gigantic was the song of highest merit. Kim Deal’s only lead contribution, it stood head and shoulders about everything else on the debut album. I don’t think any of these estimations are accurate, but I think it’s true that I’ve never heard the true Surfer Rosa - with all its incendiary aggression and manic energy, with any of its freshness. Those coming to it in the reverberations of Where is my Mind? have not and cannot hear it through the tinnitus of that one song’s inexplicable explosion. Death to the Pixies was sold on the band’s influence on Kurt Cobain, which causes a similar tinnitus. Here, we were told, was a near perfect four album catalogue and, coming to Pixies then, meant grappling with an oeuvre, not an album. Perhaps, like I mentioned in my Cure review last week, Pixies is a five-star band without a five-star record or that this discography (from the original run at least) is greater than any component part of it. I don’t think that’s the case entirely, but I find it hard to think of Surfer Rosa in isolation. Most remarkable is how the songs from Come On Pilgrim, Surfer Rosa, and some from Doolittle were written in a six month purple patch that Black Francis was never able to replicate. It’s really this six month period, after a trip to Puerto Rico, that looms larger than everything else - when he was swimming in the Caribbean and losing his mind. That deserves a 4.5 at least, even if the burst of Surfer Rosa may not. Surfer Rosa is a weird album. There are a lot of great tracks on it but it isn’t quite a great album, in my opinion, because they don’t feel (to me) like they are in any order. That’s excepting Bone Machine as an opener, which is a wonderful idea. It’s a petty thing to complain about. When so much talent is dumped in front of you it’s looking a gift horse in the mouth to say ‘Brick is Red’ isn’t a great closer (doesn’t help that Surfer Rosa/Come on Pilgrim is how I have always listened to this record) or ‘Where is my Mind?’ is an odd choice for opening side B, for example. Or that the (de facto) skits are annoying and unnecessary. Or that Broken Face isn’t any good. Why isn’t Broken Face any good? I’ve no more idea than I do about why most of the rest of the album is brilliant. I was going to write something about the strength and clarity of the musical ideas and their brutal economy of phrase construction…but really I’ve no idea. Pixies are just special. Never has music that sounds so stupid been so incomprehensibly clever. 4/5

As I was traveling, I didn't have much time to listen to Play. Of course, I was sentient in 1999, so I've heard every track thousands of times. I did hope that it would prove to be more than the sum of its hacked off and traded parts, but being altogether does the tracks a disservice. Similarly, looping and mechanising the samples does them a disservice too, neutering the humanity that would be apparent in variation. It doesn't help that Moby composes such bog-standard progressions underneath - far too reliant on swelling pads, awful slides, rumdimentary drumming, and, on Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?, a terrible, dead piano sound. 18 years after My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, there is nothing innovative in this approach. Even the cynicism is uninventive: Paul Simon had already done it beautifully with Graceland. Moby's real genius was in going all in on selling out - marking the end of the 90s. I can't be too harsh on the record though. It worked in every placement, because there are hooks, perhaps only hooks and few of them Moby's own. There is a dark rush of nostalgia that carries the record through to South Side, the chorus of which illustrates why Moby had to harvest hooks from elsewhere. I don't mean to suggest that there is anything wrong with sampling. There's not, even when it may be culturally exploitative. But when it highlights the musical paucity of the supposed headline artist, it doesn't do them any favours. Apart from raking in millions of dollars. 2.5 This was a miserable listen. An hour of dull drum loops, one-bar-two-finger piano loops that would annoy if a child was playing them at a school concert, and worst of all Moby himself occasionally popping up to mutter some excruciating lyric. I can’t believe I bought 17 copies of this album in 1999. 1/5

I was very generous to Play by Moby yesterday and what did I get for such softness, but another unavoidable mega-seller from 1999?! Like Play, I don't have to listen to it, as the songs entered my bloodstream by osmosis during that summer. Why this overlong stream of thumbed bass and puerile rapping didn't coagulate into a thrombosis in my brain, I don't know. Life's cruel like that. To make it less cruel this time around, I only listened to the song Porcelain back to back with the song of the same name from Play. Moby's bad Porcelain was better than the Chili Peppers bad Porcelain: somewhat hooky, a little propulsive, something approaching intelligible. If I was generous to Play, I can't do the same to Californication. The former tugged on a nostalgia, the latter pushes on a gag reflex. Bad music by three good musicians and a person who should have been under house arrest since 1991. 1.5 To be fair to these godfathers of sex pest funk-rock the formula by which they piece together these tracks is their own. Still there is nothing here that improves on Give it Away or Under the Bridge, in fact it’s all considerably worse and those two songs weren’t that good to begin with. I know people who love this album but I do not sympathise and today was the last time I will ever try. Californication is awful in every way. 1/5

After two duff unit-shifters, it is a relief to listen to something uncynical. A pointless accompaniment to a film that was already soundtrack, the band justify the meandering, unfocused sound and sequencing. Although uncynical, as I say, it lacks the sincerity that makes the loved-up Screamadelica and the aggressively niave XTRMNTR work. The earnestness of those works excuses, perhaps even elevates, Bobby Gillespie's poor vocals, lyricism, and songwriting. Even Rocks, Jailbird, and Damaged, et al, are genuine imitations. The performance here of whatever happens in the film I haven't seen doesn't seem to come from Gillespie himself and Gillespie was always the weakest element of Primal Scream - sometimes he sells it, sometimes he doesn't. However, the rest of the band make a decent stand at trip-hop, although Mani will do better work on his second record with the group. 3 I haven’t listened to this in years but I really enjoyed hearing it today. Truthfully there is nothing brilliant in here at all but everything is interesting. Primal Scream are pushing every button in the studio to see what it does. There are lots of funny noises and haunted house pans - here are ghosts of (brilliant) Primal Scream past and future. I do love that Kowalski was the choice for first single. 2.5/5

I was really surprised by how much I enjoyed Can't Stand Me Now after all this time. That is all. 1.5 Me at HMV: Can I have Supergrass’ I Should Coco? Mom: No. We have I Should Coco at the crack den. I Should Coco at the crack den: 1.5/5

Like Hit Me One More Time..., The Cars is crowded with a number of huge radio hits that cut through and against each other. However, they aren't victims of the loudness wars, they're written and recorded for FM radio. Not as trebly as transistor radio hits, not as bombastic as the late-90s brick wall sound, The Cars has sonic depth and clarity that plays as well on a car stereo, in the roller disco, or at home on your turntable. And while each song is a sort of single, composed and arranged only to complete its own journey from studio to consumer, they are not so strongly in competition with each other as on the Spears' record. It sounds like a gang of hitmakers, doing what they can with a rigid set-up, just what they can fit on the stage at the tiny Boston club. So all the songs sound of a piece, but also like they're trying distinguish themselves from each other. And it is this sense of a gang working together, but with each edging toward the spotlight, that excuses some of the clumsiness (mostly Elliot Easton's meandering guitar) and uncools some of the sheen (does I'm in Touch sound like a very careful Magic Band?). If there is a competition here, it's between Ocasek and Orr. On aggregate, Orr wins with his four contributions - great stuff. 3.5 All very catchy, very cute songs full of funny keyboard noises and arch vocals. But somehow entirely unlovable. Rock music with no edge, pop music with no drama. Well done The Cars. 2/5

Van Morrison is a mood. And one has to be in the mood for that. Today, I was and enjoyed every second of Moondance and its churning, hypnogogic act of mysticism. Although there are several of Van's big hits here - And It Stoned Me, the title track, Into the Mystic - I don't think it is appropriate to call him a songwriter or to call most these tracks songs. They are incantatory, entranced repetitions, never properly starting or stopping, but turning over until the chanter moves on to a new idea. It is a gentle tumult, not so ecstatic as Astral Weeks, but one from which moments of beauty rise up: the flows and eddies that conjure up the water in the first verse of And It Stoned Me, for example. Even the cheeky/lazy references to Brown Eyed Girl in Glad Tidings suggest that everything is pulled up from the same well, not individual songs so much as different vessels into which Van Morrison is poured, different shapes and sizes, but the same substance. Whether or not you will enjoy the substance of Van Morrison is not a given. Or not a given on any given day. But, on this Brand New Day, I dug it. 3.5 I do not understand the passion that people have for notorious arsehole Van Morrison’s music. But I never really understand why I don’t. Like several other Van Morrison albums this is a very good album. I admire these songs very much. I admire the arrangements. Van has a terrific voice. It’s really a pleasure to listen to. Why can’t I love it? Is it just the notorious arsehole thing? But when I run down the list of artists I do love there are so many of them. It can’t be. Why not this arsehole? The mystery lives on. 3.5/5

Although a fan of the records that precede and follow (See You On the Other Side moreso than All Is Dream), I've never had a firm grasp on Deserter Songs. Perhaps the significant kudos placed on the record at the time set the bar too high. With some distance, it is a less expansive and ornate album than I remember or, at least, how I remember it being discussed. The strings aren't so lush and the theremin does a lot of work. It is, in fact, a much smaller record than the hype suggested and, while the music is frequently cosmic, it is the feeling of looking up at the stars rather than being among them. The record should be listened to laying on your back, whether in the cosmic moments or the somnambulistic. Although some of that is fun, Hudson Line and The Happy End lose the run of themselves quickly and Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp is never under control. See You On the Other Side, by comparison, edges even further into cacophony, but never sounds chaotic. That record is more energetic, while All Is Dream is more lush and Deserter Songs can't support its own weight or the weight that was heaped upon it. Still, the organ flourish at 3.10 in Goddess on a Hiway is the single greatest achievement in the band's career. Is that Garth Hudson? 2 I love the first minute and a half of Holes. I find it has the same haunting quality as the beginning of the Beatles’ Day in the Life - perhaps partly by sounding a bit like it I suppose; a sweet, see-sawing opening major chord crumpling into minor; a lonely phrase waiting on its friends dropping in. The Beatles accomplish this effect in seconds and with a great deal of elegance. But it still works nicely stretched out over that first minute and a half - the melody a looping four-note holding fragment while various players wander in from the darkness. It’s just as well the start is so good because the rest of the song, indeed the rest of the album, is balls. As soon as that clutter of instruments led by the drums kicks in - the atrocious bowed saw starting its daft wail, the putrid melodrama of the strings and horns (‘cinematic’ I think is the generous term) - the whole illusion falls apart. There is no songwriting, just posing. No craft, just the extrapolation of a shoddy philosophy and its accompanying tricks; why take a clear musical idea and develop it when you can just pile up voices playing looped ideas and seem as sophisticated? And the song structures? Where there isn’t just witless repetition with pauses - Holes, Endlessly - there are verses and choruses slapped together like a couple of stickle bricks - Opus 40, Goddess on a Highway. This is puerile, cowardly music-making. Still…it wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for the fucking lyrics. To return to Holes for a moment; if this song begins with the album’s best music - it ends with its worst lyric. Which is saying something for an album that has Goddess on a Highway on it. ‘Bands/ those funny little Plans/ that never work quite right’. At least ‘Holes’ properly rhymes with ‘Moles’ in the previous verse. But it’s the failed attempt at some kind of confessional insight that really makes this an arse-clencher of a line. Even if you’d said it well - why would you think that the slings and arrows of your few years of being in a band would be worthy of the 5 minutes of Barber’s Adagio-mugging grandeur that preceded this poetically empty little toad of a line? Just say something else vague about ‘time’ you idiot. Still….it wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for the singing. Levon Helm and Garth Hudson are on this record. 1.5/5

The Talking Heads record that I've listened to the most, as it's the only one I ever bothered to buy. Although I know the others pretty well, I think this is a much easier record to put on, as it is much less dense - the sound of the band itself, rather than the band and Eno. Probably not the best Talking Heads album, but the only Talking Heads album. Considered that way, it is obviously riddled with contradictions: Jerry Harrison was a smart addition to complete the four-piece, but all the keyboard parts he adds sound dreadful. It's the interplay of their guitars that works best for me, even though the production and mixing is pretty rough and does them no favours. I like the clean guitar sound. Tina Weymouth was only playing bass for five months or so when they recorded the album and it is her most rudimentary part - the verse of Psycho Killer - that is most lauded and imitated. However, the best bass playing is everywhere else - the bridge of that song for example. Yet, while the guitar interplay and bass are the best parts of the record, Psycho Killer, with the least of the guitar and the simplest bass, is the standout song. Who Is It? isn't much of anything, but it shows all the modes of the band as they expand and contract through the different sections. There is absolutely nothing there in the song, but they arrange the nothing pretty well. Once they start working with Eno in the studio, they hardly arrange at all, working songs out of grooves, rather than shaping songs into records. I can't decide how I feel about Byrne's lyrical approach. He tells rather than shows, which is usually bad form, such as when he tells us that the world has problems and that he is indecisive, rather than dramatizing this or giving us illustrations. Is this universalising? I like that he sings about friendship on two songs, an underexplored topic. While Byrne is often thought of as an observer rather than an emoter, the ooohs and woahs are pretty intense, like at the end of The Book I Read. They're pitchy and I don't know what they mean, but I find them more decisive than the lyrics. The 'Here we go again' at the end of No Compassion is a harrowing tick. He's not rousing us for another round, he just feels it coming on again and there's nothing he can do to stop it. Sad really. Not really a contradiction, but Chris Frantz's rolls and fills are all over the show. 3 I find this album deeply irritating. It takes a great deal of trouble in producing musical (and lyrical) gestures that yell ‘Look at me I‘m odd!’ but amid the awkward guitar lines and declamatory vocals there is very little risk taken with the actual songwriting. There is a difference between originality and arbitrariness in design - between musical inspiration and musical contrariness. There is no appreciation of those differences in these mostly merely stupid songs. This is Talking Heads’ first album so they always have the defence of naivety but I don’t think that’s what I hear. I hear a prevailing spirit of ‘why construct when deconstruction is so much cooler?’ It’s just contempt for the listener - I thought regularly of Lou Reed listening to this record, but not his good stuff. Byrne’s accuser in ‘No Compassion’ is wrong. Byrne does not have so many problems (a charge Byrne is pleased to repeat and not deny); he has one problem - vanity - and it radiates from this record. 2/5

It seems paradoxical that one can be simultaneously arrogant and vulnerable, but that is the heart of exhibitionist. If you want to read the cover of Two Virgins as exhibitionist, I'll hear that out. If you think that Lennon's focus here on his particular problems is narcissistic, you might be right. Given how much contemporary discourse is about what an awful person Lennon was, I'm sure his naval-gazing on this record puts a lot of people off. Still, I prefer to see Plastic Ono Band as the beginning of his incomplete redemption arc. He will be as good again artistically as he was with Paul, but he does use his solo art as a way of exploring and redressing the personal issues that co-existed with his creative highpoints. Things don't get better immediately and the drastic solution to withdraw from art-making altogether may have been solution at all, but he tried. And it starts here. Such pained self-reflection may sound onerous, but I choose not to think of it like that. While the songs themselves might be therapeutic exercises for Lennon, they can be functional or work music for us - most of us will, at some point, need to express My Mummy's Dead. Focusing less on the content and more on the form, we can see songs like Love, God, and Mother as giving us a format in which to structure our own feelings. What is love to us? What things in our life have we lost faith in? Having faith in yourself is a solid foundation to rebuild from. The fact that U2 reworked that song on Rattle & Hum proves my point, although not well. So, while Lennon's performance is very personal, the songs themselves are composed as public prayers. You may not always need them, but, in a foxhole or a doldrum, you may get some use from them. That may be overstanding things. Some of the songs are throwaway, certainly less gnomic or koan-like, but, even then, Ringo's drums sound stupendous. 3.5 What a pairing this was with Talking Heads 77. I couldn’t sympathise with Byrne - in my assessment a writer unwilling to risk expression in his songwriting beyond portraying a surface musical brand - awkward, contrary, intellectually aloof, unpredictable, cooler than you. Well, instant karma; here is a songwriter willing to expose himself in his songs to a discomforting degree. Better, no? There is certainly the temptation with some of this to peremptorily dismiss Mr Lennon with the neatness of Byrne’s antagonist in ‘No Compassion’: ‘Go talk to your analysts/ Isn't that what they're paid for?’ However the truth is that in the midst of all this millionaire’s self-obsession and primal screaming there is a very important element that is not present in Talking Heads 77; there is some really beautiful music. Lennon is not one for much melodic or structural development; lots of these songs simply go round and round through verse after verse before a bridge breaks the musical stasis. But those (seemingly) simple, square, four-bar melodic phrases over heavily reverbed piano plonked straight from the heart - Mother, Isolation, Love, God - at least achieve a crystalline beauty that is worthy of repeating. I appreciate the risk John Lennon takes too; when you write lullaby-simple phrases you always risk sounding like a child. Of course Lennon had just finished The Beatles when he did this so perhaps he was confident no one would judge him too harshly if he fell the wrong side of it. I like this album. 3.5/5

The standard complaint these days is that artists aren't allowed to develop or bed in. If you're first album isn't a hit, then you're out on your arse. RHCP broke through on their fifth album. We could have been spared that had the execs at the time been more parsimonious. You might argue that John Frustciante and Chad Smith were only on his second album. Give them a chance. Were it not for the millions of units shifted, no exec could get behind this music. It is never the one thing it professes to be: funky. It is like they are doing every exercise in the circuit wrong - jerking when the action should be smooth, spasmodic, when they should be controlled. The fluidity of Parliament, James Brown, or Prince is absent and, in its place, a lopsided struggle to lift the weight to their chin. All jerk, no clean. When they're not trying to make that stupid, grotesque music, they really shine. The open-tuned riffing of Breaking The Girl, with its swells of mellotron, could be gorgeous, where it not for Kiedis's awful mugging and juvenile posturing. He ruins everything he touches and, as I understand, he touches underage girls, so he should be made to stop. And this is what it comes down to. There is no fixing or resitting the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. The rot remains - that is, Anthony Kiedis in all his noxiousness and Flea's impulse and instinct for lurching funkless funk. That is the totality of the band and fortune or execs might bring in a talented musician like Frustciante or a balancing force like Smith, but the premise was wrong to begin with. The idea was terrible. The foundations unsound. I generally like Michael Beinhorn, but I blame him for polishing the turd of The Uplift Mofo Party Plan. But I get it, he was poor and desperate and desperate men do bad things. 1.5 This album is so very, very boring. I had big ideas, Californication having been considered a couple of weeks back, to write a review comparing BSSM favourably with that album in all kinds of ways but I just haven’t the enthusiasm. This is not songwriting - it’s just the piecing together of grooves from musicians with only one setting and no soul. Above the tick of their meaningless, thoughtless riffing a deviant delivers the same old shtick about his penis in excruciatingly square raps and clumsy melodies. And there’s 73 minutes of this. I want to give this more than the 1 star I gave Californication but after listening to it I actually can’t. 73 minutes. It is undoubtedly better than Californication - I’m sure with an editor there’s a 1.5 star album in there somewhere - but that is moot; both these records deserve to be forgotten and never listened to again. 1/5

A transitional record. At the time, it was transitioning to something that didn't exist yet. Now it is overshadowing by what came after. Half the songs have been immortalised by their part in the great Beatles story. The other half are frozen in the record before the movie, before the explosion of Rubber Soul, never included in collections, never in a montage or an advert. Both sets of songs have similar assets and detriments. The modal writing that elevates the compositions above contemporary rock'n'roll, experiments in recording and arranging, the singular vocal blend of their harmonies. Still, the lyrics are sentimental and unsophisticated (for the most part) and some of the melodies are syrupy. Case in point, If I Fell, which would be easy listening, where it not for the strange harmonic shifts - the melody is never not smooth, but chords are a pleasant surprise. The best songs - the title track, If I Fell, And I Love Her, Can't Buy Me Love, Things We Said Today, You Can't Do That - are a more prominent part of the Beatles cultural presence and that might be because they were always better or they sound better on the record because they are so familiar. The transitional record had the effect of changing everything and nothing can go back to how things were before. Some of the songs here are from that before time and the Beatles transformation ended up tarnishing them. It made me think of this from the end of Machen's The Great God Pan: "And I forgot, as I have just said, that when the house of life is thus thrown open, there may enter in that for which we have no name, and human flesh may become the veil of a horror one dare not express. I played with energies which I did not understand, you have seen the ending of it... The blackened face, the hideous form upon the bed, changing and melting before your eyes from woman to man, from man to beast, and from beast to worse than beast, all the strange horror that you witness, surprises me but little." 3.5 George Martin clearly drew on his knowledge of classical music sequencing this album; people love Beethoven, make sure the odd numbers are all good. Maybe there isn’t much more structural principle at play than that and there is certainly an imbalance between the first and second sides of this album however - what a pile of songs. This would have done rightly as a greatest hits for many other bands of the time. Even the slighter numbers tend to have something to recommend them: the weird tom hit on Happy Just to Dance…., the bizarre piano octaves on Any Time at All, the playful bass part on I’ll Cry Instead. Alright that last one was number 9 and doesn’t quite live up to the Beethoven principle. But Things We Said Today comes straight after it. 3.5/5

In the Murmur entry, I mentioned buying that album on a school trip to Germany. I also bought Doolittle. My roommate on that trip, Gaven, bought a copy of Roots. And he played it! This was much better than previous school trip where one of my roommates played a bootleg dance remix of Loser late into the night: "I'm a raver, baby, so why don't you kill me." My memory is that Sepultura were harsh and impenetrable. I was much relieved when Gaven put on Black Sabbath's second album instead. Naively, I thought Sepultura was extreme metal, which it isn't. But, in that first listen, I certainly missed the integration of Brazilian instrumentation and indigenous performance. To be honest, it only came through occasionally and, when it does, it either feels like a field recording (much like the 'spiritual' at the end of Birth Slide Show by Badnose) or an affectation (the Spanish guitar on The Unforgiven). Of course, Sepultura's usage here is deeper and more sincere and, with closer listening, it is apparent in the percussion more generally. But can you listen more closely? Yes, I can and there's something to be found in there. However, many of the reviewers here say they can't. Max Cavalera's vocals are too abrasive and guttural. If only they could hear the grooves without that vocal style! Well, that's what happened: Cavalera left Sepultura and nu-metal rose to prominence, the exact same grooves but with distinct vocals. It should have been obvious that this was coming. The title track opens with the same needling guitar sound as on a bunch of Korn records. There's the Ice Ice Baby riff. And those caesuras are very nu-metal. My experience with Sepultura hasn't been kind. Once, I was too ill-informed and too unfocused to hear the songs through the rough exterior. Now, I'm too focussed and can't ignore the awful scene that groove metal birthed. I don't blame Sepultura for what followed and I respect their commitment to the folk music of their nation, but, compared to the other metal albums we've listened to, they put their own focus in all the wrong places. 2 This is an album of superficial charms; mesmerising heaviness, good death voice, dramatic riffs, a sense of the exotic/non-generic in the sporadic tribal stuff and the Portuguese…. I shouldn’t have read this album’s lyrics. Anyway, even at my thirstiest for low-tuned groove rage an hour is more than I needed of this. Some of these tracks are admirably concise - the opening trio, Born Stubborn - packing musical and textural detail tight. Why isn’t the album more concise? 2/5

I saw Scissor Sisters twice in about the space of a year. In the first instance, they were in the Limelight, supported by the Vichy Government. In the second, I accompanied my mother to see them in the King's Hall, supported by... I don't remember. However, the transition wasn't as extreme as it appears on paper. In the Limelight, they were obviously being pushed as an up-and-coming cool group that might break big and draw in exactly the crowd that made up the King's Hall audience: mothers, awkward teens, Radio 1 listeners. Putting them together with the Vichy Government was predicated on a very tenuous grasp of what it meant back then to provoke audiences, to challenge gender norms, to side with pop over rock. And, thus, the Scissor Sisters went on to huge venues and record sales and the Vichy Government did not. There is nothing more to the music of Scissor Sisters than a few Elton John records when he was closeted, all without the tension provided by that thinly-veiled secret. The band's queer openness is coy to anyone who has heard Pansy Division or Jobriath or Phranc or Jayne County or Coil or a million other artist, so safe and pliant that it verges on minstrelsy. It is middle-aged Graham Norton. It is, to borrow an epithet from John Lennon, "granny shit." Those were the people, my beloved mother among them, who danced to it and for whom it was designed all along. I've previously criticised Red Hot Chilli Peppers for their jerky, funkless funk. Well, Scissor Sisters and their sexless dance music is worse. Although the record is toploaded with singles, a bad sign itself, this listener is given a quick primer to how unfunky and unpopping this plodding dance-pop record is: the flat-footed sixteenth notes of Laura; the player piano syncopation of Take Your Mama; and always bouncing octaves on the bass instead of licks, riffs, or grooves. It's all rigid, easy for the mamas who have been taken out to dance to between the fold-down seats on the slanted banks of the arena, but that rigidity gives away how mechanical - nay animatronic - it all is. Reading back before posting, I realise that the Lennon quote and what it engenders reeks of agism and misogyny. I won't spare my blushes by taking it out, but will reiterate what I think he meant when he used to call out McCartney's pop writing: parodic, fourth-quadrant, commercial, unchallenging, integrationist stuff that touches everyone, but offers nothing. That's this record, which is fine now and again, but, even as a part record, it falls apart pretty quickly. Go to the B-52s first record to see how it should be done. 1.5 I shuddered when I saw this album come up. I listen to a local commercial radio station for most of my working day and ‘I Don’t Feel Like Dancing’ is a daily horror. It isn’t on this album I know, but it is the song of theirs I hear the most (Filthy/Gorgeous also makes a regular appearance) and I hate it very much. So when I think ‘Scissor Sisters’ that horrible blabbering chorus pops into my head and I wince. To be honest though I quite enjoyed listening to some of their debut album today. The singles aren’t brilliant songs but they are stupidly charming and I credit their songwriting for effort at the very least. These songs, albeit superficially, recall the work of some great songwriters; Stevie Wonder and the Bee Gees among others and there is nothing wrong with taking your cues from up there. Elton John is also referenced. Of course the arse completely falls out of this album after Filthy/Gorgeous but that too is forgivable - they were trying to keep the party going as long as possible. 2/5

Not so innovative as Coltrane's Giant Steps. Not so catchy as the Monkees' Giant Step. Unlike the Great Leap Forward, completely bloodless. But, like Neil Armstrong's Giant Leap, it is airless. And, somehow, not even the sum of all these parts. Not a giant step, but a small feat. 1.5 What if perfectly pleasant pop tunes were as sonically interesting as experimental music? If this question was well answered more than a quarter of a century before the Boo Radleys’ Giant Steps no one told the Boo Radleys! There is a palpable sense throughout of the dullest man at the party inciting everyone to prepare to have their minds blown while he fumbles at the cd player with a copy of Revolver in his hands. Giant steps isn’t sonically interesting. The funny noises aren’t funny enough. The tunes are pleasant but forgettable. The singing utterly inoffensive. The drums and guitars sound shite, which is perhaps the most genuinely forward-looking part of this record; Oasis slouched towards Creation Records to be born. 1.5/5

"I try to sing it funny like Beck, but it's bringing me down." But what if Beck stops singing it funny? I missed the album between Midnite Vultures and Guero. I don't remember why, but it is possible that I knew Beck was sad and I feared an entire album of Nobody's Fault But My Own from Mutations. Not that I dislike that song, but there is something about its sincerity than never set well with me. It is something in the quality of his voice. For so long, the grandson of the Fluxus artist was doing a bit that everything sounds like a bit to me. Nobody's Fault - a genre exercise in having feelings - was fine, because it was one collage piece among many. Sea Change is wearying though. Say you're postmodern enough and no one will believe it when you bare your soul. Or I don't anyway. This collage is made largely from Nick Drake albums cut up and arranged in such a way that you don't see the joins. Indeed, the best sounding element of the album is the sample from Serge Gainsbourg, a chink the singer-songwriter veneer. I like Beck and I don't want him to be sad. I also want to believe him when he's expressing himself and it is the voice more than anything that stops me. He did used to sing it funny, but the wind rather than the sea changed and his voice got stuck that way. 1.5 There is a settled consensus on Beck’s Sea Change which has it as his best album; ‘Beck’s Blood on the Tracks’ seems to be a very common tag in critical accounts of it. Well I love the 3 studio albums that Beck made that precede Sea Change and I love Blood on the Tracks too. So naturally I hate Sea Change. I have tried many times with Sea Change - I bought it the day it came out, puzzled over my dislike of it over many listens since and I tried again this weekend. It’s a dreadful album and how anyone can love it and call it his best work is astonishing to me. It is, no doubt, the sound of a certain type of heartbreak but the prevailing character is not of pained recollection or confession - it is of emotional and creative numbness. Dylan explored his pain obliquely, inventing characters and rambling scenarios (Tangled Up in Blue, Idiot Wind, Shelter from the Storm) and with considerable lightness of touch (would anyone accuse even You’re a Big Girl Now or If You See Her Say Hello of wallowing?). Beck has none of that. Every track on Sea Change conveys a dazed self-absorption in maudlin cliché. ‘These days I barely get by/ I don't even try’ (Golden Age) Lonesome tears I can't cry them anymore I can't think of what they're for Oh, they ruin me every time (Lonesome Tears) I’ve seen the end of the day come too soon/ Not a lot to say, not a lot to do (The End of the Day) ‘It feels like I'm watching something die’ (Already Dead) Aye me too Beck. But let’s set that all aside for a minute because truthfully a comparison between Blood on the Tracks and almost any other album ever made is very unfair. Wouldn’t it be more just to compare it to some of Beck‘s previous albums? Well unfortunately for Sea Change those albums are bloody fantastic as well. When I think of Odelay, Mutations and Midnite Vultures - they had merely absurd (and funny) lyrics most of the time but my goodness the musical inspiration that just cascades out at you; effortless and fearless and so rich with what must have been spontaneous ideas that you have to laugh. That’s all gone on Sea Change. So is the sense of musicians playing in a room that makes Mutations so gripping. Sea Change feels like it was made in parts; it feels cleaner, airless, more figured out and yet much less inspired - ‘clinical’ is probably the word I am looking for. Listen to the guitars on Dead Melodies then listen to Lost Cause; listen to the guitar on Sing it Again then put on Already Dead. Something has died indeed. This effect is not aided by the addition of the pompous melodrama of the string parts; I find Lonesome Tears embarrassing to listen to. This is the sound of an artist and his band and his producer (exactly the same crew that made Mutations and Midnite Vultures mind!!) polishing mundane songs and mundane musical ideas to death. Death. Fuck it, let’s return unjustly to Blood on the Tracks. Despite a death-y title, Dylan’s album is actually about life, where loss is a part of it. Beck’s album, it seems to me, is merely about being dead. His lyrics are dead, his sense of humour dead, his musical playfulness, even his singing voice, dead. The band, when they arrive halfway through ‘It’s All in Your Mind’ sound like they want to be dead if they aren’t there already. This album is one mechanical dirge after another. Music that is made not by humans in communication but as a result of a mechanism being wound. To me it represents, more or less, the end of Beck artistically - though plenty of people will disagree as they do with Sea Change. When he returned with Guero a few years after this, trying desperately to relocate his Beckiness, it just wasn’t the same. Guero is actually a much more difficult album for the coroner’s table because on the surface it does do all the things that Sea Change doesn’t - it has energy, variety and humour - but somehow it is almost as creatively empty. I have done a lot of complaining here but I should reemphasise at the end that Odelay, Midnite Vultures and especially Mutations are albums that I love and will always have very high regard for. I hate Sea Change but I love Beck. While I am disgusted that the world chose to anoint Sea Change rather than reject it I don’t blame Beck for making it; he obviously couldn’t make anything else at this particular time. ‘Life is sad; life is a bust/ All you can do is do what you must’ (Bob Dylan, Buckets of Rain) 1/5

Of course ‘Ready to Die’ is a fatalistic title for a pantomime tough man performance, but I was struck by how pinched and unhealthy Mr Smalls’ voice is. He raps at the top of his register, through what sounds like a narrow windpipe, with a desperate little gasp for air between every line. He does sound like he’s ready to die. And there’s the faint gurgle of saliva, somewhere between a death rattle and vestigial lisp. If his flow is preternaturally good, as I read it is - GOAT standard - I’m completely lost. His voice isn’t pleasant to listen to, his delivery isn’t clear - neither is a lot of Gilbert and Sullivan patter, for that matter, so it’s not about genre particularly or vernacular; it’s just hard to clatter out a bunch of words and be heard. You really have to enunciate. What I did hear were the obvious clangers: birthdays were the worst days; the bizarre stresses of Genesis in Juicy; the convoluted “cancer in the breast” instead of breast cancer. Their clumsiness makes them standout of course and I’m sure the things I couldn’t decipher were top class. “I’ve been robbing since the slave ships” was pretty funny actually. I liked that he was born to the sound of Superfly, but the rest of the skits are unpleasant and there’s a low-volume babble panned to the side of each track. I think it’s Diddy. Even if Diddy wasn’t a monster, his artless slabbering does nothing to help. 1 We are less than a hundred albums in and we have done at least half a dozen rap albums and I have run out of ways to express my puzzlement that a large number of people in western society regard two bars of elevator music on a loop with someone talking over the top to be the music that they prefer. Here is, apparently, the greatest rapper there has ever been. Really? Is the trip in this sticky little elevator really better than, or even much distinct from, Eminem’s or 50 cent’s? This is sad. None of the aficionados of this genre come here for musical edification; no one really wants to hear those two bars over and over again. They pretend there is a substantive technical element called ‘flow’ that dresses up rapping as if it is akin to the way Hendrix plays the guitar or the way Stravinsky uses woodwinds. It’s all bullshit. What they show up to hear is the bubbling of the open sewer of some poor creature’s mind. They won’t have been disappointed with ‘Ready to Die’. This bubbles horribly for over an hour. 0/5

Without the backstory of Ibrahim's exile, I don't that I would find much to say about this recording. Even with the backstory, it is hard for me (ignorant as I am) to locate Ibrahim's biography in this buoyant, gentle, gospel jazz. I'm sure that does the work a disservice, as it deserves a more considered descriptor than 'pleasant.' And, yet, its pleasantness is what strikes me, after the impressionistic, virtuosic, and cerebral jazz records we've already listened to. Pleasant may not be memorable, but it doesn't ruin an afternoon either. 2 There is something not quite right here. Whatever the cover art, the grandiose album title and the title of the opening track ‘Mandela’ evoke - it does not fit with what then proceeds musically. ‘Mandela’ should have been titled ‘Parkinson’ surely. The closer ‘Sameeda’ is redolent of something from the Jazz Club sketches on the Fast Show. The title track is extemporisation on Film 95 with Barry Norman. Whoever ‘Sathima’ is I am imagining an American lady with a perm and an oversized jumper (or is it a cardigan hanging round her shoulders?) who has been disappointed in love in the previous scene. Whoever ‘Tuang Guru’ is, he has a private dick tailing him. On the whole this was an enjoyable but I dare say forgettable album. I will give it credit for proving, conclusively, that try as they might, no one out-sillys a trombone. 2/5

On this, the first anniversary of his death, it is safe to say that Steve Albini's legacy as an engineer far outshines his legacy as a performing artist. That is not say that Big Black, Shellac, and, yes, Rapeman weren't significant in their way, but who listening to In Utero, Ys, After Murder Park, Rid Of Me, Pod, Surfer Rosa, Razorblade Suitcase, Things We Lost in the Fire, Walking Into Clarksdale, Transaction de Novo, Dogs, American Don, or Bird Machine is even thinking of those abrasive power-trios? It celebrated recording style was the capture the group exactly as they are and, while that works perfectly for many of the great artists he captured over the years, it also highlights his limitations as an artist and songwriter in his own right. His other legacy is as a controversialist or, thankfully, as a repentant edgelord. Like John Lennon before him, Albini's life describes a redemption arc that we should all be granted enough time to complete. Although Albini's life was short, he got more it and completed more of his arc than Lennon did. Thus, he was able to show some regret over the stage antics that used to accompany Jordan, Minnesota. If I remember correctly the supposedly true story that inspired that song was also false, which would make it not only distasteful but reactionary. And that is the problem with an artistic practice that documents the thing warts and all - warts. And what Atomizer documents is an artist who hasn't arrived anywhere yet. The drum machines sound laden (compare with Twitch by Ministry of the same year). The grooves are monotonous. Until Kerosene, there is no dynamism and it is only the concluding live track that sounds as wide and alive as the rest of it ought to. The next Big Black album sounds a lot better and his later recording efforts will sound better still. The think that surprised me most was how much it sounded like the first Cocteau Twins record: similar bass movement, similar drum machine programming, similar guitar parts. Of course, Robin Guthrie would lash everything in reverb, spending hours sculpting those same ringing guitar lines into layers. And then Liz Fraser would sing beautifully, not on top, but in between - a million miles away from what Albini can do vocally of course. But it shows how principle can change very similar material. Later, Albini would learn to combine immediacy with craft (that coupling might be called professionalism), but it was never important to his artistic output. 2.5 I appreciate the trouble that went into making this record sound a certain way, which is to say sort of terrible. It’s harder to judge the musical material buried underneath all the distorted electronic kicks and guitar harmonics. But I am still fairly sure that, like the Scissor Sisters album, this record has most of its better stuff in the first half. ‘Jordan, Minnesota’, ‘Passing Complexion’ and ‘Kerosene’ are all striking and worth hearing. I found much of the rest of the album monotonous aggression. 2.5/5

I enjoyed this more that The Low-End Theory. Groovier, hookier, structurally closer to songs. The live group feel is more welcoming and the bass sounds pretty good, although, even when musicians are playing together, they tend to repeat, digging in rather than developing. Towards the end of the record, the woozy synths are exhausting. Hardly no skips, but no skits is pretty good for a hip-hop album. 2.5 This wasn’t that bad. I am not keen on Q-tip‘s voice which has a thin, slightly nasal quality to it but I appreciate his efforts to bring more than a couple of bars of music on a loop into his work; the appearance of the chorus of Johnny is Dead caused a wave of relief to sweep over me. That said, a lot of this is still two bars on a loop and a fair chunk of that is the type of washy keyboard shit that God intended only for numbing the rage of people on hold with customer services; Gettin Up, Wefight/Welove, or the last three tracks. It’s also worth observing that Q-tip has a comfort zone; although the odd phrase is slickly abbreviated, almost every track is a 4/4 backbeat at about 100bpm. There is very little character or drama in Q-tip‘s voice and his lyrics, while largely free of gangsta-ese to their credit, only offer mundane, sometimes risible, rhymes. Almost all the triple rhymes on Gettin Up are excruciating. But I will finish on the positives; this was only 45 minutes long - fair play Q-tip. And I liked Won‘t Trade which was successfully hypnotic even though it didn’t have much structure and I don’t know anything about American sports. Is Division One the top division over there then? 2/5

Few had so purple a patch as Bowie in the 1970s. While the phrase 'purple patch' largely suggests quality, its defining characteristic is quantity - a purple patch is one of high-productivity, where good work hopefully begets good work. It finds the artist in a creative mindset with the resources to generate creative output. Bowie was in that position for a good while here. However, such creative outpouring doesn't always produce coherent or complete products. Rather, the albums produced are snapshots of that flow in motion and, depending on when that snapshot is taken, we can capture the moving artist in imbalanced pose. A few months earlier and Young Americans would have been The Gouster, a more aggressive soul-style album, with John, I'm Only Dancing Again and It's Gonna Be Me. Another version may have had Footstompin'/Shimmy Like My Sister Kate. A few months later and it all sounds more like Stay from Station to Station. While there are great songs on Young Americans, it is altogether too slow, its singles too much out-of-step with its core attributes, its Beatles cover too awful. David Bowie always photographs well, but, in this snapshot, he is in an awkward position. Whereas the Berlin trilogy of albums plays like a fluid flickbook of Muybridge images, describing a complete action, Young Americans, despite its smooth sound, is not part of a smooth transition. He's a little rigid, a bit uncertain. The plastic of plastic soul is probably right. Bowie may have been a chameleon, but a chameleon gradually changes colour, slowly shifting from one shade to another. That he stayed in this mode for only one album, with only small traces of it in the follow-up, suggest he knew himself that he wasn't at home in the environment. Would it have been better with I Am A Lazer on it? Probably. 3 Young Americans is brilliant at the start, brilliant at the end and also has a middle. The run of Fascination/Right/Somebody Up There… is listenable but a little dull; worthy enough genre exercises. Then the mesmerising abyss that is Across the Universe. I may have stared too long this weekend. I love (The Beatles’) Across the Universe a lot. It’s a really beautiful song. Credit to Bowie too for a genuine reworking rather than a dry cover; he rips parts out (‘jai guru deva om’ is gone), squares the beat into striking rigidity, changes the verse melody, adds vocal harmonies (!) and throws in a couple of minutes of nothing (‘NOTH ING, NOTH ING, NOTH ING!!!…’) Whatever Bowie was looking for in his mauling of the song, I am sure he didn’t find it. It’s truly, everlastingly, horrifying and alongside the title track it is what I think of when I think of this album. This is also one of Bowie’s worst album covers in my opinion; the fonts, the backlit hair, and smoking, which is bad for you! Still, the opening two tracks and the closing two tracks are exquisite and sure that’s half the album. 3/5

Metal records rarely let up. That is both the promise of the genre and its fatal flaw. Or it's a flaw if you believe that metal should allow a point of entry for non-metallers. The heavy metal armour of Master of Puppets is riddled with such chinks: classical guitar, melodicism over shredding, genuine choruses, and Hetfield's smooth burr. It should fail the purity tests that subcultures throw out to keep their numbers manageable, but it doesn't. Not that it is these moments and qualities that make Master of Puppets a great metal album - they make it a great album that metal is entitled to claim as its own. 4 This is a terrific album. I think the crucial element is the balance the music strikes most of the way through between brutality and beauty. For every ounce of double-kicked chromatic chugging there is an ounce of beautifully worked harmony between the guitars; for every sequence of Hetfield shouting tunelessly or squatting on one note there is another of seductive melodic contour. Only Leper Messiah misses the balance; an ugly track that only offers a couple of minor arpeggios to break up the gloom of its muddy beat and Hetfield’s bellowing. But then of course Orion follows it, sophisticated and lovely. The lyrics are awful of course but that is almost a requirement of the genre. This is Metallica’s best album; probably - ‘Lulu’ with Lou Reed is the only 21st century album of theirs I have made it all the way through and it is…not as good as Master of Puppets. This was also the last time that Metallica brought an album in under an hour in length. 4/5

I first tried The Fall by borrowing the murky Dragnet from the CD library in 1999. Apart from Your Heart Out, I couldn't get into it. About a decade later, I was chatting with an artist at his exhibition opening. I told me I had to give the Fall another chance. By then, it seemed to late, and I wasn't going to do what some poncey painter told me to do. Two years ago, I gave them another go. Hex Enduction Hour and This Nation's Saving Grace are murky too, but not in the same way as Dragnet, lyrically and conceptually murky. Live At The Witch Trials falls somewhere in between. If the Fall was intimidating, it wasn't the sheer quantity of albums, but the brusque, inscrutable character of Mark E. Smith that presented the challenge. By then, though, I'd read enough Machen to grasp the urban gothic fantasies of Smith's rantings: "Someone's always on my tracks... I'm out of my place... I'm frightened." The grotesquery and mental contortions are much scarier than any goth or metal album, because, whatever happens, the grimness of British working-class is always visible. "By the window I didn't scream!" It's possible to read Smith as glimpse into the Lovecraftian conservative mind: "I don't know how to use freedom"; "We are not black"; "No Xmas for Junkies"; "Non-sympathetic to spastics"; "And aye you're a good lad, Oh here is a new flat" - something about social housing?; ridiculing 'the new thing.' However, I see him better described in this passage from Hieroglyphics by Smith's believed Arthur Machen: "I think that the Hermit (as I shall call him) had begun to find the perpetual solitude of his years a growing terror, and he was not sorry to have a listener; at first, indeed, he talked almost with the joy of a child, or rather of a prisoner who has escaped from the house of silence." 3 Paul McCartney tells a story that just after Revolver was completed he listened to an acetate of the whole album and was gripped by the notion that the whole thing was out of tune. He contacted the rest of the band in a panic and they had to reassure him that it sounded alright. That story popped into my head early on listening to Live at the Witch Trials and the album might be, I think, somehow more Beatles than it is punk. It has the bones of pop music. The top line is not melody exactly but not unmusical nonsense either - it has lots of rhythmic character and repeats ideas; it’s a sort of rhythmic and structural placeholder for a melody that might have been worked out later but wasn’t. The drums and the bass, while not quite Ringo and Paul, are alluring even when ‘wrong’ (*that* bass note on Rebellious Jukebox turned my stomach) I detected no irony or contempt for pop music here either - there is a palpable sincerity about this record that is difficult to explain. I liked it, although I took the notion early on that the drummer takes too many rolls and then that spoiled it for me a bit. 3/5

Immediately recommended to our mutual friend, Geoff Hatt, as inspiration for his on-going country project, as this is a lovely sounding record. The guitar is clean, but raw with the occasional dissonance buzzing among all those I, IV, V chords. Willie's voice is sweet. The drums crisp. The piano bright. The theme recurs for too many times for a half-hour albums, but the overall effect was enough to make it stick out among country records, even on the one listen I had time to give it. 2.5 Old-timey country is fine. Pleasant, like a walk through a sunlit cornfield or a roll in the hay with an attractive cousin probably. I read that this is a ‘concept album’. Now I may be just a greenhorn, city slicking indoorsman but this isn’t my first concept album rodeo and I declare Willie’s ‘concept’ to be all hat and no cattle. That dog don’t hunt. You can put your boots in the oven but that don’t make ‘em biscuits. Whatever trace of a story there is here evaporates by the final few tracks and I say a sense of musical homogeneity needs to be achieved at a deeper level than plonking out ‘Amazing Grace’ with worse lyrics every other track. Floyd knows how it’s done. No sir, not your cousin Bessie’s boy, a different one. And your album cover is just as ugly as a mud fence. 2/5

A smooth band and slightly adenoidal voice brush against each other. A similar quality to the roughly put-together Rev Green rolling around on silk sheets. Silk sheets don't stay tucked in for long though and this may be why the opener and title track is the best of the lot. Everything after is just rolling around in the damp spot. It's still a little sexy, but the event is over and Green frequently lonely and by himself. Why Let's Stay Together distinguishes itself is for proper scholars of soul to explain. On other tracks, Green is just as sexually pinched. The guitar sounds great throughout. The horns are always articulate and punchy (the brass line on It Ain't No Fun to Me was so good they used it again on Take Me to the River). But nothing is quite so effective after Let's Stay Together. In fact, it is the creases in the silky smoothness that stick out on the rest of the album - for example, what is going on with Al hard-panning a spoken vocal to the left on La-La For You? Still, in the numbness of the post-coital or post-sad-wank haze, not everything registers. 2.5 Another horrendous album cover. What’s happening with his face? What’s happening with the font? We’re doing an album of love songs wouldn’t it be good if the singer’s name oozed in Comic Snot green down the front cover? Was that the best wall they could find to shoot against? Could no one hold the man’s bag for him? The jacket is amazing to be fair. As is this version of How Can You Mend a Broken Heart? But the rest of the album, aside from a strong opener and maybe La La For You, is forgettable. Just one big pot of soul syrup; too sickly when served as a whole meal. There’s only so much ‘oooo oooo’ and ‘baby yeah’ the stomach can hold. 2.5/5

More than anything, this reminds me of R. Kelly, where the performer is so taken with their own vocal and observational prowess that they wander freely - happily - through unmoored melodies, slanted rhymes, and narrow narrative details, leaving me - as a first time listener - completely lost. Similar RnB innovators - from Stevie Wonder, through Prince, via Andre 3000 - will orientate the listener with a definite chorus or a concrete musical idea, some handhold to bring you back to the song, no matter where their creativity takes them. Such things may exist in this album, for the tang of intention is everywhere, but only Frank Ocean knows where they are. Maybe its obvious to his fans or genre listeners, but, after a weekend of listening, I was no more grounded than at the beginning. I think this might be rewarding, if you put the time in, but I'm not made of weekends. Agreed - HD TV is too real. I watched A Comedy of Terrors on my step-father's new HD TV and it was obvious that a stunt double was wearing a Peter Lorre mask during the fight sequence with Vincent Price. Completely ruined it for me. 2.5 I confess to being old enough that my main reference for this sort of R‘n‘B (that is smooth, middle of the road vocalising about sex over airless beats and elevator-ready guitar and bass lines) is Craig David (Craig David). I am not aware whether Craig is still known, never mind popular or respected, among a younger generation but I am aware that Frank Ocean is certainly all of those things. Recently Timothy Chalomet, comparing Frank Ocean to Bob Dylan said that Ocean is ‘The Thinker…guiding us culturally…from up here [tapping his head]’. No one, not even an idiot, ever said anything like this about poor Craig. Truthfully, Craig didn’t even say his own name that much during his songs yet that feature is mainly what he will be remembered for. Well not that much during his hits anyway; to be fair I haven’t yet investigated Craig’s albums but presumably ‘Born to Do It’ will generate at some stage in this project. So why doesn’t Frank Ocean say his own name during his songs? Because Bob Dylan didn’t? The worst part of the album might be when Andre 3000 turns up on Pink Matter and does a ‘clever’ play on Frank‘s name. If Frank Ocean had said ‘Frank Ocean’ a couple of times earlier in the song Andre 3000 might have felt his reference was redundant and left it out. Is Frank Ocean too clever to say his own name? Too much the Deconstructionist? Too much of a cultural leader? On the whole, going by this 13 year old album I’ve never heard any of before this weekend I’d say Frank Ocean is essentially a lobotomised Stevie Wonder. A fair chunk of Channel Orange is four-bar loops of keyboard stabs with Wonderish vocal sophistications on either a base melody that is too mundane to be worth the trouble (Sierra Leone, Sweet Life) or on nothing at all (Pilot Jones, Monks). Instrumental hooks to compare with Stevie Wonder? There aren’t hooks to compare with anyone. Of the albums we have done so far it puts me most in mind of Lost in the Dream; plenty of vibing but very little in the way of original musical ideas. That said, The Thinker does manage to think his way out of not being as asinine as The War on Drugs. Thinkin Bout You, Super Rich Kids, the first half of Pyramids, Lost, and Bad Religion are the backbone of this record. They are all conventional songs; even phrasing over four-bar loops, a couple of verses, three choruses and a bridge. And they aren’t bad. The lyrics, as everywhere else on this album, are lacking. Here are rambling thoughts that frequently, to their credit, rise above the album’s core themes of materialist ennui and ‘titties’, however, there isn’t an ounce of poetry on this album. Frank Ocean, presumably knowing he has at least enough Stevie Wonder in him to shoehorn any old pile of disparate rhythms into a smooth vocal line, fires them out seemingly without a second draft: ‘The jewel of Africa, jewel/ What good is a jewel that ain't still precious?/ How could you run off on me? How could you run off on us?/ You feel like God inside that gold/ I found you laying down with Samson and his full head of hair’ (Pyramids) That sounds like shit to me and I am not singling that out because almost any few lines from this album would have done. The songs still work though I think. There is enough drama and enough striking music in those few tracks to carry a listener through this album’s general aimlessness and indulgence. 2.5/5

I remember when Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was unquestionably the greatest album of all time. I also remember when it was the greatest Beatles record of all time. Then that was briefly Revolver. Last time I checked, I think it was Abbey Road, but, then, I don't really care about popular consensus any more and rarely check those lists. They tell you more about a time than they do about timeless works of art – if there is such a thing. That Rumours (with a U! They're an English band after all.) is currently the highest-rated album on this site tells us something. My recollection is that Rumours was always the most highly-regarded Fleetwood Mac record, even though I have a soft spot for Tango in the Night myself. But I also remember that Fleetwood Mac was hopelessly uncool. After the syrupy pop of Tango, they ended up on the County Fair circuit in the 90s, their songs covered by the Corrs and the Dixie Chicks. Even when alternative rockers were covering the songs, it was Billy Corgan and Courtney Love, who, for all I love them, were never effortlessly cool – they're both corny in their way. Certainly, Rumours is inoffensive. With the exception of The Chain, it doesn't push the boundaries of pop structure. There is no real studio invention. The lyrical content is personal, but it is not profound. Not that there is any need for a great record to do these things. It is precisely this approachability that makes Rumours come out so well on aggregate. Because good songwriters (and the band had several) will write good songs. Good musicians will perform good arrangements. Holed up in a studio, what else are they going to do but produce a good – maybe great – album of smooth, coked-up, California country? Well, we know what else they were doing. And we know what they were hoping to avoid by making a record. There is a claustrophobia and intensity of focus that underpins everything. Whereas the disintegration of the Beatles produces the fragmentary white album and the begrudging Abbey Road, Rumours is more watchful and paranoid – if they aren't working on songs, they'll be tearing their lives apart. The intricacy of the arrangements is a distraction tactic. The Beatles wanted to stay out of each others way, so they recorded alone or in pairs. Fleetwood Mac either fancy each other or are jealous – they may not always be in the same room, but they are very much in the same moment, as painful as it is. “Don't stop thinking about tomorrow” is a line they sell themselves – they're stuck in the present. Such confessional writing isn't new. Joni Mitchell and Graham Nash did plenty, but on different records. The Beatles wrote about each other later, but about their world more generally at the time, whether John writing about Yoko or Paul writing about Allen Klein. It is a self-mythologising approach that connects Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo to Dante Alighieri. But all those artists are reacting to outside factors pushing on and shaping them. For Fleetwood Mac, everything is contained inside. Where the Beatles fragmented and exploded, Fleetwood Mac implode, creating a compelling black hole. It draws you in. In this sense, it is the perfect meeting of content and form: the record is the band that makes the record. Not as a self-conscious, self-reflexive work, but a psychodrama. Thus the record's few glaring flaws are integral to its success. While there are a handful of mediocre tracks – Second-Hand News, I Don't Want To Know – it is the tedious Oh Daddy that brings subject and process together. The superior Silver Springs should have been there, but, as it was another song – embarrassingly - about Buckingham, sung by Nicks, who already had several showcase tunes, Mick Fleetwood angled for the inclusion of McVie's odious song about him. The dark heart of Rumours is the attempt to balance and work through their awful desires. That requires the end product be tarnished by ego and appetite. Had they been able to set aside interpersonal problems for artistic vision, they would have made some other record. But content meets form here and imperfect is perfect, completely self-contained like the band's lusts. Almost detached in its professional avoidance of those attachments. It is a peculiar set of factors that brings Rumours out on top in the aggregate. Musically inoffensive, but para-socially scandalous. Wound-up, but California laid-back (how is Dreams so forceful, while being harmonically static?). Shamelessly radio-friendly (Go Your Own Way, Don't Stop) and just shameful (Oh Daddy). Pyschosexual reportage that is also somehow universal. A staple in a lot of parents' record collections and all over TikTok. Indeed, the TikTok success of Dreams shows the album is uncommonly meme-able, although we already knew that from the second life The Chain's bassline had in Formula One broadcasting. There are a lot of ways to make a four or five star records out of those contraries and, on aggregate, people will agree in principle, even if they don't agree in particular. It couldn't be a five star album though, not with that twee mobile phone ad guitar Buckingham is playing on Never Going Back Again. That's not cool, it's corny. 4 Rumours is the worst best album ever made. The greater part of its running time is taken up with the sound of absolutely brilliant songs playing and yet that perfection is a crushing sort of perfection. I would usually use the word ‘clinical’ as a pejorative but it is doubtless one of the real virtues of Rumours. Like when a striker is described as clinical to mean he kicked the ball into the net without show as quickly and efficiently as possible. Clinical like Stephen Hendry, 7 time snooker world champion and beloved of no one because, perfectly straight-faced and sober he would clear the table; rarely making an ostentatious shot because he never had to - his positional play was too good. ‘The Whirlwind’ Jimmy White (0 world titles) was loved. ‘The Hurricane’ Alex Higgins (2 world titles) was loved. Stephen Hendry has about half a dozen nicknames over the years because he has no nicknames that anyone really used. He is just Stephen Hendry. The titles that he constantly won said nothing to anyone about their life. Rumours is like that. Tusk you can love. Tango in the Night you can love. Even Peter Green’s albums - with their moments of unusual beauty amongst all the blues goofing - can be loved. Rumours you can only be impressed by. And almost annoyed by. Here is an album released in 1977 that has no wildness or chaos - only control. The drum lines are so well judged. There are no screams or funny noises or backwards tape shit or laughing picked up in the background on this album - it’s too grown-up for all that. It’s too grown-up even to be the sound of musicians in the same room; which we know it almost never was. Every mic is perfectly positioned. The album cover has a beige background to go with your curtains. And this album really only has one speed - moderate. The fact that none of that comes close to being fatal just reconfigures all of it as another way Rumours is singularly impressive. Even the sequencing doesn’t have to be good. Second Hand News isn’t a good opener. Gold Dust Woman isn’t a good closer. I never want to hear Never Going Back Again after I have just listened to Dreams. But those are all great songs so it doesn’t matter; your sense that there is a cold disjoint when any particular song begins is quickly overwhelmed by how good that song is. The crowning inhumanity to its listener of this album is the fact that Silver Springs - alongside Songbird the bleeding heart of the whole project - was cut from it. ‘Here is a pile of great songs,’ it seems to say, ‘we had that one that was best of all but we dumped it on a b-side just to make the point about how talented we are.’ Monsters. And yet it also forbids you to see them as the monsters they are. How can you hate an album that has Songbird on it? Take my 4.5 and leave me alone Rumours. But know this; ‘The Rocket’ Ronnie O’Sullivan also won 7 snooker world titles and is undoubtedly loved. There are other, perhaps better ways to be great. 4.5/5

The great thing about a dog is that they can take it, but they can't dish it out. You can call them anything and they don't mind and, because they don't mind, you like them and, because you like them, you don't really mean. It's all in good fun. When we picked up our most recent dog from the rescue, my wife and I tried to puzzle out his character. He seemed okay. He was a little nervous, but he had social skills. He'd been hurt before, but he didn't want to be defined by that. Our older dog, she listens to Siouxsie and the Banshees. She loves Courtney Love. I reckoned the new dog probably liked Wilco. It wasn't meant in a bad way. He was does a basic dog with a lot of hair on his chin. I was right though. When he gets anxious or overwhelmed, my wife sings to him and he likes Jesus, Etc. a lot. Maybe that's especially basic for a basic dog, a dog that also likes various McCartney melodies and Patience by Guns'n'Roses. The rest of the album doesn't really do it for him though. I think that's unfair. I Am Trying to Break Your Heart isn't bad, underneath the bleeps. Heavy Metal Drummer, I'm the Man Who Loves You... these are decent efforts, but there's a lot of fuzzy veneer on the record that's trying to keep the good bits hidden. Occasionally, people let off fireworks and no amount of politely phrased melody will distract the dog. That's when we play the brown noise. It drowns out the fireworks, but also causes a heaviness in the room, a dense fog in the head, and dull buzz in the stomach. I don't know why Wilco decided to put so much of that on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot - it distracts from the most egregious things, but leaves an unsettled, unsatisfied feeling. Much of the album is even-keeled and well-tempered, despite the attempt to muddy it up with atmosphere and static. Yet, the best moment of all is Tweedy's struggle to deliver "Your voice is smoking" at the end of the bridge in Jesus, Etc. - the actual distortion of pushing himself. That's the dog's favourite bit too. He's basic like that. He won't mind me saying so. 3 I bought Yankee Hotel Foxtrot many years ago because someone told me it was their favourite album. Actually I always seem to be hearing how it is a favourite or how it is superlative. I read the Wikipedia page today and was bowled over by just how deep and wide runs the praise for this record. Anyway I bought the cd back then, disliked it and then gave it to a charity shop. I usually keep CDs I don’t think much of in the Box of Shame (there are actually two now) but when I dislike an album I know someone else will certainly grab off the shelf for a bargain - something trendy, however disappointing to me - I donate it. No point burdening Oxfam with yet another copy of Black Market Music or Alone With Everybody. Anyway I was wrong to give away Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. It’s not bad at all. It has a few songs I really like - Kamera and I’m The Man Who Loves You, maybe Radio Cure, and I can certainly stand the rest. But I think my giving it away was born more out of contempt for the popular idea that YHF is superlative in some way. It isn’t. It’s very nice. Jeff Tweedy is a decent songwriter - I really like the subtle uneven phrases that pop up in some of these songs; music that hides the work that has gone into it. I have some sympathy for that line of American non-singer - even if Tweedy’s crap voice lacks the intimacy of Elliott Smith’s or the conviction and drama of Conor Oberst’s (both of whom I also believe to be better songwriters than Tweedy). The lyrics have a poetic sheen in the moment even if they don’t stand up to actually being read. I like the variety of instruments. I like the noisy bit where the Lady goes ‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’. Yes. Worth keeping on the shelf. I shall go back to that Oxfam and see if someone else has made the mistake of scorning this CD. No I won’t. It won’t be there. Someone will always snap up anything vaguely interesting and leave you picking through multiple copies of Life for Rent and White Ladder. 3/5

Previous attempts to listen to Deep Purple have left me cold, but today I enjoyed this. That said, I've still never heard a riff or solo from Richie Blackmore that I've remembered - apart from the obvious ones. None of them are on here. 2 Chunky oul balls, too loud at any volume. 1.5

Brian Eno is an anagram of One Brain. This could mean that Eno is all intellect and no feeling, although we all know he is really a sensualist. It could mean that he has a singular focus, which is why he has to devise new ways to distract himself. On this, his first solo album, it could mean that he is without a collaborator, one brain and one Brian after the symbiosis with Gerry, then the co-headline with Fripp from 1973, before Bowie and Byrne and Bono and Chris Martin who refuses to fit the alliteration. Of course, as a self-professed 'non-musician,' Eno can't do it by himself. Fripp is all over the record, feeling wild and unfettered in the way he often sounds in collaboration, but never on his own records (when God or something similar is speaking through him). Still, it is interesting to consider this debut as a demarcation of Eno's personal limits. He sings poorly, but not so poorly as you'd imagine. His lyrics are sometimes leaden, but not because they are coldly intellectual, but because they are too silly - 'funny,' but not humourous. The songs in themselves sit in a weird position, not so rudimentary as one might expect from a non-musician, but neither are they very experimental in structure. They have their detours and deviations from expectation, but there is nothing here more extreme than what he did on The Bogus Man or In Every Dream Home A Heartache or The Bob. It is all more conventional than on No Pussyfooting. It is a pop record - there was always meant to be a rock'n'roll singled called Baby's On Fire. But Eno isn't a pop star. Still, there is no pop star (or glam rocker) that could sing these dada tunes. They wouldn't suit any persona - not sophisticated enough for Ferry, not focussed enough for Byrne, not so vaguely uplifting that Chris Martin could inhabit them. And perhaps that is why Eno is such a successful collaborator and why his artistic endpoint was ambient and generative music, why he needs aleatoric stratagems to produce. These are answers to his natural limits and to the limits of pop music. I really enjoy all four of the four solo pop records, where he gradually pushes past those limits. I like this reedy voice. I like his dumb evasive lyrics, where he is obviously afraid to write or tackle anything substantive. They are a glimpse past the intellectual façade, the image of him as fixer, professor, as organiser. We accept that he is a thinker, an ideas man, but the pop records capture what it is like to actually have ideas - chaotic, fragmented, a little irritating, a lot distracting. Most ideas are stupid. This is - more than anything - what it is like to be Brian Eno. For forty minutes, we are as one brain. Of course, an anagram is just an anagram. It tells us nothing. But it is a very Enoesque stratagem by which we find a way into something or a way out of it. Another anagram is 'nai boner' - meaning 'no erection.' We know that certainly was not the case for Eno in the early 70s. But, perhaps, 'bone rain' is a homophone for 'bone reign' - it was that sort of time. 3.5 Amid the bustle of funny noises and striking mixing decisions there is one very good melodic idea per track. Driving Me Backwards in particular is well worth the flogging it gets - even with Brian Eno singing. There is also the frequent sense, however, that Brian thinks he is funny, which he isn’t. In fact I believe the lyrics to Baby’s On Fire or Dead Finks Don’t Talk for example, are the work of a transparent square. I like Robert Fripp though; he’s cool. 3/5

I couldn't work out why some of these slow jams are long and some are short. How do they decide when to end? There are no builds, no climaxes. Listening to the single version of the title track doesn't help. It is makes no difference if it is four minutes or ten, unless you're using it to time an egg. 1.5 This is boring, no? So much rehearsal room time spent fashioning fancy grooves and, as is often the case with groove-making, no one noticed that there wasn’t much worth grooving about. The base melodies here are dull, however 6 or 7 good musicians (too often playing all at once) may dress them up and drag them out. 1.5/5

Morrissey and Marr are a bit like Bernie Taupin and Elton John. Two very different forces in competition more than collaboration. Marr is ostentatious, virtuosic, intricate. Morrissey is flat, repetitive, maudlin. Marr is serious, but inviting. Morrissey funny, but aloof. This tension generally produced brilliant work, but also enough incoherent squibs to call those moments of brilliance accidental. It's how you can have Vicar in a Tutu and There's A Light That Never Goes Out one after the other. It is a consequence of Marr working at a remarkable pace and Morrissey tossing off moments of inspiration - sometimes inspired, sometimes just toss. The Smiths were a singles band and they knew it. It is the reason their b-sides compilations work at well if not better than the records proper. I used to love the Smiths. I don't so much now - and it's not because of Morrissey. However, when I loved them, I loved them in toto, as a band that created an incredible body of work in only five years. The albums, though, have their flaws. The Queen is Dead especially is as variable as any of them - Some Girls are Bigger than Others has great music, but why even sing about that? - and is damned by its title of best Smiths album (that's Louder Than Bombs). The band was often also cursed with thin production, which never did the rhythm section justice. The only performer than receives justice from the production is Morrissey and the verdict on him is as damning as that delivered by the judge in his case against Mike Joyce: "devious, truculent, and unreliable". Of course, no human could be relied upon to produce a whole album of There is a Lights, Bigmouths, or I Know It's Overs. Well, Marr could. But Morrissey couldn't keep up with him. But, perhaps, like Morrissey, I'm becoming truculent in my old age, even as I find him less relatable. Finding fault where I wouldn't have at as a younger person, when I would have been content to love the whole. Now, as I pick at the parts, I am making unnecessary distinctions - it's a very good collection of songs really. (I've never really cared for The Boy With The Thorn In His Side. Don't get it.) 3.5 I realised today that I’ve never given much thought to whether The Queen is Dead is any good. I came late to The Smiths insomuch as I heard lots of their music as a teenager, took a thorough dislike to Morrissey and then held my disdain for them as a settled opinion until I was a good deal older. I was certainly in my thirties before I developed any affection for their music beyond Please, Please, Please… which I loved, grudgingly, in the midst of my bitter incomprehension of an older generation’s reverence for The Smiths. The song that properly converted me was The Boy With the Thorn in His Side. That song has a delicate beauty to which I was entirely oblivious as a young man. So The Queen is Dead missed out on that period of my life when I burned through a good deal of leisure time sat with a cd in my hand scrutinising the track listing and the liner notes. I bought the cd in recent years and, having satisfied myself from a more or less cursory review of a collection of songs that I mostly already knew that it was terrific, duly tossed it in rank 4 or 5. Not a small accolade; that’s still the front of the revolving cd tower, even if those lower ranks were recently subject to regular and brutal evacuation by my child when she learned how to crawl. Listening to the album today though I found that I didn’t know the order of the songs, indeed I couldn’t have named all of them in any order. The result was my hearing the album in a continuous sort of amazement. (“‘Frankly Mr Shankly’ is brill… ‘I Know It’s Over’?! Wow!”). What a pile-on of terrific songs this is. I really must put that cd where my daughter can’t reach it. 4.5/5

I didn't think I would have to justify my OK Computer rating so soon. How to explain the half a star of head room I left to afford Kid A and In Rainbows full marks? At first, I borrowed OK Computer from Peter Barronwell. I knew the singles, but it still amounted to a process of persuasion. The world was telling me that Radiohead was cool and I needn't to be convinced that they were more than that. With Kid A, there was a lot of expectation - studio blogs reprinted in music mags; live bootlegs slowly downloaded on dial-up - and it met that expectation. With In Rainbows, there was no expectation, only surprise, but it followed through on that surprise. I was already on the side of Radiohead for those records and each one reified that decision. More abstractly, OK Computer ends with the exhortation to 'slow down.' Thom Yorke calls you or someone like you an idiot. A warning against a possible accident. Kid A and In Rainbows are not so death adverse. Motion Picture Soundtrack, though maudlin promises a technicolour 'next life,' while Videotape images that, at the pearly gates, one might look back at and enjoy the best memories of your life. The movies may feed us on little white lies, but the movies of memory are true. That's life. People criticise Yorke as being whiny, but the possibility of an afterlife presented as the endpoint of both records seems pretty positive to me. I mention this because I think it would be easy too mistake the expectation for hype and dismiss Kid A, as some did, as overreaching, as "effect over content" (Mark Beaumont), as Thom Yorke escaping up his own hole. I'm just happy he escaped. The pressure after OK Computer was great. The black hole of its success and its morose themes could have been too much - every 90s alt-rock star had to deal with it, some did so better than others. But Kid A sees them shrugging off the implications of that success, shrugging off the identity of a band (is anyone else but Thom on the title track?), and I think, in that last line, shrugging off the miserablism of the 90s. There will be millennial problems going forward, but Thom Yorke has found ways out. It may not be a perfect record - Treefingers. Morning Bella goes round and round. The National Anthem is a bit stiff until the horns comes in. - but the effect is greater than the content. The effect is a feeling that there is a way out of the rockist, angst of the 90s, a sense of possible liberation from rigid roles and genres. Not every track may do this successfully. Other bands may pull off particular of the tricks better. But the album itself is Radiohead's best trick, reinvention into something that was less recognisable as a band but more themselves. 5 It’s hard to know what to say about Kid A because there is so much to say. OK Computer came up only a few weeks ago and I did a whole personal spill about it. It’s too soon for another one. It will have to do to say that the long run-up to the release of this album was the most excited I have ever been for the release of any artist’s album. I was very young and my unreasonable expectations were such that only one of the best albums ever made could have satisfied them. Well done Radiohead. 5/5

Slade are to glam as Oasis are to Britpop. Working-class have-a-go's whose rudimentary stomping rock produced multiple hits for a largely male teen demographic and completely out of step with the aesthetic and pageantry of the movement they were thrown in with. Slade wore platforms like Noel Gallagher carried a Union Jack guitar, to ride a wave, but without seeming like a try-hard or a sell-out - they certainly didn't care how they looked. My uncle Paul liked Slade. My mother liked T-Rex. They were not sharing a pop cultural moment. Neither, do I think, were Oasis lads part of the same moment as the girls who liked Suede. Noddy Holder's lyrics don't mean much more to me than Noel Gallagher's - something about being young and hedonistic, there's a sort of life-affirming freedom in them. Being crazee is good, I think. While it ain't art, there's a time for such dumb, up-lifting thundering. I'm not saying it has to be Christmas, but I understand why it is Christmas. Also, I like that, while the band all went to the trouble of writing Slade on their fingers for the cover, Don Powell went and tapped his up as if he couldn't resist having a drum while the photographer set up. The thumbs, wavering like Roman Emperors, adjudicating whether or not the record slays us or not is just proof that they don't care. Their decision will never be communicated to us. The thumbs hover at maybe indefinitely. 2 Jesus Christ, this is awful. I’ve always liked Slade, which is to say I’ve never really listened to them beyond 3 songs, but it felt safe to assume that when Noddy Holder popped up on Radcliffe and Maconie and amused me with witty and erudite commentary on things that happened 30 years ago (now 50 years ago) that his band were bound to be highly enjoyable if perhaps artistically frivolous. No, not so. Shite is what they are. I think I actually recall them being shite in ‘Slade in Flame’ the one time I watched the film but of course they were playing characters from a different band so I didn’t make any assumptions. This was a tough listen. Here is an album that has nothing to say about Christmas. 1.5/5

I imagined that I would have a lot to say about our hundredth record. It is a milestone that requires to be marked. On seeing that we were given a late seventies blues album, I knew I wouldn't be able to conjure up much. It is unfair to criticise the blues for the compositional limitations inherent in the structure. I wouldn't do that anyway. But the slick guitar sound from a lot of late blues puts me off big time. Still, I listened to this and it isn't bad. In opposition to a lot of the reviews here, I liked Mannish Boy precisely because it stayed on the I for the whole thing. If the song is never going to move somewhere interesting, why not refuse to move? There was some great hollering on it too. The production is lively and clear, even making blues harmonica sound like a vital, growling texture. And the slide guitar on I Can't Be Satisfied sounds beautiful - it almost sounds like Captain Beefheart. I'm unlikely to listen to this ever again, but I guess it says something about the journey, now we're 10% of the way through: I am largely right about what I like and don't like in music generally, but, on a close listen, I can always find something to enjoy, briefly. 2 A couple of these tracks would nearly do. Does anyone sit down and listen to this whole thing? 50 minutes of 12 bars, turnarounds as old as the hills, and bursts of pentatonic noodling broken up by the classic ‘same note for ages’ gag. Sleazy barroom blues is great fun but it’s as good fun when any half-cut, half-competent set of players blast it at you and 6 other people on a Thursday night with a few drinks in you. What is there to praise here besides Muddy Waters’ iconic voice? Playing blues is like playing Monopoly - you learn the rules and away you go. Listening to blues is like watching Monopoly. I appreciated the relative austerity of ‘I Can’t Be Satisfied’ breaking up the constant party-clamour of honking harmonica, guitar, drums and bass, and piano (mostly all at the same time which can be great but generally - take turns kids) but honestly, it was track 5 and I was already partied out by that stage. I was probably looking for my coat by the end of track two. Or a pint at least. 2/5

Knowing The Who would later cover Heat Wave by Holland-Dozier-Holland, it was disappointing that their debut album didn't open with a cover of Out in the Street by the Shangri-las. For all the dexterity of Moon and Entwhistle, their versions of two James Brown songs would see the band docked wages. The quality of not quite being able to pull-off popular black music overhangs the whole album, much as it does on the early Beatles records. Smokey Robinson is present, even when his writing credit isn't. And, yet, the funk, Motown, and Brill Building impulse is a good one to follow. The Who might go on to be a stadium rock band, but they are a pop group at heart, benefiting here from immediacy and absence of grandiosity. Still, The Ox sounds the most like them having actual fun, rather than just recording fun to sell. That's the trap into which they fall over and over, I think, not quite art, not quite product. Nothing from Moon is intentional, nothing from Townsend is instinctual. As on Exile on Main Street, which we've already discussed, Nicky Hopkins is the star of the piece and far too frequently buried. 2 As you may remember, many years ago I offended a friend of ours with disparaging comments about The Who, a favourite band of his. I don’t recall the comments I made but they were offensive enough that the gentleman brought them up the next day presumably having been much bothered by them in the interim. This was terrible to me and I apologised…I think (I hope). I then resolved never again to risk hurt to anyone by verbal attacks on the music that they held dear. Such an attack, as I should have understood better loving much music so dearly myself, far from being a challenge to some abstract philosophical principle is really a sort of assault on the heart and the mind of another person and is plainly bad behaviour. If that particular resolution outlived even a couple of hours I‘d be very surprised; I still haven’t expelled that compulsion from my personality all these years later. However, I did make another resolution at the same time; at some point I would give The Who a fair spin. Because I hadn’t. I knew some of Tommy and a handful of the hits. That‘s not a just basis for slagging off a classic and beloved band to a fan’s face. Well I hadn’t got back to that resolution before this weekend so here we go now. The Who. First album. My Generation. Fair spin. *I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot/ so then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot I will spue thee out of my mouth (Revelation 3: 15-16 KJV)* As John the Revelator points out, the reason God doesn’t like The Who, is that they art lukewarm. Not playful or witty or weird enough to be good pop music. Too orderly and commercially deliberate (and not weird enough) to be good rock music. When I say ‘not weird enough’ of course I clarify that I am referring to the music, lest the voices of The Who’s supporters clamour in defence of notable paedophile-researcher Pete Townshend. If ‘pop’ and ‘rock’ are slightly anachronistic stools to set either side of an album that came out in 1965 I will say that this describes my essential problem with all the music, mostly from the 1970s, I have encountered by this cursèd band. Daltrey’s singing is a key problem. He was blessed with an edgy, powerful voice but he can only use it to utterly banal effect. There is a cleanliness and precision of delivery about it that speaks of deep-set squaredom. There is no accent, no character, and no drama in his voice; save when he is imitating other singers and when he does that, on Please, Please, Please and I’m a Man, it is excruciating. Moon puts so much into every song that he puts in nothing at all. He is a party trick. A great drummer who never does great drumming. Pete Townshend’s guitar playing…ugh. I am going to stop talking about The Who in general now because this is too long but also because there will presumably be ample opportunity for that in future. There are bound to be another three or four Who albums at least in this list. The album is My Generation so let’s focus on its particular sins rather than the mark of Cain which all Who albums carry. There is a strain of chauvinism running through this album which is extremely distasteful. Opening your album - nay, your career - with what sounds like a rape threat letter from a stalker is a verifiably bad idea anyway but when Pete is on the front cover glowering in black like an alley-lurking strangler that the police helicopter has just found with a spotlight it is doubly so. Oddly this album was released exactly the same day as Rubber Soul - which finishes with Lennon’s horrifying paean to woman beating ‘Run for your life’. But the rest of Rubber Soul has the decency to be absolutely charming and wonderful. Not so My Generation. The album’s one attempt at procedural sweetness, ‘La La La Lies’ falls utterly flat amid a barrage of variations on ‘I’ve had you and now I’m away to have someone else because that’s the way I am baby’ [not an actual lyric] or ‘Just wanna keep doing all the dirty little things I do’ as throwaway pap ‘A Legal Matter’ puts it. There is a sense of musical manspreading throughout as well: Daltrey’s baseless vocal confidence; Moon’s witlessly virile drumming; Townshend’s guitar lines always relying on loudness and ignorance for memorability. Entwistle’s bass I really like; subtle, thoughtful - he presumably paid up his man dues on the front cover, Union flagged and thumbs in his belt like a Millwall fan ready to settle a 1-1 draw with a good old dust up with a few of you Berkshire Hunts. I’ve written too much. What I meant to say was My Generation is a very good song, although I don’t think the stuttering quite works - good idea but needed a singer with a bit of contempt in them to really sell it. The rest of the album is mostly dreadful. 2/5

I doubt I have much to add to the discussion of Dark Side of the Moon. I certainly don't have the energy to do so - "Shorter of breath and one day closer to death." It is rightly popular and has sold many millions. I don't have the strength to verify the story that a German vinyl pressing plant existed solely to churn out copies of the album, but I can believe, given the number of copies I've seen around. The sales were definitely sufficient to make the band huge, securing them the totemic Lear jet, and making them the image of indulgent and indulged rock stars. The sort of arena prog that punk was supposed to displace. But Pink Floyd aren't prog. Certainly not on this record. Coming from psychedelia, they were performing epic instrumentals before the term prog was coined. There is nothing epic here anyway. The longest track is under eight minutes and its a slow jam, not a technical workout. The record is harmonically straight-forward, often vamping between two chords. Richard Wright brings in some jazzy 9ths, but easy to digest. And rhythmically? Nick Mason is never showy. The riff of Money is so catchy that you barely notice the time signature. Gilmour and Wright are virtuosic players, but also virtuous, observing the virtue of good taste. Nothing ever feels like an exercise. There is room to discuss favourite Floyd albums and some of the contenders can be faulted for indulgent, but Dark Side of the Moon remains the best - the world's favourite - Floyd album because it avoids these traps. While not merely a collection of songs, it is not a concept album either. It sits pleasingly between the two - too coherent to be broken down into tracks, but not knotted up on storytelling. The story, in fact, is the simple story of everyone's life: time, money, conflict, decline. The shape of a life rather than any person's life. The Wall gets specific and The Final Cut more specific still, but the generality of Dark Side makes it easy to relate to. Talking Heads Fear of Music is an interesting comparison. That is another album where the writer focuses sharply on concepts of modern living - Compare Air with Breathe; Life During Wartime with Us and Them; Heaven (where they play your favourite song ad nauseum) to the endless climax of The Great Gig in the Sky. Byrne's obsessions are tetchy and paranoid. Waters' are universal. Sad, contemplative, maybe even hopeless, but gentle. Almost reductive. However, we all think about these things (some of us all the time) and, even the instrumental breaks - the panicked On the Run - capture the process of rumination. The snatches of other voice remind us of thinking. Thinking isn't - or shouldn't be - isolating, it is a conversation between ourselves and the things we've read and seen, the people we've spoken with. This isn't just Roger Waters's angst on record, it's everyone's. ELP parodied Fanfare for the Common Man, but Dark Side of the Moon is for the common man. That's why everyone has a copy. Even my ma, a old punk, used to listen to it in the dark. And a German town is very thankful. Okay, perhaps not everyone. I went to see Future Bible Heroes in London in 2002. Stephin Merritt asked the small audience what the English way is. I was the only one in the two-hundred strong crowd (strong probably isn't the right word for so many indie weeds) who got his Floyd reference (itself a reference to Walden). Or I was the only one who shouted it out when asked for clarity on the line. The least awkward of the two interactions I've had with him. 5 The Dark Side of the Moon has many faults and all of them were apparent to me the first time I listened to this album, at about 15 or 16, and disliked it. ‘Boring’ I would have said ‘what are everyone’s parents talking about?’ I know what I mean. It is sort of boring; everything except On The Run is taken at a middle-aged 60-70 bpm and On The Run has its own special way of being boring. Lots of solos - bloody saxophone and organ as well as guitar. Pompous too; it’s about your whole Life and Everything (‘that’s the beat of a heart at the start of the record you know!’ as someone’s uncle is always telling you). It’s about Time and Money too; isn’t it time you bought another copy? ‘The 30th Anniversary Vinyl if you can manage to find it - the dynamic range on that one; the soundstage…’ as someone’s single uncle is always telling you. No matter which of Pink Floyd is singing they all sound like a weary English schoolmaster. Hmmm. I seem to have almost talked myself into not giving this 5 stars so I’ll stop. 5/5

While the Beatles are not directly to blame, all those Yellow Submarine style awnings and playpark fixtures around Liverpool must have some effect on the children. The Zutons, The Wombats, and The Coral, all from Liverpool, and all amiably pop and psychedelic. You can go back to The Teardrop Explodes and Echo and the Bunnymen for more psychedelia, and Ian Broudie and Lee Mavers for more pop. Can the city do anything else? If you read that list with an honest heart, the returns clearly diminished over time, growing more and more childish and less challenging. It would be harsh of me to criticise the Coral too much though - I played that same sort of bouncing fifths bassline a lot in 2002 - but I can't say that anything from this album is worth listening to nearly twenty-five years later. I went to Liverpool as a kid and rode on a Blue Meanie spring rocker. I imagine it's still there, but eaten through with rust. Not so whimsical anymore. A guaranteed death trap. 1.5 ‘I shall give you a new song, it’s in the modern idiot and it goes something like this…’ The Coral display plenty of confidence on their debut album. Confidence in their playing, and in James Skelly’s singing in particular. They are confident too in their constant display of their debt to their great forebears in English pop music; XTC, The Specials, and of course Benny Hill. But why didn’t they cover ‘Dustbins of Your Mind’ or ‘Gather in the Mushrooms’, songs which sprung to mind irresistibly throughout my listen to their album? I would say it’s because the lyrical heft of Benny’s work might have shown up a lot of the empty dogshit-about-nothing (‘Simon Diamond’, ‘Bad Man’) that populates this album; songs that are all nudge and wink without any evident implication. ‘Dreaming of You’ is a banger though, even if I was already sick of hearing it about 20 years ago. 1.5/5

Bubbly, but cheesy. I'm sure there's a foodstuff that applies to, but I won't lower myself to picking one. The North African elements are charming. It is the late-90s pop production that lets it down. Perhaps there is something in it. It's hard to know at such a cultural remove. Is the music witty? Sexy? Satirical? Eccentric? The only way in for me is through the cover of Imagine. All covers of Imagine are a mistake, like plagiarising a birthday wish, but the fact that this artist chose to record it straight-faced, as a duet, suggests a guileless sincerity that might be off-putting if I understood the lyrics or the musical conventions. 2 This took a bit of getting into. Just as I was getting my bearings Khaled‘s cover of Imagine happened and I had to mentally reset. I started rising above the temptation to decry Pound-Shop George Michael backing tracks with ‘Ya Aachkou’. From here I began to appreciate the fabulously ornate vocal lines, doubled and tripled luxuriously by strings or flute or accordion and the fun of the vocal glissandos and the rolled ‘R’s . Truthfully these backing tracks sound quite expensive and even interesting sometimes (I loved the texture of whatever combination is happening at the start of El Bab) even if I probably prefer it when the cheesy electronic beats are dumped for real percussion (Raba-Raba). There is certainly too much of everything, especially cheesy beats, over the course of a ludicrous 78 minutes. But I am giving extra credit to Khaled because he has a good tache and I like that shade of purple on the album sleeve and the interior of his car. 2/5

A lot of stuff going on today, so I got one cursory listen to this. Familiar with the Roots from their album with Elvis Costello, I was reasonably hopeful. While there is some sonic diversity here, this album doesn't have the lyrical, melodic, or emotional range of Wise Up Ghost, probably as the latter uses Costello's whole career as a sample base, while Phrenology is conjuring its own musical material and there isn't enough of it. Certainly not to justify the runtime. All Speakerboxx, no Love Below. 2 I note from a quite read-up about The Roots that they are often characterised as ‘alternative Rap’. Unusually what I am hearing is two-bar loops for minutes on end while someone talks about one or all of 1. How great I am at rapping 2. How great I am generally 3. How women find me irresistible 4. Where I am from (Philadelphia) Is this really the alternative to the other rappers we’ve heard so far? Let’s be fair though; occasionally they will throw us a chorus albeit in the form of the sort of mundane tune that would escape notice on a Dido album (Sacrifice, Thought @ Work). Or they might just make funny noises (!!!!!!!, the latter half of Water, Something in the Way of Things). A little differently again, Pussy Galore seems to complain about the omnipresent poison of the sexualised female body in human culture. It is not entirely clear if the contents of this album are excluded from that indictment. I note that they have their own drummer; kudos, although so did Huff N’ Doback and there is really nothing here as good as Boats and Hoes. No, I was unable to get crunk with this album. 1.5/5

My wife is on heavy-duty, nerve-blocking painkillers. "Why are you listening to the Dirty Dancing soundtrack?" she asked. I explained. "It sounds good though." It does sound good. I wasn't listening intently. Maybe it wouldn't sound good if I was listening closely rather than nursing my ill wife. But she liked it. The arrangements are sweet and characterful. Solomon Burke's voice is sweet and characterful too. I don't know that I can say more than that, but I trust my wife when she says that, with her nervous system dulled, she likes it. 3 Although I am not convinced that there is a great song on this album, the arrangements elevate everything. They are light and detailed - great lines everywhere, especially the guitar (whoever is playing it - I couldn’t find a credit online). Solomon Burke has a terrific voice; gruffer than Sam Cooke’s but almost as impressive. The backing singers, whoever they were, are top notch as well. A very easy listen. 3/5

We agreed to a break on the day we got Pet Sounds – I had things to do, you had things to do. Then Brian Wilson died. I thought it would be easier to come back to the album after a few weeks. My initial thoughts were all over the place. Perhaps, after some reflection on Wilson's significance, I would have a better idea. Once, a radio producer invited me onto a radio show to talk about Pet Sounds. I didn't realise it was a panel show, where the guests talked about their favourite albums. I'm still not sure why he thought Pet Sounds would be one of my favourites. Maybe there was a space to fill. Regardless, I had less to say about it than the albums chosen by the other two guests: Purple Rain and Forever Changes. Historically, I've had troubled articulating much of anything about Pet Sounds. I've never owned a copy, although I've had copies of and enjoyed the record that proceded and followed it: Today and Smiley Smile. It's hard now to discuss it, knowing that in the deficit of reviews to catch up on, I've to write about Today as well. A review of that album can't ignore what we now all know was coming. There is no dispute that Pet Sounds is a great album – beautiful sounding, confidently pieced together, challenging but accessible, eccentric but average. However, it never speaks to me the way that other great records do. Brian Wilson's teenage symphonies to god are specifically to a distant god and teenagers from long ago. He was twenty-four when he wrote all this, but it has the emotional complexity of someone younger writing for people younger still. Except for God Only Knows, where the simplicity horse-shoes round to profundity and universality. That songs shows what Wilson can achieve with great lyrics, but the truth – not a hidden truth by any stretch - is that the words have little to do with the success of Wilson's – not the Beach Boys' – records. The emotional depth and artistic curiosity is solely in the music and Wilson is constrained by the sentimental conventions of pop music – which he couldn't challenge himself, so relied on collaborators – and even by the idea of a band itself. How much closer to Wilson's vision – and therefore his true personality – we would be if the Beach Boy group vocals were replaced by a faceless choir, no longer the product of a pop brand of which Wilson is only a part, but the tool of Wilson the composer. Imagine Beethoven had to write for the boy band of which he was also a member – the Gary Barlow problem. The elements of Wilson that we might relate to, the human understanding that we might uncover, is in that strange music: sunny, but sad; explorative, but homely; short, but all tangled up with each other. As this project goes on, I am forced to concede that pop music is, predominantly, a charismatics medium: a force of will and personality, an artform of individual tastes pieced together for sale. Brian Wilson's genius, then, had to come second to his charisma. And he had none. Charm, perhaps. But not charisma. In the final product, his facility is too often subservient to other people's concerns. There are musical forms in which facility is paramount, but mid-twentieth century pop music wasn't one. Quite accurate, he just wasn't made for those time. 4 “Now tell me who's gonna hold your precious hands?/Who's gonna kiss your ruby mouth?/And who's gonna talk your future over/While I'm out there workin' like a dog way down in the south?” (Solomon Burke ‘Hard, Ain’t it Hard’) Brian Wilson! Brian fucking Wilson, Solomon that’s who. Listen to the lyrics of ‘I’m Waiting for the Day’ - the tale of a woman who doesn’t actually want the song’s protagonist but, having been hurt, is exposed to attachments by this sort of barnacle. Perhaps it was the unlucky precedence of Solomon Burke’s lively, virile record but the Beach Boys’ album struck me today as nothing if not flaccid. The barnacle analogy is unjust I dare say - unlike the noble, hermaphroditic barnacle, there is an utter sexlessness, musical as well as lyrical, about Pet Sounds. It has no genitalia. This is an effect of the music as well as the lyrics. That big reverb wash, a sickness of American pop albums in the 60s, positively castrates the drums. The Beach Boys vocals I have always winced at; performances like Wouldn’t It Be Nice? are the very soul of whiny, wet, nasal, vocal manchilding; little conviction and no passion, only a somnolent sense of correct notes being dutifully oozed out lest the baby wake up. And who is that baby? The grown women that the Beach Boys are so conspicuously interested in never having an unchaste thought about before marriage (before which neither can ’be happy’) ‘Goodnight my baby/ Sleep tight my baby’ Ugh.  Now what about the ‘genius’ of Brian Wilson’s musical architecture? Chord sequences wandering off from key centres like a boy wandering the dance floor in search of his prom date. No final resolution. Every track ending the night back home by 9, alone, unsatisfied.  Since writing the above Brian Wilson has died. Rest in peace Mr Wilson, you were a brilliant songwriter. I was going to write more above anyway. There would have been a ‘turn’ in which I acknowledged that I actually think Pet Sounds is very, very good and that God Only Knows is one of my absolute favourite records; a song almost worth castrating oneself to have the honour of having written. I was going to give Pet Sounds 4/5 but I will bump that by half a point now because I too am basically soft and sentimental. And I didn’t even go to my school formal. 4.5/5

Paul Westerberg, at the start of an actual songwriting career – that is writing songs rather than riffs – is messy. Paul Westerberg at the height of his songwriting career is messy. I haven't heard anything he's done lately, but I bet it's messy too. None of my favourite Replacements songs are on here. Neither are the catchiest. But it is joyful, reckless, open-minded and messy, much like the life stage it successfully describes. Honestly, I prefer my college rock to have more mystery than messiness, but it would be churlish to disregard the Replacements – it's sincere, it's spontaneous, and it's sloppy. Westerberg becomes more of a craftsman later, but the satisfying ending to Androgenous could never be achieved with craft. 3 This Replacements album is good but it is much cooler than it is good, which makes me quite suspicious of it. There’s a lot of being bored and not caring on this album.  ‘I don’t care’ (I Will Dare)  ‘I don’t give a single shit’ (Favorite Thing) ‘Let's get this over with, I tee off in a hour’ (Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out)  ‘We don’t wanna know’ (Seen Your Video) We are also invited to grasp how little The Replacements care in the ‘live-feel’, complete with a tinny, cheap-sounding delay on the vocal and noisy, random breakdowns and in the grab-baggery of the shifting tempos, genres, instrumentation etc. Oh look - an old piano; why don’t I just do something bouncy and sweet? Um…I dunno let’s do a Kiss cover next or whatever. Dare we listen to Unsatisfied and believe that it was the result of more than a single take of genuine, visceral unsatisfaction after which the producer said ‘So are you happy with that take?’ and Paul Westerberg shrugged?  Audibly not-caring has been cool as hell in rock music ever since Bob Dylan stopped trying to sing and started not-really-singing about women that he didn’t care about, in place of political causes that he seemed to. There have been many genuine not-carers since then but I’m not sure that The Replacements are among them. The not-caring here is so multifaceted, so plainly thoughtful, that it comes across as interested. Even the title ‘Let It Be’ is more than just a form of words to not-care by; they picked the title of the last Beatles album because they wanted to show that they didn’t care that the Beatles had it first. Clever squares.  3.5/5

Of the albums we were left with over the break, Maxinquaye is the one I kept coming back to, stuck as I was in its molasses-thick production. Unlike other sample-based music that we've listened to thus far, which often sounds brittle, with its layers of audio sliding across each other like graphite, this is dense and unstratified. I rarely know where I am in it: it's over my head or I'm upside-down. It is only the familiar – but unexpected – references – to Japan, to Smashing Pumpkins – that suggest I might find my way through. Most obvious, of course, is the shared sample between Hell Is Round the Corner and Portishead's Glorybox. It is hard to listen to Tricky's track and not compare it with the work by his fellow Bristolians. In Glory Box, Beth Gibbons is the star. The sampled arcana may be murky, but she sits atop it all, clear as a bell, as clear as Aretha Franklin - “Give me a reason to be a woman.” On Maxinquaye, Martina Topley-Bird – whose voice is beautiful and whose cheeky vernacular makes her as charming as Neneh Cherry – is never given so distinct a topline. She too is subsumed in the viscous vinyl crackle. Of course, Hell Is Round the Corner is predominantly a vehicle for Tricky rapping, which, for me, always feels more limited than melody. No matter how rhythmic – and Tricky is distractingly laconic – it is one-note, never interacting with the music in the way that melody can. It has nowhere to go but the straight line. I go back to Mark Fisher's writing on the album. Portishead, he points out, is hip-hop with the Blackness toned down – that is, no rapping. He compares Tricky to the Britpop exploding at the time, a scene that built itself on models of Britishness that dominated in the 60s and early 70s, a White Britishness, where Black influence was imported on seven inches not part of the living culture. Tricky represents a more accurate image of British pop in the mid-90s: mixed-race; mixed vocals (rapper and chanteuse); mixed sex (male singing from a female perspective and vice-versa). His work acknowledges the music that happened in the UK since the seventies – art pop, later Bowie, two-tone. And his posturing is distinct and relatable, unlike his rapping American contemporaries: gender-bending rather than misogyny; working class veretie, rather than gangster posturing and consumer greed. But, god, was mid-90s Britain ever gloomy. Of course, Fisher's description of Britpop is reductive. Or that moment didn't last long. If anything, Maxinquaye sounds like Vanishing Point by Primal Scream: cloudy, dreary. Black Steel could even be on XTRMNTR. That's certainly the UK and, for what its worth, I find Tricky more relatable than his conservative American counterparts, but, now that I've returned and returned to it, I don't think I need to return to it again. Grim. 2 I find this album gloomy and energy-sapping. I like Martina Topley-Bird’s voice a lot but I struggled to care about much that she used it for here. Martina does a quare lot of lifting, considering hers isn’t the name in the marquee and that adds another slightly depressing dimension to proceedings. Tricky’s own vocal contributions are irritating, lacking any life musically or dramatically. If there are vivid moments of melody, beats, arresting samples or even lyrics (Black Steel) - they are used to build nothing; they simply “groove” for a few seedy minutes. I have put groove in inverted commas there because presumably no one would attempt to dance to this stuff; that is not its raison d'être. Nor would (or at least should) anyone put this on as background ambience to a social gathering unless they meant to discomfort their guests. To my mind this could surely serve only as DVD menu music and kudos to Tricky for anticipating the form before the technology was even rolled out. But here’s a film I wouldn’t watch.  1.5/5

The high, fluting voices of the Beach Boys are castrato wails: remarkable technical achievements, but incomprehensible on an emotional level. How do you relate to something that sounds so alien and formal, especially when most people find it hard to listen to opera. Yet, the best work here – When I Grow Up (To Be A Man), Help Me, Rhonda – is as lush and effecting as a classical movement, being harmonically rich and structurally interesting, even while constrained by doo-wop and surftone aesthetics. The remainder, which doesn't constitute the best, are nicely arranged pop standards. And this split between good pop and beyond pop reminds me of nothing so much as A Hard Day's Night, where the division between proficient statis and the stratosphere isn't exactly the same. However, the difference is the Beatles's title track itself. Not only is it catchy and clever, with a previously impossible studio-processed mystery chord at the beginning, but the title itself is new. A play-on-words from Ringo, the title incapsulates another Beatles innovation: the artist as a character. The four forceful characters of the Beatles – and their humour – becomes inextricable from the music. The Beach Boys introduce their sense of humour later – Vegetables; She's Goin' Bald – but it is a goofy humour, not the socially adept humour of the Beatles. And Brian Wilson's personality only becomes apparent when he has free reign over the music, which he gets on Pet Sounds. However, the distinction is clear: the powerhouse personalities of the Beatles are propulsive, until the point where they pull themselves apart; Wilson's gentle character is at once protected and suffocated by the empty-headed pablum of his band mates, his business moguls, and bank managers. Too reserved to push through himself, he has been drawn out and, even then, risks being smashed to smithereens by the pressures. 2.5 I felt bad for the girls in Good to my Baby and She Knows Me Too Well. I felt bad for the Little Sister (and rather sorry for her boyfriend too). I felt absolutely dreadful for Rhonda. Some of the tunes are terrific and the arrangements are sweet and absorbing. But the Beach Boys are utter creeps. 2/5

Early albums that are all cuts, no sides, no throughline, make it hard to get to know an artist. It's easy to grasp that Arethra Franklin is a great singer of songs. It is maybe possible to understand that she is a great interpreter of songs – when she's not making big mistakes: A Change Is Gonna Come. But it is difficult to get any further, when each song stands staunchly by itself. What sets apart Sam Cooke's Live at the Harlem Square among early 60s soul album is that a live album has narrative – they're all part of the same performance and the performance of each song relates to every other performance. Even if the songs don't relate thematically, they connect temporally – all played in the same place, played by the same musicians, rather than jammed together from one studio session here and another studio day there. The problem doesn't go away. The Britney Spears album we already reviewed was a collection of stand-alones jostling for prominence on a single record. Arethra Franklin isn't like that, of course. I know she's an artist, rather than a studio and executive confection, but I don't know what kind of artist from this collection of songs. She sounds like a queen – how could anyone treat her like the subject of the title track does? She sounds so dignified – how does she not command unspoken RESPECT? Who is she? I need a fuller picture. 2 The opening three tracks of this album are so good that the album could never have been anything but lopsided. If the rest is too classy in execution (and production - love the horn sounds on Dr Feelgood) to deserve the tag ‘procedural’ - it is still mostly forgettable. Then the cover version of A Change is Gonna Come is bizarre and ill-judged. The minor lyrical changes aren’t half as damaging as the musical sanitising of the harmony; goofy dominant sevenths helping take the bitter edge off the verses and turning tragedy into Sunday brunch. The outro is needless showboating. A rotten way to close a record. 2/5

I’m not sure why I didn’t listen to It’s Blitz! when it came out. I liked Fever to Tell a lot, and Zero and Heads Will Roll were great singles. Especially after the underwhelming Show Your Bones. On a first listen, nothing tops those singles. Soft Shock is good. Skeleton irks a bit with its Highland-style countermelody. The sequenced synths start to feel wearying; Nick Zinner’s one-finger synth lines don’t have the same expressiveness as his four fingers on a guitar. The drum machines obscure what I know to be Brian Chase’s more inventive acoustic drumming. When, I wonder, did drum machines become more limited than the people they were built to replace? It all sounds very 2009. Or at least how I remember 2009. A little Metric, some Feistian keening. Faint traces of Animal Collective and Fever Ray. That whole era’s sonic bootprint is stamped all over it. And for all that I liked those singles at the time, I’d had enough of 2009 even before it happened. I was already fed up by 2005. That’s probably why it’s not easy to go back now. Still, there’s a lot that I like — most of the record, in fact — though the pacing feels off. I found myself waiting for a slow, spare number like Hysteric. Then they follow it with Little Shadow, a second slow closer. Not a bad ending, but a wan one after all that came before. The acoustic version of Skeleton, which was tagged onto the expanded edition I listened to, would have done a better job at track four than the electric version. Even so, it - like the acoustic Soft Shock - has the air of a mid-2000s advertising sync. I looked it up: the Karen O commercial was from 2005. That’s when the bloat set in. When everything started sounding like that. Still, there’s enough to admire here to make you wish you didn’t feel like you were being sold a T-Mobile G1 while listening to it. 2.5 When it came out much was made of this 3-piece rock band’s daring pivot to dancey synth pop but truthfully it was superficial change. This was just another Yeah Yeah Yeahs album. It’s Blitz has the same weaknesses but fewer moments of justification than its predecessors. As usual they simply hook their listener into submission. There are no long (or even medium-sized) lines in either the lyrics or the music. Short guitar/keyboard riffs go round and round and round. Short melodic ideas go round and round and round. A second one of each is introduced and then we are bludgeoned with that for a while. The singer sings nonsense but as the chorus of The Beatles ‘She Loves You’ taught them; singing the nonsense three times usually does the trick. That has been the story of the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s process since album 1, track 1: [idiotic guitar riff] ‘I’m rich/ Like a hot noise/ Rich rich rich’ (Rich) Nevertheless these arbitrary fragments are mercilessly enjoyable; the addictive drama of Karen O’s brilliant voice, at once powerful and fragile and Nick Zinner’s clinical unsubtlety on his guitar (or synth). It is songwriting as stickle bricks; each piece is so colourful and pleasant in itself, who cares that you can’t make a cathedral out of it? Not my toddler, who sticks two of the bigger pieces together and declares that she has made a robot. Wonderful work I tell her, and I mean it. So how good are the 11 robots on It’s Blitz? They’re alright. Somehow the two previous albums had better ones. Far better ones. Y Control and Maps and Gold Lion and Fancy all create their potent drama out of familiar rock tropes and in doing so invite you to believe for a couple of minutes that something profound is being reached at. You bring your own ‘meaning’ and ignore the lyrics. On It’s Blitz the shop front now reads ‘Dance! (dance, dance)’. The rock artifice is discarded and with it the suspension of disbelief that makes the Yeah Yeah Yeahs seem even faintly credible as songwriters. As I said at the outset it’s really a superficial change - you could always dance to the YYYs and you always knew they were basically shit. I quite like this cover and would be interested to know how many eggs they went through to get it just so. 2/5

I used to lump Rage Against the Machine in with Red Hot Chili Peppers, without giving either too much thought. A kind of automatic reaction. A twitch. Men in singlets, shouting things. Swagger, mostly. Not much subtlety. Maybe I saw nu-metal coming and thought: best to get my excuses in early. Morello, like Frusciante, is an able technician with a fetish for the single note: stretched, compressed, throttled, filtered through devices. Anything but shredding. Fine. Neither Zack de la Rocha nor Anthony Kiedis could be called rappers, but they certainly aren't singers. They're frontmen with sixth-form lyrical fixations. De la Rocha may pen juvenilia, but it's still preferable to Kiedis pining for actual juveniles. It's tempting (briefly) to admire the confrontational directness of “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me.” But it is the same market-tested disobedience as “They say jump, you say how high?”, only reversed. The whole album is full of such balloon-light, impractical sentiment. Rebelliousness rather than rebellion. I wish I could name the rhythm section in Rage Against the Machine. I can’t, not without looking it up. But I can tell you this: I’ve never heard a Chili Peppers song that made me nod along like this. Not once. They are genuinely groovy, something the Chili Peppers never achieve. Rage grooves are simple and dependable, grounding the songs so de la Rocha can jump up and down and Morello can whammy pedal three notes into outer space. The bassist, apparently, believes the moon landing was faked. He once confronted Buzz Aldrin. Actually squared up to him. Which, in a strange way, makes perfect sense. If you’re going to rage against the machine, why stop at NASA? But it doesn't show in his playing. Rather, a moon denier, he - and the drummer - keep their feet on the ground. This allows his frontman and guitarist to lose the run of themselves altogether. They are the foundation. The others are the ornament. They are the machine. The other two are the rage. 3 ‘Bring that shit in, UGH’ A while back fortune favoured us with a brace of Beastie Boys albums including their misunderstood debut. They weren’t really frat arseholes you see; it was satire and the evidence was in the details. The DETAILS people! Go back and read our lyrics carefully - our tongues were in our cheeks; we are clever goddammit! Alas for the Beasties, in pop music as in newspaper journalism the headline is the important bit. Frat arseholes, answering the call to fight for their right, handed the Beasties their career. Rage Against the Machine have suffered/enjoyed a comparable fate. Whatever insight Zach De La Rocha thought he was offering regarding the struggle of people of colour to overcome modern America’s institutional white eurocentrism and systematic production of colonial mentality, it was all lost under the roar of a million middle-class white men (including manys a Frat arsehole) shouting “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!” The headline on this album, apart from that, is that you can’t trust anybody and their ‘facts’ so…revolt, in some unspecified way. Maybe you won’t do your homework or maybe you’ll refuse to take a vaccine or maybe you’ll set fire to yourself in public; it’s all commendable, all roughly the same thing. This album’s initial commercial success aside, the moment it truly became part of a cultural zeitgeist was the use of ‘Wake Up’ at the end of the first Matrix film; Neo, shades on, flies off into the sky to call bullshit on absolutely everything, then Rage kicks in. A couple of generations of Americans had just found their political touchstone, regrettably. Many times inebriated and sweaty, I jumped up and down to ‘Killing in the Name of‘ just before kicking out time at the (old) Limelight. It was usually paired with Smells Like Teen Spirit to close Friday night proceedings. It’s a happy memory. So although Zach De La Rocha’s nebulous nonsense grates a little with me now I still have a soft spot for a few of these tracks. Tom Morello’s distinctive bag of one-trick never got better than it is here. The cover art is brilliant, if distasteful - a hypnotically horrifying image cropped to strengthen its iconic character. The typewriter font suits the project. The limited colour palette suits the bluntness of the music. 3/5

Later in life, musicians tend to need a little support. Or, like Van Morrison is doing now, they collect up duets and collaborations with everyone they've ever admired - be it Taj Mahal or Curtis Stigers. I don't know if those Van collabs will come out now, just like Morrissey's recording with Miley Cyrus has been wisely smothered by handlers with a shred of shame. You learn a lot about a man by his friends. Or, at least, who will publicly admit to being his friend. John Lee Hooker's friends are a respectable lot, although not to my taste. However, it says more about them than him that their contributions to the album do him no favours - gross 80s production and restraint passing as reverence. The final three tracks, mercifully free from such suffocating piety, reveal a crackling ember of vitality, no less potent for its isolation. That's what I imagine old age is really like. Maybe he couldn’t manage a whole album solo anymore. Maybe he didn’t want to. Maybe he liked the company, even if I don’t. Perhaps he got his flowers with this record, but I hope he got a decent cheque and didn’t have to listen to too many playback sessions pretending to be pleased. 1.5 I wasn't healed but I was number with boredom which is nearly as good. 1.5/5

A few reviews back, I criticised Wilco - probably Jeff Tweedy specifically - for slathering Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in a wash of noise. Not quite bleeps and bloops, but not feedback either. A pink noise that held the songs at bay. I realise now that the same accusation could be laid at the dog door of one my favourite groups, Sparklehorse. They too could be called Americana or country-adjacent. Mark Linkous's songs are simple, grounded in acoustic guitar and the singer-songwriter tradition, just like Tweedy. The difference - and why the radio hum is so successful on any number of Sparklehorse records - is temperament. Mark Linkous was introverted. Perhaps dissociative. Although his songs are open, it feels appropriate that there is a layer of insulation between the singer and the outside world - "it's a hard world for little things." Tweedy, on the other hand, is unfazed. He's in a rock band for god's sake. Hear all about it. The sonic lagging on Yankee was an affectation. For Linkous, it's a necessity. I suppose that appeals to me because the muffled, dissociative quality of the Sparklehorse records is how I feel a lot of the time. This, I suspect, is why I return to those records compulsively: not because I understand them or Linkous's lyrics, but because they match the fuzz of my own internal monologue. That kind of emotional congruence is rare. I mention that here because I don't know if I will get an opportunity to talk about Sparklehorse on this list - more's the pity. However, I think what I'm saying has some relevance to Loveless also. We've already listened to Giants Steps by the Boo Radleys, where the noise bore no relation to songs that we're even there to begin with. Psychocandy will certainly come up some day and we can debate whether the lacerating feedback on that record is a palette knife scored across the work of art or the art itself. On Loveless, the noise is not only necessary, it is integrate, inseparable. I think it works in the same insulating manner that Linkous's static does. Kevin Shields, by all accounts more comfortable among cables than crowds, has made a record that reflects that temperament. The music folds in on itself. Even live, they’re so loud it’s like the volume is there to push you back, gently but firmly. Not to punish, just to create space That he does this, not with harsh noise, but with a gentle puff, like a citronella collar on a reactive dog, suggests he's no misanthrope. Loveless is not hostile. It is not Metal Machine Music with £250000 of Alan McGee's money. The hooks imply the same: Only Shallow, Sometimes, Soon are all gorgeous and the beautiful lures of the music are made from the same material as the thing that keeps the listener away. Not too far away. To borrow Schopenhauer’s hedgehog fable, the problem of proximity is this: hedgehogs need to huddle for warmth, but they prick one another if they get too close. Loveless solves this problem with queasy elegance. It places the listener at the perfect remove. Not at the centre. Not outside. There is a sweet spot. It is not, despite the name, loveless. It simply understands that too much intimacy is a form of violence. 4 Brian Eno, talking about My Bloody Valentine‘s song ‘soon’ on stage at MOMA in New York in 1990 had this to say: “It’s a wall of distortion with a few motifs arising like icebergs out of it here and there. It’s hard to hear the beat, it’s very hard to hear the key, there are no lyrics so far as I know. It’s really set a new standard for pop music.” It’s a very nice quote and I can understand why it is ceaselessly cited in rapturous critical testimonies about Loveless. Someone cool saying something cool about a cool thing before it was even cool. The only problem is that Eno’s description bears almost no relation to what ‘soon’ actually sounds like. It’s easy to hear the (looped) drum beat. It’s as easy to determine the home key as it is with any other piece of modal pop music. The chords are few and details of the bass line are easy enough to hear, far from being buried under a ‘wall of distortion’. ‘Motif’ would be a generous designation for the simple three-note riff that pops up on the beat, unaltered throughout, in even phrases (rather than emerging mysteriously from the mists of the North Atlantic). Perhaps Eno heard it on the car radio, with poor reception, in traffic, in fog. The disjunction between the Loveless that other people have heard and the Loveless that plays every time I insert my copy of the cd appears to be endemic. I used a streaming service today just to be sure I hadn’t been done dirty by HMV a quarter of a century ago. No, that was it alright. That’s the album people are always gawping at. A Monument in popular art; a Revolution for the guitar; an album that the Great and Noble (Robert Smith, Billy Corgan) bend the knee to. Well yer hole. What I’m hearing today is the same thing I’ve always heard from this album. Nice, rather sweet little lullabyish tunes in neat four and eight bar loops broken up evenly with very short, rather idiotic instrumental hooks. Predictable song structures. Everything repeated to death. The guitars get tremeloed a lot. But of course, crucially, there is an eccentric mix so that the vocals, bass and guitar are unusually low and the guitars are very loud indeed. This is the crux of what transmutes this set of pleasant enough looped fragments into Art worthy of particular praise from the stage of MOMA. It’s not what you do, after all, it’s how you do it; turning your back to the audience is far cooler than Paul McCartney waggling his head and grinning from the microphone. The aggressively eccentric mix here has always appeared to me just another form of that conceit. I appreciate creativity in engineering and mixing - pop music is record-making first and song composition second to be sure. But once you’ve turned your back you better play a blinder. These songs don’t. They have lyrics, whatever Brian Eno says, just not any worth making out. They have musical ideas - but little of much strength and daring beyond Three Blind Mice. Pop music has been there before and since. No ‘new standard’ was set. 2/5

Peter Hook once said that The Walk by The Cure bore more than a passing resemblance to Blue Monday. The implication was that imitation might have been the sincerest form of flattery, but flattery doesn’t pay publishing royalties. Amusingly, Hook had less to say about the fact that All the Way sounds quite a bit like Just Like Heaven, which came out two years earlier. “A chance to steal one back,” he said—wryly, one assumes, though with Hook, it’s hard to tell where the mischief ends and the grievance begins. He may even have been referring, with gallows humour, to the passing resemblance between Dreams Never End and Inbetween Days. This sort of borrowing doesn’t bother me much. If it did, you have to scrub Elastica. But it does make the comparison between New Order and The Cure a little easier to draw. And here’s the thing. when New Order sound like The Cure, they sound like a very particular version of The Cure: the hits. The radio edits. The songs people dance to at weddings. When The Cure sound like New Order (because it does go the other way), they sound like the whole discography. Joy Division included. That sense of brooding underworld atmosphere and emotional churn, that was Robert Smith just as much as synthpop bangers. What New Order achieved with two bands - Joy Division and themselves - Smith managed with one. And for longer. And with far greater consistency. And without descending into legal wranglings, betrayal memoirs, or Punch & Judy feuds conducted via NME headlines. Hook, for his part, remains the obvious star of New Order. His basslines have swagger, and you get the feeling he knows it. Sumner’s vocals, on the other hand, always sound slightly startled to find themselves in front of a microphone. Smith, by contrast, sings like someone perpetually on the brink of an epiphany or a breakdown. Or both. It may be crass to drag Joy Division into the conversation, but how can you not? Ian Curtis didn’t just leave a gap, he left an outline. Everything they made after him felt shaped by that absence. It’s not just that they lost a frontman. They lost the sense of having a single, obsessive centre. In his place, they had a collective. And the result is music that’s brash in tone, sometimes, but cautious underneath. Nobody quite takes the lead, everything is pushed in the mix. In fact, their most iconic musical moment, on Blue Monday, was generated by a stuttering drum machine, neither human nor intentional. To me, they never sound cool or confident. It's no surprise that their World Cup song didn't inspire England to victory. New Order are always, to borrow a phrase from Sumner’s side project, getting away with it. And sometimes they do, handsomely. But not on Technique. That record - something of a darling still — leans heavily into acid house and Balearic beats. Dated now, but, even then, the thirty year olds of New Order must have appeared like they were chasing the latest thing. They may have owned a nightclub by then, but they dressed like they were standing outside with no chance of getting in. The production is polished but bloodless, the vocals as wispy. The singles are pale imitations of what they did before. Notice Robert Smith never stole anything from Technique. And then you think about Disintegration. Same year. Not my favourite Cure album, not even close. But it holds together in a way Technique never does. Every track belongs. The whole thing feels like it’s been dreamt by one person and set down before it faded, although it was as much of a group effort as anything by New Order - it was just a group that bought into the leader's vision. New Order never managed this. They offered flashes, fragments, stumbling innovations. They were a brilliant accident that never learned to be anything else. 2 I must admit to never having listened to a New Order album before. All I have in the house is the compilation Substance which has on it Blue Monday, Bizarre Love Triangle and True Faith (or ‘The Bounce Bounce Song‘ as I regularly referred to it when I was 5). That has done me rightly for New Order to date and although Technique certainly isn’t bad it hasn’t left me feeling like I’ve been missing out. This is a solid album of workmanlike songwriting, slick production and decent detail in the music. The dancey tracks (Fine Time, Round and Round, Mr Disco) may well be the most memorable parts of this album but they are quite possibly also its weakest parts; dated keyboard sounds, dated beats and a overwhelming stench of cheap gimmick. Much of the rest had me absolutely itching to put on Cure albums. The Cure do it better. Better singer, better lyrics, better bass player, better guitar riffs. Not that it’s a competition but very early on in the album I feel like New Order started selling tickets. The intro to All the Way felt like smack talk to me. 2.5/5

Apart from a perverse evening with In Through the Out Door, I've never properly listened to a Led Zeppelin album. The debut is a great place to join them in starting their journey. And, hopefully, the generator will continue sharing the band in order. Right from the off, Led Zeppelin I hits with the certainty of people who’ve already been in a hundred bands, played a thousand pubs, and found the one combination that finally works. It is a strong, impressive opener, especially Bonham's assured introduction to Good Times, Bad Times. They sound like they’ve been doing this forever, which, given their session backgrounds, is more or less true. That job is to sound like the people in the room have always been a unit. Thus the playing is tight to the point of claustrophobia at times. Brilliant claustrophobia. But then, brilliance without brakes has its limits. The polish, the power, the sheer talent do start to overtake everything else. There's no question they can do extraordinary things with just four players, perhaps the apex of what a four-piece can do with few overdubs. Still, in the way that ELP and The Nice might end up burlesqueing a classical piece, this music feels like prog rock by people raised on blues records. There's real force and intelligence here, but it often serves performance more than purpose. There is a fair carp about how Zeppelin stole blues riffs and full songs without giving credit or passing them off as arr. LZ. I excused or glossed over similar behaviour in the previous New Order review, so won't litigate it again. However, the burlesque does become a little ugly in Robert Plant's lyrics: he is wronged again. And again. And again. Women are always cheating on him and treating him bad. She "made me mistreat my only child," just a fancy version of "She turned the weeuns agin me." If this were coming from some battered Mississippi bluesman in 1931, you'd nod and feel the ache. The guy's probably no saint, but times are hard. However it’s Robert Plant: ethereal, shirtless, already mythologising himself by album one. At a certain point, if all your relationships are failing, you might consider the common denominator – it's either you or the jeans. But he’s not trying to confess anything. These aren't diary entries. They're postures, costumes, performance. He sings these things not because he's revealing himself, but because he and his band are playing music they love, and playing it better than almost anyone else ever has. And that’s its own kind of truth, even if it’s not confessional. I don't mean to slight anybody by saying Plant's medieval use of the word rambling makes his persona minstrelsy in two senses. He’s the troubadour as fantasy figure, wandering and wounded, peacockery and pageantry. So, yes, it's brilliant. But it’s also a bit ridiculous. And occasionally that ridiculousness curdles. Still, the power is there. Something enormous is starting to move. It is all artfully done, but, until - hopefully on some later record - it is done in the service of some artistic ideal, I can only enjoy it so far. Ramble on Led Zeppelin II. 3.5 How neat that our first of the six(?) Led Zeppelin albums on this project is the debut. Dazed and Confused was one of the first Led Zeppelin records I really loved but my first introduction to it was Remasters rather than this album. In fact this may have been one of the last Led Zeppelin albums, along with the late, terrible ones, that I listened to. It is certainly one of the best. It is questionable whether this album actually has (any) ‘good songs’ on it - lyrically it’s all of a (distasteful) piece; poor Robert Plant being misused by ‘little girls’ and ‘sweet babies’. Some of it is blues procedural. Dazed and Confused was plagiarised. Your Time is Gonna Come is just rotten. But then there’s the band… These four musicians at their best, as they are here, could spin poop into gold. The frequency of delightful details in these tracks might justly be compared with the Beatles approach to hit-making; assume the audience will be falling asleep after 30 seconds - give them a musical nudge. The differences are that Led Zepp do it sometimes across 6 or 7 minutes and do it mostly off the cuff. The brilliant thumb-hits on the guitar before the second verse of Your Time…; the flurry of double-kicks 3 minutes into I Can’t Quit You Baby; the comically expressive harmonica solo (or any of the other solos) in You Shook Me; the mesmerising bowed guitar on How Many More Times or Bonham’s introduction of a new, delicious drum pattern 6 minutes into the same track; everything John Paul Jones does. They are just wonderful and although the sublime economy of Good Times, Bad Times and Communication Breakdown makes a strong argument against the excess of most of the other tracks here I wouldn’t like to edit much of it. 4/5

Although Fat of the Land was ubiquitous at the time, I was lent it by Conor Brannigan on cassette – that's not ubiquity or access. Because you can't skip tracks on a cassette, I just skipped the whole thing. That's probably because I was aware that it was it was a dance record: breakbeat or techno or rave or something. I'd heard dance music on the radio in the backs of taxis. Usually on a wet Friday or Saturday. It sounded dreary and repetitive. Why do taxi drivers listen to music meant for groups of people? But Fat of the Land couldn't be the dreary and repetitive, could it? It has three top ten singles. And, in my memory, they were okay – they had the shape of songs, they had hooks and choruses. There was an effort at arrangement, rather than the looping oblivion of a dance mix. It is with that hope – open mind and open heart – that I went into Fat of the Land. Breathe certainly has sections: distinct verse and chorus, textural changes that herald transitions. It is a song, if a lyrically meaningless one. Firestarter is more limited than memory suggested, merely alternating between Keith Flynn's two meteric banalities. Smack My Bitch Up doesn't really change at all. A generous reading of the song's two couplets suggests something of a story: by “chang(ing) (his) pitch up,” that is adopting a feminine tone or persona, the protagonist might “smack (his inner) bitch up,” meaning to bring his anima to the surface. He is briefly successful, as illustrated by the exotic female melisimas in the middle of the song, but he returns to his masculine voice, only momentarily transformed. This is evidenced in the gender-flipping in the single's music video. Indeed, it is the music video that gives the song any sense of narrative, any forward motion, anywhere to start and end – start at the beginning of the night and end at the break of dawn. And that is the narrative of all the songs on the album: cuts from excess; the soundtrack to nights partially remembered. They don't need to have structure or development, they don't need to have internal logic, because they have to fit around the dance, the length of the trip, the epic adventure that will become a blur. They are music cues for the movie you make by half-remembering the fun you had. These aren't really songs. There are pseudo-songs, here and there: Fuel the Fire, Serial Thrilla. But they are all tracks. Most are the same sick synth sound twiddled into a pulse by turning the filter knob one way then the other. Someone raps or rants over the top – nothing worth understanding. Sometimes, its a sample instead – the benefit of sample culture is that you can someone saying “This is the funky shit” and make it seem like they're saying it about your shitty funk. But it's all immaterial, as it is about the vibe rather than the content. And these tracks are content for a DJ's set. That they all appear on an album – strangely separate from each other, never mixing into a trip, like Screamadelica – is something of a mystery. They got three hit singles out of it and a massive selling album. But do any of the record's fans think this is the optimum way to experience the music? “Blows your mind drastically, fantastically,” Kool Keith raps on Diesel Power. I don't think anyone would have their mind blown listening to this on cassette in their teenage bedroom. Even on the better speakers I have now, I misheard it as “Close your mind drastically, fantastically.” That's where I'm left. 1.5 I love that crab on the cover, it looks like it’s having a great time. This was not my experience with The Fat of the Land. I may have never actually listened to this album all the way through despite its having sat on my cd shelves for many years. Well I did today and it was a grim experience. A mistake. I noticed for the first time that Breathe - a track I always thought I liked - has its chorus squarely on the 1 minute, 2 minute, 3 minute and 5 minute mark. This is the essence of what the Prodigy really do - mechanical repetition. Nothing truly free, nothing truly unexpected. The visual pretentions (the hair, the clothes) to being a punk or rock band of some sort spill over into the songs to some extent. There is more structure here than might be reasonably expected in techno tracks; even quasi-verses in Serial Thrilla, Firestarter or Fuel my Fire. It is always in thrall to dull, mechanical repetition in the beats, the sample noises, and Keith Flint’s one-note, one-idea voice. But worse than that, it is sort of embarrassing because it invites comparison with songwriting outside the limited parameters of techno. A real band would never have bothered with Breathe’s laughably redundant fourth chorus right at the end. I paid attention to this today. That is surely not what it is for. 1.5/5

To listen to Shalimar without its accompanying visuals is like stumbling across the exploded remains of a carousel in a desert: colours, mirrors, twisted brass piping, faint music still playing, but no hint of its original order or purpose. It’s dazzling. It’s baffling. It’s possibly broken. But it’s not boring. Soundtracks always bear this ontological defect - they are works made in relation, in response, parasitic by design. But even severed from its cinematic host, Shalimar is like a chicken dancing after its head has been cut off, still alive some how. I haven’t seen the film. I’m not even sure I believe in the film. Listening to this, it might just as plausibly be a score for a theme park, a diplomatic function on Mars, or a children’s cartoon about a private dick whose a sex machine to all the chicks. The musical grammar mutates every few minutes. There’s the velvet blare of Blaxploitation horns, the faux-sinister strut of a Eurocrime thriller, sudden bursts of Vegas lounge, funk, Hindustani classical gestures, Moog squiggles, cocktail samba. It all careens past like floats in a badly organised Pride parade. In this way, Shalimar invites comparison not with the typical Bollywood songbook, nor with the great symphonic scores of Hollywood, but rather with the smirking bricolage of Serge Gainsbourg at his most light-fingered: Comic Strip, Du Jazz Dans le Ravin, Coleur Cafe. Everything is in play, which I understand is just for Bollywood’s own meta-cinema tradition, where homage and parody often blur. But it's only a rush of ideas. There is narrative logic holding the whole together that the listener can understand. Thoughts arrive, flash, and vanish, without transformation. There is no development, only incident. Maybe the film is like that – unwatchable. But, as a soundtrack, it resembles what Paul McCartney did with Standing Stone: an associative soup of musical signifiers with little connective tissue. Also unwatchable. Is Shalimar pastiche? Yes. Appropriation? Certainly. But does it matter? There are elements traditionally associated with Blacksploitation and Noir here. Plenty of other western styles weave in and out, but, if you told me that the more traditional Indian styles were also appropriation and pastiche, that the composers and performers were from Antarctica or outer space, and that they'd learned everything about music from mail order Lalo Schiffren boxsets, I would believe you. I would believe you if you told me there was no movie either. I'd believe if you told me there was a gas explosion in the editing suite. Scoring this would be absurd. I'm not saying that it doesn't belong on this list, but it doesn't warrant that sort of anal scrutiny. Whatever score you give it, I will match and we'll say no more about it. 3.5 This was very enjoyable. There was probably a ceiling on my potential to be moved here because I have neither seen this film nor learned Hindi yet but ‘Aaina Wohi Rehta Hai’ and ‘Hum Bewafa…’ struck me as very lovely. The menagerie of sounds and styles here across 40 minutes is a treat. I particularly enjoyed the Countess’ Caper in which she presumably gained surreptitious entry to a Jewish wedding and witnessed a Sergio Leone-style showdown before some sort of Monarch arrived; all in under 4 minutes. Here is a film I will watch. 3.5/5

I don’t particularly want to be drawn into eulogising Ozzy Osbourne, although he was obviously a character - a showman, a strangely effective and affecting singer. It’s probably fair to call him a shaman, in the limited, superficial way we mean it when we say Jim Morrison was a shaman, but Elton John isn’t. Just accurate enough to explain the magic of the music. Last night, after the announcement of his death, I put on Black Sabbath, Master of Reality, and Blizzard of Ozz. Proof positive that Ozzy with the rest of Sabbath is better than Ozzy without. The shaman needs his drum circle, his magic book, his eternal drone. Okay, I don’t really know anything about shamanry, but Ozzy Osbourne benefits from Ward and Butler’s elastic rhythm section - so distinct and sensual compared to everything that metal would later offer. He communicates through Geezer’s bizarrely flat yet cosmic lyrics; he is staged by Iommi’s slow, powerful, dumb riffs. They are a group held together by their childhoods together - therefore timeless - and the work is held together by childish concerns: monsters, fairies, God, the devil. And, as childhood friendship becomes stronger if it endures into adulthood, so too do the themes: the devils become warmongering industrialists; the evils are capitalism and politics. With perverse intent - showing that there is no randomness with this generator - we are asked to think about Vol. 4 today, the first album where the bonds of the band come under strain. Iommi takes over production. As director of the music, he starts to stretch himself: some faster riffs, some piano, some mellotron. The structure is weird - “Changes” slots in nicely as a surprise third track, but “FX” is preposterous at four. Later, maybe, it would work as an exercise, but at four, it’s a cul-de-sac. Towards the end of the album, he returns to the slow murkiness of Master of Reality in “Cornucopia,” “St. Vitus Dance” (no wonder the Seattle sludge band took the name), and “Under the Sun.” But what is happening with that chaotic, atonal run in the last song? It’s less like Vol. 4 than a slate of options for Vol. 5 - Iommi dragging the rest of the band to several uncertain destinations. It could just be the cocaine, though - the drug of confidence without clarity. And while there are shamans somewhere who sniff coke, it’s not so magickal or penetrative as booze, dope, acid - the drugs that influenced their earlier albums. Thus, the lyrics are less of an invocation. Some of the horror elements remain - “Snowblind,” a horrible description of addiction as intense as The Revenant; the black wizard on “Under the Sun” - but it’s a work of gnosticism, a demystifying. Illusions and delusions are torn away in “Wheels of Confusion” and “Cornucopia,” revealing the world as evil - even on the tender “Changes,” “the world will have its evil way.” Faith is lost in wizards and priests both, because the world is a corruption, a trick, a trap. This is true on the metaphysical level, but also on the material - we are slaves to the boss, eating “frozen food in a concrete maze.” Working-class gnosticism. The system isn’t broken - it was built this way. You don’t transcend it; you crawl out of it, blinking, half-broken. Things are made no better by success. Ozzy certainly had his battles with success. And life was not easy for him. If you had told me that he would be the first member of Black Sabbath to die, I wouldn’t have been surprised. That he was the first to die at the age of 76 - well, that’s the surprise. Vol. 4 is the disenchantment of Black Sabbath. Breaking up their trademark mood, pulling in different directions, dispelling the magic that made a world of the first three records. It succeeds from time to time - “Tomorrow’s Dream,” “Supernaut.” It surprises - “Changes,” “Laguna Sunrise.” “Change” may not have drums or guitar, but it has the band altogether: Iommi's music, Butler's lyrics, Ozzy's performance, and Bill Ward's grief – it's about the dissolution of his marriage It's all falling apart though. And it’s a little disappointing to hear them so human. Similarly, it’s disappointing to see Ozzy humanised by death. Unnecessary, even. Thankfully, they played their final show together only weeks ago, not far from the childhood streets where they grew up together - mythologising and reenchanting the band and their music before the humanising could take it away forever. 2.5 Rest in peace Ozzy Osbourne. I have never listened to a Black Sabbath album before, to my recollection. No particular encounter with any of their big songs has driven me to investigate further. There are things I like about them - the loose, groovy drumming; the warm, fuzzy double-tracked guitar sound; Ozzy’s trebly voice cuts through nicely. In the last day or so it has been moving to read the many testimonials from fans in the wake of Ozzy’s death (including those from musicians I admire) about how much Sabbath has meant to them. I would like to have had a revelation today about all I’ve been missing with Sabbath and join the chorus of rapturous celebration about this musician. Alas, it didn’t happen for me. The warm fuzzy guitar sound is cool, but the riffs are naff and the solos instantly forgettable. The lyrics…I know a lyricist never really has apologies to make in the metal genre but really, the stream of bastardised common-metre nonsense and laughable nursery rhyming never lets up on this album. ‘Mary had a little lamb’ would slot seamlessly into Cornucopia, notwithstanding the literary superiority of Mary’s story. There is nothing even to offend a delicate sensibility here; the criticisms of religion and materialism are mealy-mouthed at best. Whatever poignancy ‘Changes’, a sweet little tune, took on today, it remains an awkward, rather dry account of loss. Credit to that track, all the same, for sticking out like a sore thumb amid all the fuzzy nothingness. 1.5/5

Most of what I know of George Jones I owe to Elvis Costello. Not George himself - I wasn’t raised on country music - but on the enthusiasm of a man who was. Costello once said that Jones could sing a telephone directory and break your heart with it. That always seemed to suggest style over substance. Take A Good Year for the Roses. Costello does a fine version, a UK Top Ten hit, but it’s the bones of the song that stay with you: the half-empty cups, the cigarette ash, the silence. All the ways people vanish but stay in the room. A Stranger in the House, a song Costello wrote for Jones, treads a similar line. There’s someone missing and the house knows it. From my ignorant perspective, this is Jones's story. He sang it again and again. Most famously in He Stopped Loving Her Today – he stopped loving her because he is dead. Or she is dead. Or she just left. Absence through death and absence through heartache are all the same and to be dealt with in the same manner: stoicism. Thus it is no surprise that the grand tour of the album's title and lead single is a tour of a mausoleum, a museum of grief or heartbreak, a shrine to someone gone and the life that went with them. Although He Stopped Loving Her Today wasn’t released until years later, it feels like a spiritual twin to The Grand Tour - same story, same production, same ghostly voice. It could have come out at any point in Jones's career, for the years they won't change George Jones's persona, not one bit. All the songs seem to come from the same ghost-town, but the production makes them all look newly painted. Billy Sherrill’s arrangements - strings, backing vocals, that polished Nashville finish - glide over the surface of things. They are pristine exhibition pieces rather than living objects. Maybe that's what country fans like: Jones plays the role of the tough widower, broken but, somehow intact. The forgiving cuckold. The cautious fella who has been hurt before. And he plays this same stoic role over and over. It may or may not be him. He may as well be singing the telephone directory. It’s not that it’s false, it’s just not very active. A little too tidy, a little too rehearsed. Real man's music where you don't give too much away. It's how my granda held himself and probably how he would have sung. Maybe men aren't like that anymore. Johnny Cash, in the video for Hurt, gives you that same house tour - only in his case, it’s real. You feel the years pressing down. The furniture hasn’t been moved in decades. He’s showing you the place where his life and marriage happened. You don’t doubt it. It works because it happens once, when it was true. We see the horror in Cash's presentation of the Grief Museum, rather than Jones's odd, normalising control. Costello clearly heard something in Jones - a kind of emotional minimalism, maybe. Restraint, perhaps. But even his own Jones-inspired songs (Complicated Shadows maybe?) struggle to match what he seems to be aiming for. He can't be that restrained. You can feel the effort, the strain to be honest. Which makes you appreciate even more the artists who take that same template and stretch it into something stranger, truer. The influence can be heard in a pair of songs by Bill Callahan and Joanna Newsom about their breakup. Joanna Newsom’s Does Not Suffice, for instance. A woman walking out of her ex’s life, one garment at a time. “The tap of hangers swaying in the closet…” She’s not mourning a person so much as an atmosphere. The absence is total - and yet the space is still crackling with memory. It's a gorgeous, discrete short story, unlike Jones's gothic twist in the tale. Or Bill Callahan in All Your Women Things - the frills left behind, turned into something monstrous, something uncomfortably alluring. Callahan takes the "frilly things/scattered round (his) room" and makes "a dolly/a spread-eagle dolly/out of your frilly things." He fucks it! Gross. You can’t quite look away. He’s not the sad man; he’s the man sadness got into and rewired. It's true horror compared to Jones's little boilerplate spook stories. These songs do what Jones's sometimes only gesture toward: they make the private public and the poetic real. They show us what it’s like to live with the aftermath, not just to sing about it. These are two songs about the same relationship, the two singers moving away from each other. Newsom leaving Callahan. It is agonisingly real, awkwardly honest. Perhaps that level of emotional realism is exploitative. Normal people might prefer the distance of George Jones's pose. He had his problems, probably worse than Newsom, Callahan, or Costello, but his restrained performance of a type of man is more functional than artistic. Yes, it might as well be a phonebook. Or might as well be the same ghost story you read every Hallowe'en. Maybe Jones is beloved not because he bleeds, but because he doesn’t. Because he presents sorrow as something that can be sung, sealed, and repeated. Like sad Tupperware. Lionel Trilling once traced the modern shift from sincerity – that is, being true to your role - to authenticity, being true to something deeper, stranger, more interior. Listening to The Grand Tour through that lens, I hear Jones as the last of the sincere men. His grief is a performance of consistency: same gestures, same house, same heartbreak. What once read as emotional truth now feels like genre fidelity. Authenticity, in contrast, has to be disruptive. It has to risk being a bit grotesque. Newsom and Callahan sing like people who have actually lived in the wreckage. Jones walks us through a grief-stricken house tidied up for visitors. You admire the effort, but you know that's not what it's like to live with loss. Costello, like Jones, is still performing a role - just a more modern one. He’s sincere about his desire for authenticity, but that’s not the same thing. You hear the strain, the deliberate construction. It’s closer to theatre than to raw confession. He calls himself “The Beloved Entertainer” and, yet, his songs of loss (Veronica, The Puppet has Cut his Strings, Almost Blue, I Want You) are anything but performative. They're always surprising. Maybe I hear, faintly, what Costello hears - the form, the shape of something deep, the telephone book as Book of the Dead. But it always feels like it’s happening elsewhere. Perhaps Jones works better as a ghost that haunts than as the haunted man himself. 2 This is an odd album. Not the music of course, which is as procedural as it gets, but the lyrics. George Jones chose a number of songs here that consistently cast him in what would be commonly supposed (certainly, I presume, in 1970s Texas) to be a woman’s part. The reluctant lover, wary of heartbreak (Pass Me By if you’re Only Passing Through); the adoring spouse welcoming back a partner who has cheated (Once You’ve Had the Best); the adoring spouse who is still being cheated on and is in denial (She Told Me So); the other woman (Borrowed Angel); and of course the abandoned, heartsick partner (the Grand Tour, Darlin’, Who Will I be loving now?). Maybe I just need to listen to more country music from a half century ago, which may all be like this (I won’t). I did a couple of years of listening to Downtown Country in work; modern country-pop where the men generally sing about beer, trucks and meeting their perfect wives. George seems remarkably secure in his masculinity by comparison. Great voice too - even if the too-Texan accent grates a little. The chorus of She Told Me So doesn’t make sense. 2/5

Our first year music teacher, Ms. Gibson, taught us So What. Well, she didn't teach us So What, she taught us the two-note hook: doo, doo, duh-doo, duh-doo-dooooo... So What! On cheap, plastic recorders. She did most of the heavy lifting herself, seated at the piano. The obbligato in the left hand, what I recognise now as quartal chords in the right. Then, at the end of each phrase, half of us boys squawked a D falling to C; the rest, a B followed by an A. This may not be the same key or mode as the original recording - D Dorian, I've read - but it included four of the only five notes we knew on the recorder at that point. I don't think Ms. Gibson ever explained what harmony was or why playing those notes at the same time was pleasing. Or as pleasing as twenty-five recorders can be. It didn't sound great, but it was a lot of fun. She may not have been that good a music teacher, but she was a decent pianist. Maybe this performance was a way of avoiding teaching so she could do what she really loved: playing modal jazz. She wasn't a particularly harsh instructor, but she had no time for tootlers - those recorder instrumentalists who would play random noise, blowing indiscriminately and restlessly. Usually while she was talking. As a young boy, it's hard not to tootle, the spirit and the energy just passes through you, the music is already inside you and the recorder’s the only thing you’re legally allowed to channel it through. If you don't like such noise, you're not going to teach prepubescents for long. Ms. Gibson, to her credit, lasted longer than most, but, eventually, she left the school. She got a post teaching postgrad jazz students in the Caribbean. Very much not West Belfast. Along with not explaining harmony to us, she didn't explain the difference between tootling and bebop. Plenty of the jazz we've listened to so far in this journey could be accused of tootling. Certainly of trundling, toddling, tilting or teetering. Naming no names - even those who appear on the record here discussed - there is a tendency to meander, to throw out a line that sounds an awful lot like random noise. Or a line that doesn't end. Or a line that gets tangled up in itself. Maybe there’s a fine line between exploration and nonsense. My class probably didn't need to know where it was, but surely the Caribbean jazz grads did. That is the one thing I was hoping to understand from this weekend's listens to Kind of Blue: where that line is. What makes this record the one everyone agrees on, what makes it easy for people like me - people poorly schooled in jazz - to understand. The recording is beautiful: each instrument is clear, defined, yet never separate. You can hear the room they’re in. And the mood in the room is gentle. Only kind of blue, not depressed, not despairing; the sort of indulgent melancholy that could feel underplayed, but isn't. Davis's lines in Blue in Green remind you that, even if you're enjoy wallowing, there is a real pain in there. With a single note, he turns the dial from smooth to searing. Sometimes, I think about Ms. Gibson: why she ended up teaching boys like us instead of playing clubs, touring, session work. Part of it’s obvious: who really makes a living out of jazz? But she also had an arthritic finger. She would play and, then without losing a beat, shake the offending right hand with a wince: a moment of real pain that fed into the music. She incorporated it into the rhythm, so as not to throw off her inexperienced accompanists. A moment of weakness worked into the performance. My grandfather used to play Schubert with a similar kind of grace. And when he missed a note, he’d throw up his hands, grin, ask the composer’s forgiveness. Then he’d go on. The mistake not scrubbed out, but acknowledged, blessed even - and returned to the flow of the song. Of course, classical music is not jazz. One is beholden to the composer, which is why you beg forgiveness. Still, he kept going. The trick was not to be spooked or thrown off by the mistake, but to enfold it into the bigger performance: the performance of command. Back in the classroom, we could play as badly as twelve years old will, because Ms. Gibson had control over the music, even if she didn't always have control over the class. Within the boundaries of So What, tootling was no longer tootling. That is what is so evidently on display on Kind of Blue. The control. Not a smothering, tyrannical control - as we've already seen on Frank Zappa's Hot Rats - but an acceptance that, whatever happens, it's okay. Not perfection, but poise. Not strictness - the players roam, stretch, tease - but they know where they are. They know how to play within the boundaries and bring it home. If Coltrane or Adderley lets a line wander, they find a way to end it that makes it feel inevitable. But Davis, especially. He’ll let it hang in the air, let it go soft - and then drop in one of those pained (but never painful) notes that makes you think it was all planned from the start. Everyone talks about “blue” in this album: the sadness, the coolness. It’s there, yes. But I think So What is the real key. The two-note motif - simple enough for a bunch of wee Westie bastards to master - comes up again in Freddie Freeloader and All Blues at least. Maybe elsewhere. Although, unvoiced, those are the two words of lyric on the album. The So What we learned was a taunt: “So what! Who cares?” But it’s also an accepting, Zen-like shrug: “So what. No big deal.” You make a bold move - so what. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t - so what. If you own the decision, if you can take the pain or the misstep and fold it into the performance - that’s jazz. That’s life. Kind of Blue is all those things. It doesn’t care what you think. It doesn’t care, and it doesn’t really think either. It just is. Maybe that’s what Ms. Gibson was doing, within the stuffy boundaries of a West Belfast classroom. I doubt many of the boys I sat beside ever heard Kind of Blue again. I rarely do. But maybe - without knowing - they learned something from it. About control. About not being thrown. About letting the mistakes in - and going on anyway. Except for the ones who went to prison. 3.5 For as long as I have loved popular music I have been interested in hearing all the ‘big’ records. I love curated lists, Greatest Album and Greatest Singles lists. I always reasoned that the thrill of great music, while basically inexplicable, was still observable; if all these people, across cultures, across generations sometimes, are willing to testify that that special thrill is to be had with this record then surely I need only listen well a few times and it must reveal itself to me as well. And it worked. The first time (and second) I heard Sgt Pepper’s I thought it sounded idiotic except for A Day in the Life. Dark Side of the Moon I found boring. Well, trusting that it was me and not them I kept listening to these albums and it wasn’t long before I heard them. I single these ones out because they are, today as for many years, a couple of my absolute favourite albums as well as the favourites of millions of other people. They thrill me every time. I knew humans would keep me right. The readers of Q Magazine don’t lie. In Paul Gambaccini Veritas. Now I appreciate that Jazz is not Pop. But I’m not musically illiterate either. I’m absolutely bound to be as good a listener as the worst half a dozen of the hundreds of millions of people and their grannies that swear this album is, at least, as Rolling Stone’s 2003 poll puts it - The Twelfth Greatest Album of All Time. And how I have tried with this album. I know this album. I have played Freddie Freeloader with a big band. I taught GCSE classes on All Blues. So What may have been the first piece of Jazz I ever really listened to, courtesy of Ms Gibson’s enthusiasm. Still, these advantages are nothing next to just listening until familiarity kicks in. Recognition is next to pleasure and is the key to opening up any music; it works with Mahler as with Trout Mask Replica (sort of). I don’t know how many times I have listened to Kind of Blue but it ought to be enough and I have been doing it not just out of a desire to connect with the particular adoration of its million worshippers but to connect with a whole genre. Here is, so they say, a major gateway to appreciating Jazz and I’ve been banging on this fecking gate for decades. Was this to be the weekend? No. Fiona, less familiar with the album, tells me it is evocative of Sex and the City. I can now at least make an addition to my list of advantages, having never seen a single episode. Is it something to do with New York I wonder? Might living in that city help? Kind of Blue is pretty, organic and human, while Manhattan is a massive, alienating steel and concrete shitpile. Is listening to Kind of Blue like a visit to Central Park? I am in no rush to visit that city again but regardless, Mahler works in my living room so Miles Davis should too, no? I even had Blue in Green and Flamenco Sketches on in the car again this morning going up the motorway in the rain thinking the setting might help. Nothing helps. I find this album merely iconic; full of musical symbols which are unmistakably its own but perhaps because, like car logos, I have been surrounded by them my whole life. I know Mercedes Benz when I see it but the logo doesn’t mean anything to me or impress me; indeed I don’t care about cars and I don’t understand people who do. Jazz…pfff. Maybe a Buddha statue is a kinder analogy. In any case, the millions who swear by Kind of Blue and its power and profundity are to me an alien people clutching their Lydian mode. It’s them, not me. 3/5

You don't need me to tell you that the title is a misnomer. Pornography is not titillating. It is not erotic. It is not lascivious. It is, instead, a musical facsimile of spiritual collapse: puritanical, dour, and seethingly joyless. Its title is a red herring. Or perhaps a black one. Unless we accept pornography for what it really is: an act of endurance and mortification. The album marks the end of the dark trilogy that also includes Seventeen Seconds and Faith: a sustained attempt to remove anything so gauche as pleasure from the musical experience. But it’s also the beginning of a deeper, career-spanning descent into darkness, continued in Disintegration and Bloodflowers, and canonised in the Trilogy concerts of 2003. Whether Pornography will eventually lose its place to Songs from a Lost World, or whether the trilogy will simply expand into a tetralogy, remains to be seen. It’s the only Cure album produced by Phil Thornalley. He’d later pick up the bass after Simon Gallup quit the band - briefly, and after an embarrassing on-stage fight during the tour. Robert Smith, dragging the drunken body of childhood friend and nominal drummer Lol Tolhurst behind him, turns to pop music as both a joke and a way out. There were pop elements to begin with - Three Imaginary Boys has a bunch - but that was adolescent work, uncertain of its own seriousness. Those trilogy is heavy and depressive, and for Smith, increasingly unbearable. Four albums in, after relentless touring and with little money to show for it, the strain was beginning to show. There’s no ambivalence here: the seriousness is absolute. Smith, drinking heavily and writing furiously, sounds like a man not on the theatrical edge of rock’n’roll burnout, but on the real, unlit ledge beyond. Will he change or will he choose “an eternity of this.” After Pornography, he creates a character to protect himself from life as a professional indie musician. The character is unnamed. It isn’t a persona in the Bowie sense. It’s closer to Dylan’s game: always the same, always different, never to be trusted. A mask of lipstick behind which Smith might be smiling, frowning, or maniacally laughing. It’s more personable than the blank masks worn by the band on the Pornography cover, but no less obscure. Pornography, then, is the closest we get to the real Robert Smith. Or at least Smith at his worst: depressed, drunk, raging at his band, and at the world. And if we can’t handle him at his worst, we don’t deserve him at his best. Because Pornography is not the best Cure album. Only the most ardent Goth would argue it is, the kind who might veer into industrial and never quite return to the real world. But I love the album all the same, as a committed act of emotional honesty. A step up from Seventeen Seconds and Faith, it’s immediate rather than ponderous. There’s a propulsion here, a kind of urgency, that the earlier albums don’t have. Lol Tolhurst hasn’t exactly learned to drum, but he hits hard and with intention. The repetition across the songs earns its place, because it feels like the band is fighting their way through it, trying to find a way out. They don’t. Which is why they fall apart on stage in Belgium instead. Given the accessibility and commercial success of Staring at the Sea, the band’s first singles collection from a few years later, it’s hard to believe any tracks from Pornography were included. But The Hanging Garden demands and earns its place. One Hundred Years deserves one too, though it didn’t make the cut. That’s not surprising. But it should be there. It is foundational. It is brutal. And it is, crucially, very funny. If you can’t hear that, I’m not sure how you understand the band or their success. Yes, The Cure’s greatest triumphs - both commercial and artistic - would come later, in more polished and pop-adjacent records. (Phil Thornalley produced The Love Cats, after all.) But the fact that they keep returning to this place, this mood, this tone - on stage, where several of these songs still sit comfortably alongside the hits, and in vision, with the trilogy-turned-tetralogy - proves that this version of Robert Smith was never a phase. It is the core. On a personal level, I’m glad Smith escaped the world of Pornography. But I’m just as glad he can still return to it when he needs to. Not to dwell, but to remind himself, and us, what the stakes once were. What it cost. The album may not be erotic, but it is pornography in the truer sense: exposure without consent, raw and unresolved. Not something to emulate, but something to witness. And Smith let us witness it. 3.5 A grey, drizzly Monday listening to Pornography. I was going to write something about how I appreciate the instrumental textures. But I died. 3/5

You step out your front door of an evening, in this sleepy little seaside town, and the air smells like someone’s set fire to a sock drawer soaked in cough syrup. Not even legal here, and yet it hangs in the air like a bad decision: clingy, persistent, and utterly devoid of charm. The streetlamps wear it. The teenagers wear it. Even the seagulls seem a little slower these days. It brings back trauma memories: low lighting, low conversation, low ambition. The couch swallows your limbs. You become sponge. “Dude,” someone says, and it is both greeting and thesis. I didn't even take any. I just watched everyone else. Worse still, the people who make it their personality: celebrating 420 like it isn't Hitler's birthday; artisan bongs; a consumeristic coma under the guise of counter-culture. But this record isn't that bad. I liked Igziabeher. I liked Ketchy Shuby for the first minute or so. It reminds you that the creative spirit can overcome the depressive impulse. Or that you can rock out while lying down. 2 For the brief time the party existed, Cannabis is Safer Than Alcohol did not stand in my constituency. I think I would have voted for them though, not because I actually smoke the stuff but because I admire their concision. There in the name of the party is their purpose, their main policy, all their other policies and their (sound) argument. Alas, my constituency was ceded unfought to the same party that always wins here; another one-policy party that, lacking the grace of CISTA, pretends to have other policies. Peter Tosh’s debut album is just like that. Peter says all he really has to say in ‘Legalize it’. He should have left it there but instead he goes on for another half hour dispensing tiresome fluff like Watcha Gonna Do and Ketchy Shuby (which is 5 minutes long why?). Sometimes it’s worse than fluff; the square lead guitar parts on No Sympathy and Till Your Well Runs Dry are awkward enough to make for an actively unpleasant listen. Still, we thank Peter for bringing to our attention the benefits that a United Ireland has to offer Tuberculosis sufferers. Sorry, I meant ‘smoking weed’. 1.5/5

Celtic Soul is hard to define - much like the word Celtic itself, slippery as it is suggestive. Is it 'seltic' or 'keltic'? Van Morrison’s Caledonia Soul Orchestra sounds only slightly like Alex Harvey and His Soul Band, which sounds nothing like the 'Big Music' of the Waterboys or the ragamuffin hijinks of Dexys’ second album. All of them have soul of a kind. None sound anything like Noirin Ni Riain’s Celtic Soul album. Is Tom Jones Celtic Soul? He must be, he's Welsh. Most prominently, the term appears in the name of the Glasgow football team, Celtic - understood as the Irish club abroad, as opposed to the predominantly Protestant Rangers. And that feels about right: Celtic is a label for the hybrid, the obscured, when more precise terms - Irish, Scottish, Welsh - won’t do. It covers a tangle of cultures and histories: the Ulster-Scots mysticism of Morrison, Mike Scott’s Yeats obsession, born of Edinburgh, aimed at Sligo. A mess of connections, nothing concrete. So it’s no surprise that second-generation Irish Brummie Kevin Rowland should fuse his love of Northern Soul with his Irish heritage on Too-Rye-Ay - “Introducing the Celtic Soul Brothers.” It’s a peculiar fit, as it often is for so-called plastic paddies - fully immersed in cultures they don’t fully belong to. Black music and Irish music performed with an English accent. The large wave of Irish immigration to post-war Britain meant that, by the 1980s, many musicians had been raised in Irish Cultural Centres in cities like Birmingham, Manchester, London. They grew up hearing a mix of ceili and country & Irish before they ever heard pop. Elvis Costello, to an extent. Oasis, later. The Smiths, obviously. Morrissey may have Irish blood and an English heart, but no soul. More than any of them, Rowland captured the feeling – if not the actual aesthetic - of the working men’s clubs and the Northern Soul discos, packaging it into this strange, passionate album. It's all noise and clutter, nobody really paying attention to anyone else. The worst – and most common - experience of Irish trad music played in pubs is whenever everyone plays the same lines at the same time, because nobody knows anything else. He misses the mark, however, if he he's trying to connect the soultastic shang-a-lang-a-lang of Morrison’s “Jackie Wilson Said” to the folkish goobledegook of Too-Rye-Ay. It sounds less like Jackie Wilson and more like Bing Crosby crooning ‘Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral’ Compared to Morrison, Rowland can't help but be more laboured, more self-conscious. More performative. Less Celtic Soul Brothers than Celtic Soul Cousins. Everything Rowland knows is inherited – just like the dungarees he's wearing on the front. But he was playing to a culture that didn’t particularly care. When they performed “Jackie Wilson Said” on Top of the Pops, someone swapped the soul legend’s photo for one of Scottish darts titan Jocky Wilson. Mistake, obviously. But telling. Black, Irish, Scottish, working-class, immigrant, minority, other. All the same. All very different to the life of a middle-class, BBC professional. Dexys looked like they’d spent time near a dartboard, even if they seemed too fragile to throw one. Too-Rye-Ay performs a culture that never quite existed in Ireland. It existed only in Kevin Rowland’s heart. The record aches with longing, but not the same longing we hear on Soul records. There’s a term for it, immigrant sorrow: longing for something that doesn't exist. Longing for an identity you don't fully inhabit. 'Until I Believe in my Soul' Rowland sings, believing, for the moment, that his soul is Celtic. Whatever that is. It's the kind of feeling that doesn’t always find a home, even in a song. There are moments on Too-Rye-Ay that don’t sound like anything traditional, but might sound a little like the mix of Irish and Scottish you get in Kentucky or the Carolinas. As nebulous and unspecific as Americana. Not home, but an echo of it. The sincere pose of Too-Rye-Ay lasted only one album. It gave Rowland his biggest success, but it clearly sat uncomfortably with him, and he moved on. Too busy, completely unfocussed. Living between two cultures is difficult - but at least it offers options. That’s why Rowland could imagine a Plan B, while Van Morrison, on his 2012 record, sang in his repetitive trance-like way “No Plan B, No Plan B…” Van is stuck with his Celtic Soul. His career was built on it. But Rowland gets to walk away. Still, it’s fitting that Dexys’ biggest success, Come On Eileen, became a wedding staple.Their only hit in America, where all Irishness is performed. And everybody performs at a wedding. The wedding is the Irish Cultural Centre of the world. The working man’s club of the heart. The ceilidh of the soul. 2 These are not bad songs and the abundant character in Kevin Rowland’s voice compensates somewhat for the utter lack of it in the other parts. On the whole this is a very dodgy album though, I think. There is a stench of dilettantism that hangs about. The production is dreadful in several respects. The arrangements are cluttered - lots going on all the time, the verse of Let’s Make This Precious for example where drums, bass, keyboard, horns and backing vocals are busy beneath Rowland’s vocal mugging. Texturally there is nowhere for the chorus to go, except fiddles which have, miraculously, been held back. Much of the album is like this. There is no light and shade, just a ceaseless assault of instruments and musical detail. The mix is rotten too. The double-tracking in the vocals makes it hard to hear the lyrics. The violins are dry, adding a rather harsh edge to the unison lines. Everything is too clean and compressed. I never sense musicians in a room. 10 musicians in 10 rooms. Even the backing singers in Liars A to E sound as if they are recorded separately, performing separately, remote from any other musical action. The whole thing is loud, ignorant, and unpleasant. I hate the violins. There is nothing the least bit ‘Celtic’ in the purity of tone, the polite, carefully measured bowing, and the clarity of the lines. I don’t know if that is necessarily what they are going for but they don’t know either. These fiddle players sound lost the whole way through the album; doubling lines needlessly, playing awkward riffs that should be left to the horns (or left out altogether!); the solos in Celtic Soul Brothers or All in All…it’s not that those are bad lines on paper (paper which I feel sure is on a stand in front of the soloist) it’s the witless way they are delivered. The tin whistle at the start of Until I Believe in My Soul might capture the essence of the problem better than any single moment. That is not what a tin whistle is for, sir. You’re thinking of a recorder. But of course it had to be a tin whistle doing it didn’t it? Tin whistles are more Irish. It’s just another tacked-on signifier of Celticness. I don’t mean to sound precious about Irish music or Irishness - I really don’t care. But it represents yet another clumsily fitted cog that you can see moving. With all this in mind, the straight cover of Jackie Wilson Said was a particularly bad idea. I listened to the original later. How well does it capture the relaxed spirit and sense of communal music-making and organic quality that is missing from Too Rye Ay. 2/5

Missing in Missing! I was sure it was on this album. That’s the cover art I associate with the chart-topping Todd Terry remix. But perhaps that's an easy mistake: one unlistened-to coffee table album with two people on the front is much like another. Once I'm over that shock, though, it's still hard to engage. But then, disengagement seems to be the point. Numbness as aesthetic choice. Tepid, laid-back beats; keyboard pads and ambient washes; no hooks, no drama - just heartbreak hermetically sealed. Heartbreak rendered hygienic. As if the mess of human feeling were an unsightly rash, soothed away with ambient emulsions and polite snares. This album clearly attempts to sustain the success of “Missing,” which itself was only half as good as Thorn’s simultaneous feature on Protection by Massive Attack. Before all that, EBTG were - I understand - an indie folk duo. Then they re-emerged as an electronic double-act, though their style owes less to Pet Shop Boys or Yazoo than to Bang & Olufsen: sleek, muted, sonically tasteful to the point of sterility. Perhaps they were good at folk. But if Walking Wounded - a weak-chinned chillout record with shades of Morcheeba - earns them a spot on this list, I rather doubt it. What Massive Attack offers - and what this record fatally lacks - is seedy urban ennui, a kind of lived-in malaise that seeps into the bones. Walking Wounded, for all its title's suggestion of trauma, offers only a surface bruise. A temporary ache, like discovering the very same Morcheeba is the opening act. This is interior design masquerading as emotional interiority. It mistakes despair for disaffection and markets that error as sophistication. It's for people who find Portishead a bit too dark. Where Massive Attack gave us the bruised glamour of late-night desolation, EBTG gives us brushed steel and soft furnishings. They’ve confused Protection with cosiness, mood lighting with darkness, life with lifestyle. 1.5 Their ninth album?! I had a notion that there was one EBTG album. There was bound to be because Missing. Nine? I didn’t know what to say about this album to start with, then I read that this might be something like jumping into R.E.M for the first time with ‘Monster’. That would be tricky. Or jumping into The Beatles with the White Album. Magical Mystery Tour isn’t a proper album. I don’t care what the 1987 International Standardisation project has to say. They should assured right enough. Or is that disinterestedness? Are these the sophisticated, effortless productions of old hands or just low-effort, business as usual? “You do your clicky dance beat thing and a couple of bass notes and I’ll do a low-stakes vocal and a lyric about being disappointed in love.” I can’t tell. My brain won’t let me. It goes into survival mode when those sort of beats start. Then the vocal style - nice as it is - well… I worked in Debenhams between 2002 and 2006 so I was exposed to a lot more than the medically safe level of Dido. I know that’s not fair - Dido doesnae have nine albums - but I can’t control what my past traumas ruin. I hope ‘Monster’ is on this list, it’s an interesting album in its own way, taken on its proper context(s). And I think it is my favourite R.E.M album artwork. And would get extra marks because the cd tray was orange. Did ‘Walking Wounded’ have a coloured cd tray? A white one would make the cover pop nicely I think, even though it isn’t a particularly good cover. Magical Mystery Tour was designed by The Beatles/George Martin as an EP soundtrack to go with the film. *Designed by The Beatles*. Not fucking Capitol. John Lennon was asked in 1968 by an American journalist whether he thought Magical Mystery Tour was a better album than Sgt Pepper’s and Lennon said “It’s not an album.” Sin é. There’s nothing wrong with being a compilation. I treasure Beatles Blue, it was how I got into the Beatles in the first place. That’s what the American LP Magical Mystery Tour is. It’s no more a true Beatles album than Beatles 65. Is Dido on this list? I appreciate I haven’t said an awful lot about Everything but the Girl here in these formless ramblings. But perhaps someone will remix it later and make it a hit. 2/5

I’ve always felt a little odd that, unlike some of my schoolmates and rock heroes (not the same people), I never cared for Sunshine of Your Love. It’s a dumb riff - fun to play, I suppose, with its pleasant, pre-metal fuzz tone - but stupid to listen to. The only truly interesting part of the song is Ginger Baker’s thumping fills, which makes one wonder why young guitarists are so drawn to it in the first place. None of those schoolmates believed, as the graffiti claimed, that “Clapton is God.” And I doubt anyone believes it now, after his descent into conspiracy theorising. He got away with overt xenophobia for a long time, too. These are human flaws, of course, largely unrelated to his playing. But Clapton isn't God - because one doesn’t like to imagine God being so boring. It was Jimmy Page, Clapton’s old Yardbirds colleague, who truly became “God.” Led Zeppelin embodied the rock god archetype far more convincingly - even the grounded but insanely talented John Paul Jones had something divine about him. The 13 months between Disraeli Gears and Led Zeppelin’s debut might excuse some of the difference, but the gap in quality is still stark. Where Zeppelin’s songs are tightly arranged and narratively driven, Disraeli Gears feels like a series of jams. Verses and choruses are bluntly pasted together. There are no bridges - only verses with meandering solos over them. These solos often devolve into directionless squalls, much like the songs themselves. Endings feel arbitrary, as though they simply agreed the fourth chorus would be the last. There are exceptions. Strange Brew is clearly crafted to be a hit - and succeeds as a song, at least. It even has something resembling a conclusion. The solo in Sunshine of Your Love is more considered, though the joke of quoting Blue Moon in a song about morning sex is a bit thin. But most tracks go the way of Tales of Brave Ulysses: stroke after stroke after stroke, with no climax. Pedestrian blues fills stand in for hooks - marginally interesting only because of the psychedelic effects layered over them. What’s striking is how much external help was needed to dress these songs up. It was producer Felix Pappalardi who turned the blues standard Lawdy Mama into the single Strange Brew. Pete Brown gave Sunshine its oddly coy lyric - at least he waits for the lover to wake up before emptying his seas into her. Even the faint narrative in Tales of Brave Ulysses comes from Martin Sharp, who also designed the cover, which I don't like as much as his charming psychedelic tarot set. It’s telling that the closest thing to a well-written, fully formed song is the pub-song parody they crank out at the end. Cream were clearly musos, not artists - technicians with little interest in craft or creativity. Maybe that approach didn’t suit them, the way it did their Zeppelin counterparts. But judging from what Clapton became, I doubt he ever had it in him. 2 I credit my father for a fair chunk of my musical education and, more importantly, a lifelong appreciation of Eagles. It has been difficult for many of my generation to get past The Dude’s put down in The Big Lebowski, which surfaces like a Pavlovian response whenever Eagles are mentioned. So I was lucky there. Cream, however, indeed all and any of Eric Clapton, I could never appreciate despite my father’s endeavours. They were his favourite band when he was a teenager and his love of Clapton endured. When I learned guitar I dutifully learned Strange Brew, Sunshine of Your Love and White Room. A players insight didn’t help. I love nothing about Clapton’s playing and I love nothing about Cream. Especially not the front cover of Disraeli Gears - which was on regular display in our house and is to me utterly hideous. Disraeli Gears is rubbish. Distinctive sounding in 1967 I dare say - Clapton’s fuzzy lead sound paired with Ginger Baker’s almost farcical tominess. But so what? The songs are pants, the lyrics excruciating, even the bloody riffs aren’t any good apart from Sunshine… Even in terms of its significance as an innovative heavy blues record - ‘Are You Experienced?’ came out the same month this album was being recorded and Hendrix’s playing wipes Clapton’s eye. In my estimation Clapton, as a guitarist, was irrelevant before he even peaked. Let’s take a moment to recognise the special awfulness of Blue Condition and Mother’s Lament. Ginger Baker shouldn’t have been allowed to speak, much less sing. So what’s going on? It seems plain to me that the inclusion of this shit simply follows a template set by The Beatles use of Ringo to do the silly songs on their albums. A dash of English exoticism to titillate an American audience and show fans everywhere the playful, witty side of the group. It doesn’t work here. Ginger Baker comes off, accurately, as a creep and in any case the fun and lightness of The Beatles was a palpable quality in most of their songs, it wasn’t tacked on at the end as it is here after Clapton and Bruce’s witless psychedelic poetry and po-faced vocal performances. As a personal, painful epilogue to these observations I note that none of The Beatles’ records were present in my house growing up. Neither of my parents liked them. When I questioned their absence upon discovering Beatles Blue at about 16 my father told me they were ‘too English sounding’. 1.5/5

Psychedelic blues is a strange animal - not strange as in intriguing, but misbegotten. Music trying to float and crawl at the same time. Often, it doesn’t even stand up. Yesterday’s spin through Cream’s dreary brand of blues-tinged psychedelia wasn’t encouraging. Today, Cheap Thrills by Big Brother and the Holding Company didn’t do much better. It might have inspired a deeper reflection on the difference between British and American psychedelia, or between their respective blues traditions. But I was left thinking the problem might be the genre itself - or at least the idea that blues and psychedelia were ever meant to live under the same roof. Blues, after all, is earthbound. It’s bodily, physical, about things you can name and feel: loss, love, hard times - the kind of heartbreak you don’t need a philosophy degree to understand. It doesn’t drift. It sinks. Psychedelia, on the other hand, tends to float above all that. It's about altered states. It’s expansive, dematerialised, metaphysical. It aims at openness, transcendence - breaking down boundaries of time, ego, identity. It doesn’t have to be whimsical, but it should be free. Spacious. Blowing open The Doors of Perception, man. Like The Doors sometimes managed to do - but not, for instance, on “Roadhouse Blues.” If psychedelia is light, blues is heavy. It’s about roots, not escape. By definition, it’s a bad trip. And what happens when you try to glue them together? You get something like Cheap Thrills: heavy where it should soar, blurry where it should punch. Sure, there’s a little overlap. Blues’ 12-bar loops could, in theory, go on forever. Psychedelia’s drones do too, but their repetition seeks trance, not tension. Blues uses dissonant 7ths to stay spicy; psychedelia uses modal drift to dissolve form altogether. Blues is tradition-bound. Psychedelia is experimental by nature. Jimi Hendrix came out of the blues tradition and could trade licks with anyone. But he wasn’t heavy - not in this sense. He didn’t just play the blues louder or weirder. He cracked it open. Burst it into star matter. When he sang, it wasn’t about juke joints or betrayal - it was about UFOs and castles made of sand. He went to London too, which helped. Blues rock, after all, is an American problem. Even the Rolling Stones – ever the carriers of American disease - knew better than to drag blues into their psychedelic detours. When they did psychedelia, which they did badly, they at least had the sense to leave the blues behind. Not all Americans, of course. Jefferson Airplane understood that psychedelia requires space - air, irony, something like play. They didn’t have to revert to childhood, like early Pink Floyd singles, but they acknowledged childhood. Indeed, it is mother who gives you the pills that make you small. Cheap Thrills, though, is weighed down with heaviness. Bad covers of “Summertime” and “Ball and Chain.” A sleeve cluttered with over-busy cartoon art. “Turtle Blues” could be any number of other generic blues bar jams and, if the turtle is meant as a whimsical touch, it also signifies plod - something slow and hoary, rather than the horny that Joplin sings. “Oh, Sweet Mary” hints at taking off somewhere, but any lift - Jefferson Airplane style - is immediately grounded by Joplin’s backing vocals, which dominate the mix as though they miked the studio air conditioner. Of course, it’s rare for Joplin to take a back seat. She is the centre of all of this. Her voice is impossible to ignore - and sometimes, impossible to get past. It’s raw and powerful, yes, but not exactly buoyant. It doesn’t lift you anywhere. Maybe it made her feel better. I guess primal scream is an element of the hippy ethos. Still, it’s obvious why so many of these tracks are sloe-gin slumpers rather than transcendent anthems - evidently more libation than liberation. Now, some clever dicks bypass the conventional wisdom that Black Sabbath birthed heavy metal and credit Cream. Maybe even Blue Cheer. But I think it’s clear that Joplin set the template for classic metal singing - the sweep from gutter to stars - before Robert Plant did. In the way she digs deeper into the gravel pit of her throat to come at a note from below, you can already hear Axl Rose being born. Indeed, it is metal that takes the heaviness of the blues and manages to meld it with altered perspective: fantasy, horror, the occult. But that’s probably too heavy for Janis Joplin, who had real problems to deal with: the wrong drink, the wrong drugs, the wrong man. And, I think, the wrong genre too. Even a standout like “Piece of My Heart” - which is powerful - doesn’t work in a psychedelic context. A great vocal performance, sure. Metaphysical in the sense that Donne might encourage a lover to take his heart, bit by bit. But if this is psychedelic music, it’s the kind with one foot still stuck in the mud. Be honest: would you want to hear that while tripping? With all its raw, clenched emotion? It would just bring you down, man. Cheap Thrills promises wildness, ecstasy, escape. What it delivers is psychedelic only if your idea of an altered state involves a migraine 2 I have never heard this album before although I know and like this version of Piece of My Heart. Janis Joplin’s voice is rather stressful to listen to, sounding like something is going to tear any moment. But following on from the flaccid fumblings and cooings of yesterday’s record (Disraeli Gears) this album came across as very exciting indeed. Janis is the star but credit too to James Gurley’s grotesque lead guitar in Combination of the Two and Ball and Chain which felt thirst-relieving after the desert of Clapton’s tidy pentatonic lines. There’s quite a lot going on on that front cover - some of it could do with being cut out. 3/5

With most albums I review, I arrive either fully informed or happily clueless. Talking with the Taxman About Poetry found me somewhere in between: already armed with its two sharpest arrows - Levi Stubbs’ Tears and Greetings to the New Brunette - and nothing else. The full record? Never bothered. I borrowed Don’t Try This At Home from the CD library in 1999, lured by the presence of Johnny Marr and Michael Stipe. Stipe and Bragg were doing a lot of activism together at the time. What’s the verb? He/she/it activises? I've always been slightly suspicious of Bragg. Not hostile. Just... unconvinced. He seems, in every interview, affable, earnest, like the sort of man who says “solidarity” and means it. A good sort. But while plenty of working-class songwriters were scribbling observational notes on "ordinary life", Bragg always sounded like he was preparing a speech or a sermon. Morrissey was more insular. Jarvis Cocker more empathetic. Bragg often writes to tell his audience - people who already think fascism is bad - that fascism is bad. And sometimes he sounds like he’s reporting them to the politburo just to be on the safe side. His 1996 album was called William Bloke. Is that humility or a play for visionary status? Possibly both. As Queen Victoria once quipped: “Beware of artists. They mix with all classes and are therefore most dangerous.” And for all his calls to arms, a songwriter is not really a working man. When Bragg goes full political - Ideology, There Is Power in a Union, Help Save the Youth of America - he often forgets he's writing songs. The tunes flatten, the chords turn obvious, and the slogans do the heavy lifting. The impulse, I think, is noble: to follow the tradition of the broadside ballad. Simple melodies, easily sung by many, outside the gates of whatever institution needs heckling. But in trying to write for the people, Bragg sometimes erases the person. These tracks feel like they could be performed by anyone with a guitar, a cause, and two cups of lukewarm tea. So determined is he, in these moments, to make songs of and for the people that he barely leaves a human print on them at all. And yet: Bragg’s skill if that isn't too generous, is for pop storytelling. Levi Stubbs’ Tears is still moves me - sharp opening line, evocative portraiture, a rare emotional depth. While the singing and melody are appropriately deadpan, the guitar tone sounds likes someone jabbing a butter knife into a wall socket. Of course, the tune lifts once he hands the bridge over to the greats of Motown. After all, it is a song about the redemptive power of pop music, though the rest of the album could use some of that self-reflection. Greetings to the New Brunette glimmers among the other spare arrangements. But it has aged awkwardly. The line “How can you lie there and think of England when you don’t even know who’s in the team?” is clever, sure - but is Bragg laughing with his character or at him? Bragg gets to be witty; the character gets to be dim. This, we are told, is solidarity. Elsewhere, he sketches male types with much less sympathy than he does the female protagonist of Levi Stubbs. Honey, I’m a Big Boy Now mocks a neglectful partner with no interest in why he is that way. Bragg, a Marxist, forgets to mention the system. Where’s your intersectionality, Billy? There’s a second joke about football fans later, and while it’s hardly dehumanising, it does feel like Bragg’s tossing scraps to the bedsit Berias - sniggers for the fey indie boys who wouldn’t be seen dead near a terrace. Of course, later he wrote Sexuality, where an uncle who “once played for Red Star Belgrade” turns out to be a progressive hero. So all is not lost. An artist doesn't have to be perfect nor consistent. When they are caught between their craft and their cause, perfection is the first casualty. But even at his worst, he’s hard to dislike: slightly exhausting, a little sanctimonious, but - crucially – well-meaning. A useful idiot of sorts, who sometimes serves the interests of pop, which are not always pure or progressive. He’s the musical equivalent of a neighbour who tells you why the bin men are on strike, but not how he plans to deal with the garbage stinking up his yard. 2.5 This all goes off somewhere in no man’s land. I can hear and feel the reverberations of Elvis Costello, The Jam and Bob Dylan, but there is no meaningful impact. Bragg hasn’t the instinct for pop or for poetry to match the influences he wears on his sleeve. I can’t even, amid the muddle of his clumsy lines and tired, over-familiar melodies, find revulsion for him. There is just a sort of pity, as for the curate, delivering a half hour sermon, who can’t escape not being the more entertaining Parish Priest that every parishioner was hoping would take to the stage in this slot. All the things (and people) that Billy Bragg wants to be are clear enough but he is none of them. Not even The Worker. ‘There is Power in a Union’ is still heard on picket lines in Britain nearly forty years on. I think that is because it feels, superficially, like a remnant of class struggle from a deeper (and wider) past than post-Scargill Britain. That would be because it is the work of a man who has never worked in a factory but has, clearly, seen a few films about it. The bosses and their lackeys? Not the Intelligentsia either. Somewhere, dully, in the middle. 1.5/5

“It doesn't matter what you look like. I mean, if you have a hunchback just throw a little glitter on it, honey, and go dancing!” – James St. James In Lester Bangs’ 1975 interview-turned-sparring-match with Lou Reed, Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves (or how I slugged it out with Lou Reed and stayed awake), the rock critic emerged bruised, bemused, and baffled. He had gone in hoping to talk to his hero and walked away having survived a bout with a sneering, passive-aggressive troll in black leather. Reed, three years and one Metal Machine Music into his solo career, had become – if he hadn't always been - what Bangs would call a “death dwarf”: a creature of sickness, spite, genius, and self-destruction. The death dwarf archetype suits Lou Reed not just physically - with his hunched, sour presence and nasal bark - but emotionally and theatrically. He is, in a sense, a poisoned Rigoletto figure: embittered, cynical, mocking. The cruelty the world showed him – and he was ill-treated in his youth - he handed back with interest, in barbed quips and cool derision. His first solo album, 1972’s Lou Reed, was met with a shrug. It drew heavily from discarded Velvet Underground material, and in doing so made clear that Reed, outside the context of that band’s invention, was uncertain, maybe even lost. Without John Cale, Andy Warhol, and the crew, he was diminished. Reed never missed a chance to reassert himself as a mean-spirited, half-laughing antagonist. That’s why, decades later, when he recorded his sprawling The Raven, inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, he naturally gravitated to Hop-Frog, a tale of a deformed dwarf’s bloody revenge on his tormentors. In keeping with Reed's twisted way of thinking, he didn’t do it alone. Instead, he brings in his old friend David Bowie, making him the death dwarf - the beautiful alien avatar turned tight, gnarled jester. It’s a choice at once petty and poetic, like so much of Reed’s career. Transformer, his second solo album, throws that archetype into stark relief, as a couple of friends threw glitter on his hunchback and made him dance. This is his first working encounter with David Bowie – Bowie who owned the first acetate of the Velvets' debut to enter the UK, who wrote the affectionate Queen Bitch about Reed. Lester Bangs loved Reed, although he didn't seem to like him. Bowie loved him and liked him to begin with. That's why turning Bowie into Hop-Frog is such a significant transformation, like a witch transforming the beauty into a toad. It was payback in kind. Because on Transformer – a transparent title - Bowie and Mick Ronson had done Reed an extraordinary favour. It was an act of charity to a friend, an offering to a god, and one might say an act of love. They threw some glitter on his hunchback. And the magic trick, at least in places, works. It works because all of them - Reed, Bowie, Ronson - were hunchbacked in some way. That was the alchemy of glam rock: it was deformity disguised in dazzle, a celebration of brokenness lit up in neon. If you were an artist, like Bowie, it was a playbox. If you were a working-class lad like Ronson, you wore glitter simply because it got you on Top of the Pops. But if you were Lou Reed, a chance at survival. Transformer is not a Bowie album, but it is only partially a Reed album. Bowie was, at this moment, cresting into superstardom, and here he was gifting Reed a second chance - not with Velvet Underground obscurities or half-formed sketches, but with new material, dressed in glam drag, arranged with the intention to chart. Reed had written to spec before - in the 1960s, for Pickwick Records, where he had churned out cheap knockoffs like The Ostrich - but Transformer was different. It had aspirations, polish, and charm, even when Reed himself seemed ill at ease. You can hear this unsteadiness on tracks like Make-Up and I’m So Free. They aim to embrace the themes of glam - sexual fluidity, glittery self-invention. It's almost embarrassingly on-the-nose, like a cash-in Christmas record, and Reed’s performance is flat, almost self-sabotaging. He's not dead, but his collaborators haul him through it like Weekend at Bernie’s. New York Telephone Conversation and Goodnight Ladies reach for a Weimar cabaret aesthetic, but feel like dry runs for Bowie’s Aladdin Sane. Ronson’s arrangements in these moments are full of tropes - tuba blurts, campy piano - but not much imagination. He would step up, with the help of Mike Garson, on Bowie's next record, but here even Reed doesn't feel convinced by his performance. Still, in this forced theatricality, we also glimpse the early seeds of goth rock’s obsession with cabaret decay. With the bats and sexualised beatings elsewhere on the record, the gothic language later adopted by bands like Bauhaus and Siouxsie Sioux begins to form. Reed always birthed things he’d later disown – that's what Goths do. And then there are the songs that don’t need my commentary. Perfect Day and Satellite of Love are nearly immune to critique - they are ubiquitous and nothing any of us write will reduce them. They are also gorgeous. They borrow from Velvet Underground ballads like Candy Says or Pale Blue Eyes, but Ronson’s arrangements give them a clean, glossy edge. Bowie’s backing vocals - full of swoops and sparkle - animate Reed’s drawl, enlivening his cadaver. On Walk on the Wild Side, Ronson pulls off something akin to what VU achieved with Heroin: sustaining a song with minimal harmonic movement through sheer will: the backing vocals get louder and louder, then pull back. It's an impressive feat. The band throughout is stellar. As with Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal, another example of Reed elevated by superior musicianship (supported by Alice Cooper's band), Reed is given dignity, scale, and stature. Backed by greatness, he can almost meet Bowie eye-to-eye. As he sang on his scrappy first album, “Love makes me feel ten feet tall,” and Transformer is, if nothing else, an album of love: Bowie’s love for Reed, Ronson’s care in arranging, and Reed’s occasional willingness to accept it. That he puts up such a fight against his collaborators' generosity is part of the album's charm. But love with Lou Reed was always one-sided. He didn’t have much to give, not even to himself. “You’re not good, and you certainly aren’t very much fun,” he sings on Vicious, and it sounds less like a jibe than a grim self-assessment. Without Bowie and Ronson, much of Transformer would, ironically, collapse under its own straightness. Reed’s toxic wit could kill a room, and too often, he chose to use it that way. That imbalance - between love given and love withheld - would eventually curdle. In 1979, when Reed approached Bowie about producing a new album, Bowie agreed, but insisted Reed clean up. Reed responded with a punch to the face. He didn’t like being told to lighten up. He didn’t like being told anything. He should have lightened up though. Still, for one brief moment, the glitter stuck. Transformer doesn’t conceal Reed’s deformities - it illuminates them. For once, Reed didn’t just spit at the world - he let the world dress him up and take him dancing. Bowie would help other friends and heroes out with songs, production, and co-writes, but his relationship with Reed was special, because he knew they were inverses of each other. Where Bowie was gregarious, Reed was guarded. Where Bowie would expand his listeners' minds, Reed would try their patience. Bowie, cool. Reed, cruel. Bowie, tall. Reed, small. That's why, years after Reed punched him in the face, Bowie was happy to take on the cox's comb, the cuckold's crown: because he was the bigger man. 3.5 Transformer is a strange but charming album. Between the arrangements which are just beautiful and Reed’s affable, relaxed vocal clowning the weaker material (most of side 2) almost becomes good. The stronger material…flip. It is an oddly static album; no dramatic momentum or emotional shape ever becomes clear. Hangin’ Round feels like it is mocking what Perfect Day invites us to feel. Its elegant, twinkly music evaporates along with the touching first person narrative and suddenly Harry was a rich young man while generic rock n roll half chords flatulate in the speakers. Shouldn’t Perfect Day have been last? Or somewhere near the end? Or closed a side at least? Satellite of Love feels similarly climactic…but c’mere, there’s more. The constant puncturing of the atmosphere doesn’t detract much from the record’s core strength though. Half of this album is one of the best half albums of the 1970s. 3.5/5

I interviewed Stephin Merritt once. First telephone interview I’d ever done. I borrowed a minidisc recorder from the editor who told me not to erase his live boot of Rocket from the Crypt. I didn’t. I just recorded over it. Stephin wasn’t unkind, exactly, but he did ask why I didn’t know shorthand. Fair enough. I didn’t. I still don’t. I wrote things down slowly and hoped I’d catch the rest on tape. At one point — I can’t remember if it was because Peter Gabriel had covered The Book of Love or just because the silence between us was beginning to feel cavernous — I asked him what his favourite Peter Gabriel album was. Also, I asked about Genesis. He said he’d never listened to the band, which seemed plausible for the weird pop songwriter. He did like Gabriel. Also plausible. In the piece I wrote, I said his answer was So. But the truth is the recording was unintelligible at that point. A glitch? Bad disc? Maybe I’d accidentally brushed the pause button with my trembling hand. Either way, whatever he actually said is lost to time, and I — somehow — decided So sounded right. It had Sledgehammer on it and Don’t Give Up. It sold very well. But it doesn’t sound right now. Not really. If you’ve listened to Stephin Merritt for more than three songs in a row, you know it wasn’t So. It would have been one of the early ones: one of the self-titled albums with nicknames that reference the album artwork: Car or Scratch or Melt. It was probably Melt. That’s the best one, isn’t it? Merritt covered Not One of Us some time later, which would have been a handy clue. Why I thought it was So — that smooth, glistening thing, with all its horn sections and MTV overtures — I cannot explain. Even the weird bits aren’t weird enough. Sledgehammer is weird for the Top 40, but not weird for Gabriel, who once took the stage dressed as a Giant Hogweed. There are hits on So, sure, but none of them hit like Games Without Frontiers or Intruder. It’s Gabriel doing smooth. Gabriel doing accessible. One of Them. I should have written Melt. I should have asked better questions. I should have learned shorthand. Sorry, Stephin. 2.5 Look at Peter Gabriel’s stupid face. I know this album isn’t bad exactly but I don’t like it. What display of skill Gabriel shows in forging interesting melodies and structures is smothered by his unshakeable determination to use every voice setting on the keyboard. I’m sure the customers were impressed when they pushed the demo button on those things in the showroom in 1986. But five years later they were asking themselves what could have been wrong with their heads that they spent the price of a car on these obsolete abominations. Playing the start of Moonlight Sonata with synth horns then steel drum then ‘Goblins’ is good for about 5 minutes entertainment but ultimately it sounds better on a real piano and the child can’t get any good on the instrument on those settings. Are the songs really that good anyway? The lyrics, Mercy Street for example, are self-regarding but poetically hollow. ‘Don’t Give Up’ has a pleasant sentiment but stumbles over itself musically. Kate Bush plays a blinder making those awkward lines of the chorus sound as musically natural as anyone could. But they’re still not right. Peter Gabriel can’t be accused of making dull melodies but it’s easy to sound interesting when you sacrifice elegance of line. It’s an inelegant album. 2.5/5

My mother liked Boy. She liked other things too - weirder post-punk, stuff I only half-heard from upstairs, doing homework or trying not to - but the boy on that cover she liked especially. She would have told you it was the music, but I think she also liked the look of him, standing there with his hair all a mess, cheeky, right in the middle of something. U2 was my first concert. PopMart. A stage set like an exploded Argos catalogue, a yellow arch reminiscent of the McDonald’s M, only larger and less ashamed. .Somewhere in the house there was The Joshua Tree on cassette. You could stop after the first side of singles and feel you’d had the better part of it. We never played it much. Too grand for my mother. Too earnest for me, who liked the song from Batman Forever: it had a respectful joke about Jesus! There were lots of – I think - respectful jokes about Bono too. He is easy to slag and I think he takes it pretty well. But it’s not an easy thing, being in a position of cool when the band you front is, by common consent, not cool at all. Maybe The Joshua Tree fitted perfectly into those uncool years, waiting for Grunge to shake things up. Rock stars aren’t supposed to care about much other than their hair, but Bono cares a lot. And he uses the cultural capital of cool to care. That's why he ends up joining hands with George W. Bush and David Trimble. They think he's cool. They think they look cool beside him. However, the photo opportunity, even if it makes available some funding or raises awareness or ends a civil war, makes everyone involved much less cool. I don't know if that was the effect or the aim: he got big, so felt the responsibility or he wanted to do something, so tried to get big. Maybe a bit of both. What’s the point of having a reach if you’re not going to stretch? Yes, there’s ego in all that - self-love even - but also a kind of wide-armed generosity. The evangelist’s excess of love: for he so loved the world he gave it these misbegotten songs. But they're not really his songs. Back at the start, U2’s songs were theirs in the most direct sense: ragged, strident, maybe not entirely in tune, but theirs. The Joshua Tree was something else. It was an operation, in which the band were the troops not the generals. It is the product of their more accomplished collaborators: Brian Eno, Flood, Steve Lillywhite, Pat McCarthy, and – as the generator seems intent on highlight by following our last record with this one - Daniel Lanois. Fresh from So with Peter Gabriel, which had just gone nuclear, and halfway through coaxing a solo debut out of Robbie Robertson. He’d worked with U2 before, on The Unforgettable Fire, but now he had the confidence of a man who’d just delivered a global hit. In the intervening years, U2 – the Edge especially – had tried to become better musicians. We know this was not Eno's idea. It was Lanois who had them practising more, specifically so he could get them to do what he wanted without having to translate it into beginner’s terms. Lanois who steered them towards American roots music. This would bear rotten fruit on Rattle & Hum, but, on The Joshua Tree, it sounds like pop-rock populism. It's the same well as Sprigsteen and Tom Petty. It was calculated. I wonder if Lanois believed Bono's message or if he thought the media was message enough. Strangely, in one interview I read, Lanois also mentioned My Bloody Valentine as an influence on the record. In 1986, when they were recording, MBV had only released a minialbum that sounded more like the Jesus and Mary Chain than anything you associate with the band. It is nice to imagine the goth record that never happened: Flood bringing everything he learned from Some Bizarre, Lillywhite replicated the sound he created with the Banshees, U2 taking a left turn into the shadows: Shadows and Tall Trees on Boy hints at the gothic. However, the record we got has all the edge of post-punk taken off. The reverb and flange of that genre is replaced with the “infinite sustain guitar,” a Canadian invention Lanois brought along. Its long notes are all over the album, especially on With or Without You. It became The Edge’s calling card - awkward when he later appeared with Jimmy Page and Jack White and was effortlessly outplayed. The songs are so processed you can’t tell if playing skill mattered. There’s a two-note solo - One Tree Hill or Trip Through Your Wires, I can never remember - that’s no more complicated than the two-note solo on Buzzcocks’ “Boredom,” except the Buzzcocks’ version had fire and a wink in it. U2 have both fire and wink at different points in their career, but not on The Joshua Tree. That is the band's fault. They let themselves be shaped. Perhaps they asked to be shaped that way: vessels of their producer or vessels of God. They made the album for the biggest possible audience. Sometimes that works, sometimes you give everyone a free album on iTunes and wish you hadn’t. But, at the time, The Joshua Tree made them the biggest band in the world. It left behind people like my mother, like me. That’s the trade-off. Probably not a big trade-off. The bigger cost is that you must give up something of yourself. Even if you are cool and funny and humble, like we know Bono actually is, you can no longer be any of those things. You become a medium for the message. That, though, was not the end. After Rattle & Hum, they had to retreat - “to dream it all up again.” And this time, the band reclaimed the reins, for better or worse. 2.5 “I’ll show you a place, high on a desert plain, uuugch, where the streets have no nameuuuhh” Bono I thought I’d open with a quote from a Bono lyric. No one ever quotes Bono lyrics. I checked Etsy for specific examples presented as wall art or ceramic pruck, just to be sure it wasn’t my poor memory. I found only a cartoon of the band captioned ‘I want to run, I want to hide, I want to tear down the walls that hold me inside’ and a key ring reading ‘It’s a beautiful day, don’t let it get away’. How is it that a band going forty-plus years with that level of commercial success, who often write about the big stuff - Love, God, America, Political Struggle, the Sky, War etc - have so few catching lines or couplets that look good on a coaster? I suppose because it’s not what you sing it’s how you sing it. Bono spouts this sixth-form shite with the conviction of the best student in the sixth-form drama class. He sings it all as if it’s important, as if it’s poetry and as if it’s at all insightful about the serious things some of these songs are, allegedly, about. Here is hammy, transparent performance. The vocal ejaculations, like the one in the middle of the line I’ve quoted above, are the necessary ad libs of a man who knows he must do something, constantly, to cover up the utter lack of substance in his work. After staring off into the desert and dedicating this next one to the Statue of Liberty, Bono could sing the phone book and make millions of (almost) listeners believe that they’d really heard something profound. But God help them if they go looking for a tasty line to cross-stitch into immortality. There is no particular call to pick on the lyrics here but then this won’t be our only U2 album. There’ll be ample opportunity to reflect on the musical limitations of this ‘rock band’. To speculate on how firm and constant was the hand-holding from the brilliant Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois. For now it will do to say that this album is bad, worse than I remember. So I sign off with a quote from an artist who also tackled the big subjects but, unlike Bono, produced work that people are always quoting. He was writing about ‘Life’ here but he could just as easily have been writing about The Joshua Tree: “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Shakespeare 2/5

Born in the U.S.A. is a mausoleum in amber: one among many monuments to the moment when rock, bewitched by the gewgaws of its new electronic arsenal, embalmed itself. The gated drum - a thud convinced of its own eternity - is shackled here to synth patches of such queasy translucence they might have been run off an Amstrad printer. Even in 1984, this sound carried its own built-in nostalgia: a glossy cousin to The Boys of Summer, Walk of Life, and Young Turks - all already looking backward. Like mosquitoes in amber, some ideas were dead before they were trapped; others froze mid-buzz. Springsteen’s American characters were already stuck, but here they’re idealised and nostalgised, pinned in place forever. It’s a supposed celebration of working-class life with no tangible celebration. Even when they dance - in the dark, no less - it’s joyless, as exhausting as a Depression-era dance marathon. The title track is a case in point: two steps, no direction, just like the lives it describes. It sounds like a clever idea, but it’s no idea at all. A I chord followed by a V chord is not minimalism; it’s idling. A few tracks - Dancing in the Dark, I’m on Fire - flutter briefly alive when encountered on the radio, but back in the LP’s running order they’re smothered by the same synthetic and philosophic mulch. Of course, all the mixing desks were powered by glutaraldehyde then. Somewhere on an American AM nostalgia station, The Boys of Summer, Walk of Life, and Springsteen’s own Glory Days run in endless concatenation. It’s not fun. It’s motorway hypnosis in FM form. Henley aches, Knopfler goofs, Springsteen grimaces - but at speed, all faces blur. All bugs look the same once smashed on your windscreen. Who’d want to listen to so much of this depressing music? The War on Drugs, apparently. They did a reverse Jurassic Park, taking the DNA from this dinosaur rock and ending up with a buzzing, irritating sound like a mosquito. 2.5 I was out in the car yesterday afternoon listening to this album when something unusual happened. I was driving through Lurganure village between Lisburn and Moira and came up behind an estate car and after a few seconds of following it up the road a child’s hand emerged from the back window clutching a mini Northern Ireland flag (the Red Hand - not the football flag). Flegs are nothing unusual at all of course, least of all in Lurganure village, but the experience of seeing it fluttering in the wind from the window of a car I was following was striking. A couple of seconds after this happened ‘No Surrender’ started playing. I ended up behind this car listening to that track all the way up the Moira road. I don’t know what it means but it’s bound to be some sort of message from the Ether isn’t it? ‘Blood brothers in the stormy night with a vow to defend/ No retreat, baby, no surrender’ Jesus Christ, I thought, Springsteen really is the voice of the experience of the common man everywhere. I don’t know what to say about Born in the USA a day after doing The Joshua Tree. I think that sequencing certainly works in Springsteen’s favour. The drumming on this album - unremarkable on previous listens - struck me as absolutely brilliant this time. That guy can, literally, play the drums. And although the keyboard sounds on this record are much worse, and much more dated, than the keys on Joshua Tree - the terrible keyboard voices are part of the core of the musical identity of this record. Dancing in the Dark stands as one of the great terrible keyboard records in my mind, alongside Walk of Life; I absolutely adored both songs when I was a child and still have a soft spot. I enjoyed hearing this today. 3/5

I’ve neither the time nor the energy to write much today—and, regrettably, not because I’ve been dancing this mess around to The B-52s' terrific debut. It’s a smart, silly record: cool, but also somehow chilling. There's heat and sweat here, but not much warmth. It reminds me of the first Suicide album—the dead-eyed gaze of kitsch and retro, more alienating than nostalgic. Really, it isn’t a dance party so much as one of those aimless get-togethers where a B-movie plays in the background. No one’s really watching, but somehow everyone ends up quoting its worst lines for months. They mean nothing, but become a shibboleth. Over the weekend, I was listening to The Dreaming by Kate Bush and thinking about the way she uses her voice. Mocked for adolescent squeakiness on his 1979 debut (the same year as this record), she doubled down by her fourth album - twisting her voice, embodying characters, leaping across her vocal range (and a handful of dodgy accents). It's - understandably - rare to hear female singers willing to make their voices grotesque, but Kate does it unflinchingly. So do Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson of The B-52s. Despite the band’s limited instrumental palette, the singers - but especially the women - offer a stunning range: goofy, shrill, sexy, disaffected, guttural, subaquatic. They embraced this wildness openly, crediting Yoko Ono, and, in turn, John Lennon recognised the influence: it brought him back into the game briefly in 1979. Without the time to think about The B-52s deeply, it was still enjoyable to listen to how it plays with the idea of the voice - not just as melody, but as texture, character, chaos. Don't listen to it too closely, as none of it makes sense. It's all the background stuff brought upfront: snatches of conversation, bits of ideas, the people at the party you don't introduce yourself to. And, yet, you end up quoting its worst lines for months. 3.5 The shadow of The Joshua Tree still hangs over my listening this week. Born in the USA invoked it by being another big seller stadium rock album about America, though outplaying U2 and throwing its lyrical shyness into unforgiving relief. I find the B-52’s have somehow also dragged my mind back to the U2 album. In general, I don’t prefer light, comic/absurdist, danceable party music. I like my pop music earnest and emotionally weighty, for the most part. So why can’t I sympathise more with U2’s effort at least? Why am I gripped today by the notion that Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For could only by improved by the guest appearance of Fred Schneider? (LOOKIN’ up the mountain/ RUNNIN’ round the fields/ SEARCHIN’ for that Jesus/ Hey, WHERE could he be?’) The B-52’s’ secret, apart from that apostrophe, is how much skill and effort goes into their version of frivolous. The wealth of ideas and careful working-out that is folded into a track like ‘Dance This Mess Around’ is more moving than Bono’s clambering up Sinai. There is also more insight into America in ‘52 Girls’ than anything Bono has ever mustered. I enjoyed this album today, seriously. 3/5

"It's not the yellow curtains. Nor curtain rings. Nor is it bran... Heidegger suggests that "Nothing nothings" - a calm sensible idea with which Sarte, among others, disagrees. (What Heidegger thinks about nothings is not nothing.) Heidegger points us toward dread. Having borrowed a cup of dread from Kierkegaard, he spills it, and in the spreading stain he finds (like a tea-leaf reader) Nothing. And it is not the yellow curtains behind which fauns and astronauts embrace, behind which flesh crawls in all directions and flickertail squirrels fall upward into the trees. And death is not nothing and the cheering sections of consciousness ("Do not go gentle into that good night") are not nothing nor are holders of the contrary view... Put it on the list." Nothing: A Preliminary Account,Donald Barthelme I'm no expert on nothing, but Mr. Barthleme may want to turn his attention to Smokers Delight. 0 Nightmares on Wax here set out to conduct a noble experiment to answer a question that has surely troubled many a listener: is Rap Music better when you take away all the rapping? The answer is, disappointingly, that it makes no difference. I am awarding a half point, however, for the fluent trolling, over an hour in, in immediately following ‘Rise’ with ‘Rise (Reprise)’. Classic mischief. 0.5/5

When Gram Parsons coined the term Cosmic American Music, he likely had in mind a visionary blend of country, soul, and rock - a borderless American sound. But listening to Grievous Angel now, it's hard not to hear “cosmic” in the Lovecraftian sense: as something eerie, indifferent, and unsettling. Lovecraft wrote that “the basis of all true cosmic horror is violation of the order of nature, and the profoundest violations are always the least concrete and describable.” Parsons’ music taps into precisely that: songs that seem to mourn something unnamed, floating between life and death, faith and despair.The album is not a cohesive suite of songs, but a posthumous collage: off-cuts, fragments, and salvaged takes from earlier sessions. It doesn’t feel like the work of an artist executing a grand final vision; it feels like something a drug addict pulls from a crumpled bag, a tragic, accidental testament rather than a planned farewell. That it holds together is impressive, but Parsons was falling apart. He died of an overdose in a Joshua Tree motel just months before release, and his body was infamously stolen and cremated in the desert by a friend. The album already sounded haunted, but his death pushed it fully into the realm of the uncanny.The fake live medley is its own version of cosmic horror. It sounds like a fun studio idea that time has made wrong. It's a staged performance by a band that will never actually perform again. An audience present, but absent; the band is all alone. Chilling. The fact that Grievous Angel is not a complete artistic statement, and never will be, reflects the cold indifference of the cosmos: there is no final act, no summation, only fragments left behind.Another cruelty is the fact that Emmylou Harris's name was removed from the album cover at the request of Parsons’ wife. Also cut from the cover photo, she is another absent presence. That makes her role as the emotional anchor of these songs all the more peculiar. She more than deserves a lead vocal or a genuine back and forth duet, but she doesn't get one.. Her harmony on the final line of “Hearts on Fire” is astonishing - hovering just above the chord, aching with restraint and sorrow. In many ways, she sounds more present than Parsons himself. And him soon gone.Grievous Angel isn’t a finished album. It’s a dispatch from the threshold, a haunted message from someone already slipping out of reach. Its incompleteness is the point. It’s not just Cosmic American Music. It’s a document of cosmic indifference - the universe doesn't care to let you finish. But, even then, there is beauty. 3.5 Among other beautiful things on this album Emmylou Harris’ voice stands out as practically divine. I love her singing. The songs are excellent and I particularly like $1000 wedding. The medley is fun. Extra credit for getting an Eagle involved. I hate the album cover. 3.5/5

Listening to Jurassic 5 in the wake of the B-52’s is an instructive exercise in restraint. Both bands shy away from elaborate harmonic development, relying instead on the voices to structure and propel the music. But whereas the B-52’s luxuriate in contrast and theatricality, Jurassic 5 remain almost painfully cohesive - a quartet of baritones moving in lockstep, polite to a fault. Fred Schneider’s bark, Kate Pierson’s swoops, Cindy Wilson’s piercing clarity - these are voices that not only delineate sections but give the songs their personality. Jurassic 5, in comparison, offer a kind of tonal democracy.Of course, this is the genre’s insistence: words matter, flow matters. Yet the words here pass by in such thickly clustered knots that meaning evaporates - syllables blur into rhythm, rhythm into texture, texture into a monochrome droning. It is not so much verbal dexterity as aural wallpaper. Contrast this with the easy cartoonism of the B-52’s: Rock Lobster! is ridiculous, yes, but it is intelligible. It sticks.N.W.A., at least, understood the theatre of contrast. Eazy-E’s squeak played against Ice Cube’s growl - a deliberate mismatch that threw sparks. Jurassic 5 decline the opportunity. They present not a cast of characters but a committee of clones. Socially conscious rap, Jurassic 5 prefer consensus, and consensus, for all its merits, can feel stifling.Even Kool Keith’s appearance on DDT is only distinguishable as a feature rather than another mid-range Jurassic 5er - a detail likely to be missed without specialist knowledge or access to the liner notes. However, the record comes alive when there is high contrast: the sections of Acetate Prophets and the cut-ups of high-voiced children provide texture and surprise. Most effective is Nelly Furtado. Her mere appearance stands out among the other voices, creating male/female contrast, sung/spoken contrast, without diminishing the genre’s focus on rhythm. Her singing against their rapping produces the most complex polyrhythms on the record. Here, at last, the album glimpses tension, colour, a kind of internal drama it rarely sustains elsewhere.Power in Numbers is meticulous and undeniably disciplined - neatly crafted by Cut Chemist. But there is a cost: in its admirable politeness, the record occasionally forfeits the thrill of unpredictability, the spark of mischief that makes music feel alive rather than respectable. 2 ‘Hot as you'd keep a furnace We kept it earnest Poems puncture your epidermis’ (After School Special) I was typing the name of this band into the search bar on my streaming app to cue this slop for a second listen when the app suggested ‘Jurassic Park - John Williams’. Naturally I listened to that instead of kidding myself that there were deeper layers of Jurassic 5’s album ready to reveal themselves to me. To be honest it isn’t John Williams‘ best - much of it is cluttered and cloying; especially when the choir aaaahhhs along in the main theme. The incidental stuff is gruel. What about those themes though? Unforgettable tunes. 1.5/5

So much for the generator introducing me to Zeppelin chronologically. I haven’t returned to the debut since enjoying it last month, but I would expect some progression over six years that would lead here. What I mean by "progression," I don't know. Commenting on Led Zeppelin I, I hoped they’d marry their obvious technical firepower with a genuine artistic vision. On Kashmir, they really do. Although elsewhere, they don’t. On In the Light, the band reaches for the visionary but lands on something ungainly, more corny than cosmic. Down by the Seaside plods along, silly and half-hearted, until, suddenly, it opens into a phenomenal middle section: it could be its own song; it probably was at some point. In My Time of Dying is much the same: four minutes of waiting before the real riff arrives and the song becomes great. Did it need to stretch to eleven minutes? No. Six would have done, three and a half would have been perfect - just go out on those big tub thumps. I guess artistic vision is not the same as artistic ambition and, while one may want to string out the song or fill up the fourth side, you need to a stronger justification than just because you can. It's not climbing Everest, it is sculpting Everest. The minor curios are telling. Bron-Yr-Aur is a slight acoustic sketch, squandered by not blossoming into a full song or even a proper side closer. Boogie With Stu, a leftover from ’71, has no business sharing space with the album’s heavy hitters - it’s a throwaway, and it sounds it. The inclusion of such a track isn't for fun or variety or colour; its just because it was there. It shows how little clarity or necessity there is to most of Physical Graffiti. For all its peaks - and Kashmir is practically Everest - it also sprawls. Zeppelin could have done anything they wanted at that point, but, I think, that, if they had wanted anything in particular, it would have been more satisfying. 3 The dream of chronological Led Zepp is over. Physical Graffiti it is, in which we hear them traipsing out the far end of their greatness, dripping with musical (and moral) decadence. It’s a strange album and certainly too long. Even in the tighter 1974 tracks - Custard Pie, The Wanton Song, Sick Again - the utter venerealism of Plant’s lyrics, which would be hard not to wince at except that they are hard to make out, piles on the sense of needless indulgence. The prevailing image is perhaps of a bloated, dying emperor, sick of sin, but also sick of gout and probably syphilis. Kublai Khan maybe, given the pungent orientalism of some of the music. That this album is part outtakes compilation sharpens that image; there is a purposeless looking backwards which is not reminiscence but a sort of sporadic, feverish recollection of past feats, past sounds, past albums. Amid this ugly picture there is the contradiction that the longest stuff, In My Time of Dying and Kashmir, might also be the best. Page’s slide playing on IMTOD is brilliantly sluggish and there is an absorbing narrative shape to the track that makes light of 11 minutes. Kashmir is just the decadent soul of the album; an entirely witless show of musical brute force, entirely iconic. I feel a bit sorry that we didn’t get this on a weekend. It’s a bit much listening for a working day and I would be happy to write at (appropriately) tedious length about it. In a nutshell, Physical Graffiti is awful and wonderful, stupid and clever, somehow essential listening and a frequent waste of a listener’s time, a proper album and not a proper album. 3.5/5

I forgot the accusations of plagiarising Cat Stevens, but it's the first thing that comes up. It's unavoidable. But Fight Test is not just inspired by Father and Son — it’s a tracing-paper copy. And Wayne Coyne doesn’t stop at the melody. He borrows Stevens’ soft-spoken voice, his scraggly-beard mysticism, and his knack for disguising banality as profundity. That theft is a fitting emblem for the whole album, which takes the Flaming Lips’ history of chaos and eccentricity and runs it through a filter until only the safest, most palatable parts remain. Mortality is reduced to a Hallmark koan on Do You Realize?? Lyrics that are passable as single lines, become embarrassingly procedural as couplets: "She has to discipline her body." The ecstatic messiness that once made them a threat to alt-rock convention is smoothed into a “psychedelic pop” template that thousands of festival bands would later Xerox. The live experience follows suit. Gone are the days of Coyne coating his face in blood capsules, a grotesque but genuine commitment to spectacle. In its place: carnival distractions. Mascot costumes, confetti, a man in a hamster ball rolling across his fans like a germophobe’s parody of crowdsurfing. Even Yoshimi P-We herself, a genuinely feral drummer with OOIOO and Boredoms (a better live act than Flaming Lips to my mind), is turned into a cartoon heroine, her wildness replicated in miniature by Steven Drozd on the title track. The abandon is gone; what’s left is 'good fun,' which is another way of saying nothing is at stake. The timing made sense. Recorded between 2000 and 2002, the album tried to bottle post-millennial optimism, as if cheer alone could stave off the War on Terror. But that optimism reads, in retrospect, as retreat: a band that once threatened genuine disorder and danger choosing instead to play comforter-in-chief. Two decades later, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots is remembered as the Flaming Lips’ breakthrough. But listen closely and it sounds more like their surrender. Pink Robots 5 Flaming Lips 2 Producer Dave Fridmann’s trademark hard-edged drums and funny noises belie just how dull is the music on this album. The melodies, when they aren’t borrowed from Cat Stevens, have a lumbering gracelessness that I was going to compare to the work of Oasis but truthfully even when I recalled the rudimentary melodic work of Liam’s songs - Little James or Songbird - it does not capture the musical lifelessness of a melody like ‘Are You a Hypnotist?’. Here is one of the most puzzling sets of failed attempts I have come across, and it is all the more puzzling for the enthusiasm which many people (mostly Americans I think) have greeted this album for over twenty years. The title track well captures at least part of the puzzle. It is neither fish nor fowl. Coming on, superficially, like a Studio Ghibli theme song by making plain character sketching the meat of the lyric, but there is no commitment to the character or concept - the second verse adds little to the first but ‘vitamins’. It’s a faint sketch - not an animation. More importantly, it fatally lacks real commitment to any audience - not animated and earnest enough for a child, not winking or amusing enough for an adult. It is a pound shop Totoro. ‘One More Robot’ suffers from the same problems. There is little but blank (and unpoetic) generalities about robots. Where is the drama and detail? It is a pound shop Jed the Humanoid. The puzzle of Wayne Coyne can be found here too. He comes off as a half-assed children’s entertainer, twee sure, but where are the exaggerated vocal and facial gestures that really capture and hold the wain’s attention? He leaves that all up to Dave Fridmann’s bag of funny noises and they can’t carry that burden. Wayne couldn’t pull off 2 minutes at a birthday party before kids would go missing. He ought not to be much of an entertainer of adults either. Setting aside the witless sawing at acoustic guitar and the melodic waddling, we are left with the favourite talking point of this album’s many champions - the Philosophy. For Wayne Coyne, you know, has insights about life and love and the universe to drop; most notably on ‘Do You Realise?’ I think the appeal of this musically putrid bore of a song must reside in its philosophical contribution - for many listeners it plainly succeeds in neatly papering over the gaping lacuna at the heart of Barney the Dinosaur’s account of human existence. But let me speak up for Barney. Sure, he never looked our mortality full in the face, but unlike Wayne Coyne he could do a good voice and I’m sure Barney mentioned the beautiful face thing more than once. 1.5/5

"We can’t stop it, we can’t slow it down!" Roadside Picnic, The Strugatsky Brothers Anton Bruckner famously disowned two of his first three symphonies - one dismissed outright as ungiltig (“invalid”). Brahms, too, withheld early efforts. Kraftwerk made a similar move: their first three albums have never been reissued, the band choosing instead to pretend their story begins with Autobahn. It is a shame. While their earliest work remains little more than legend, the bootleg of Ralf und Florian shows a group still exploratory but already closing in on themselves. Autobahn is really cut from the same cloth. Like Ralf und Florian, it was produced by Conny Plank and still carries the incense of krautrock’s hippie aesthetic - flutes, synthesisers, drifting soundscapes. The difference is focus. Here Kraftwerk commit to programme music: compositions that mirror the modern world, an approach that would define them album after album. For all the band’s later reputation as mechanical and remote, Autobahn is surprisingly human. The 22-minute title track may be as long as a traffic jam, but at least it moves. What saves it is a sense of lightness and wonder: the imagined scenery flashing by, the bright detours, the generosity of spirit that keeps monotony from becoming despair. Once we are off the motorway, things get looser. Kometenmelodien 1 drifts uncertainly; it is never clear whether we are watching the comet or inside it. Its sequel is leaner, more charming, with a buoyant optimism that speaks of 1970s West Germany at its most hopeful. The album closes on Morgenspaziergang: after a night of stargazing, the car is abandoned for a morning walk. Birds chirp, brooks babble - though all conjured electronically, save for a lone flute that might just belong to Pan himself. For all the talk of Kraftwerk as robots, this is an album that ends not with machines but with nature, however reimagined. Kraftwerk’s motorway vision invites comparison to Roadside Picnic, the Strugatsky brothers’ 1972 novel that later inspired Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Both works emerged from opposite sides of the Iron Curtain, yet they circle around similar questions: how do human beings inhabit landscapes reshaped by technology, and how do we navigate the uncanny in the everyday? Where the Strugatskys’ Zone is unsettling, hazardous, a place where the familiar turns strange, Kraftwerk’s Autobahn offers a counterpoint. The road becomes a site of wonder rather than dread, its repetitions tempered by optimism, its artificial soundscape suffused with warmth. Kraftwerk would go on to make sharper, more disciplined music. Yet the humanity closing Autobahn - the warmth of the Plank years - is essential to understanding their trajectory. Later they would present themselves as Die Mensch-Maschine, men as machines. Here, at least, they remain men. But specifically German men. In that sense, their disavowal of early albums resembles Bruckner’s own self-pruning: both sought to define what was truly representative of their art. But where Bruckner’s legacy points upward to spires of faith, Kraftwerk’s looks to motorway pylons and music that is programme-driven, worldly, and resolutely modern. 2.5 _Duke of York: My lord, most humbly on my knee I beg the leading of the vaward. Henry V: Take it, brave York._ Henry V (Act 4, scene 3) Being first is everything. You’re a winner before you even start. You are verifiably brave, so you’re automatically a hero. Shakespeare doesn’t record how well the Duke of York actually fought, but in any case it wasn’t well enough to not be one of the 29 Englishmen that contrived to get killed at Agincourt while the French were getting pwned to the tune of 10,000 dead. Kraftwerk, I understand, are ideally evaluated in the light of other people’s artistic achievements; posterity is looking at the whole battle and the important thing is that David Bowie, prominent among the victorious, defeated the French. I respect that analysis but, at the same time, I listened to Autobahn today for the first time and I can’t help recording that in my view Kraftwerk did not fight particularly well. First off, Kraftwerk’s efforts seem to have done little for the recorder. Morgenspaziergang comes off like a rewrite of the Forest Murmurs/Waldvogel scene from Siegfried for a school project - a terrific idea for which I would certainly award the students involved a top grade. I am not sure it connects meaningfully with the rest of Autobahn, but I did like it. That said - I am miffed that apparently the credits (or at least the English credits) for this album have the instrument recorded as ‘flute’. People don’t recognise the sound of a recorder when it’s played well, poor maligned little instrument. Despised in the classroom. Erased from pop history. Much of the rest of the album is a driving hazard. I listened in the car and honestly wasn’t far off pulling over. The synths, soft-edged and absorbingly grainy, have a somnolent effect. Snoozen, snoozen, snoozen auf der Autobahn. It’s an impressive track all the same although perhaps in the end embodying a cold and monumental character despite the glimpses of humour over the 20 minutes. This is what I thought Kraftwerk sounded like and it is easy to respect. I found Kometenmelodie 2 harder to respect. There is a sense of the band cosying up to the listener here in the tracks conventional chord progressions and even-phrased chirpiness. It sounds dated. It sounds a bit silly to be honest. All the same - it certainly isn’t difficult to listen to (assuming you aren’t driving), but like the title track, it is surely impossible to really love and return to. And isn’t that one of the chief risks you take when you claim the prize of the leading of the vaward? We thank Kraftwerk for their sacrifice. R.I.P Duke of York. “Heroes”. 2/5

Although it lacks both chart hits and Brian Eno’s presence, Country Life may be Roxy Music’s most consistently good listen from start to finish. Without Eno’s excessive looping, avant-garde diversions — as heard on The Bogus Man or Sea Breezes say — the band retains its art-rock edge while focusing on taut, straight ahead songs. It isn’t yet the sleek, sophisticated pop of Ferry’s later persona, but strikes a confident balance of glamour and grit. With Ferry's libido not yet fully in control, the band feels like a true ensemble, evidently enjoying themselves, even if not doing anything exceptional. I first encountered Roxy Music through several early tracks covered by the supergroup The Venus in Furs on the Velvet Goldmine soundtrack. Among them, Bitter-Sweet stood out: a surreal, menacing concoction of cabaret and glam that remains one of their wildest, most compelling songs, even on a more disciplined record like this one. Though Country Life is not yet Roxy Music being smooth, it is, I think, the smoothest listen from beginning to end. To that point, Billy Corgan did a pretty good live version of Out of the Blue in 2001, proving that there is something to these songs, even without Ferryesque sex appeal. 3 I don’t think much of this record to be honest. Side 2 is certainly much more interesting than side 1 - the contortions of Bitter-Sweet and Triptych almost make up for the Slade-with-manners of All I Want is You and If It Takes All Night. The songs aren’t bad, they just aren’t very good. 2/5

“No, I'm not angry, just disappointed.” Stephen Lynn, Brief Encounter (1945) On Lil’ Beethoven, Sparks asked: What Are All These Bands So Angry About? They were thinking of Limp Bizkit, Korn, Puddle of Mudd - nu-metal acts raging in pre‑9/11 America, where plenty of young millionaires were breaking things in the supposed “End of History.” By contrast, the British punks of the 70s had plenty of reason to be angry. Declan McManus was trying to ignite a career in an unstable Britain: the Three-Day Week, the looming Winter of Discontent, and the constant shadow of the Troubles, which touched his own family in Dungannon. But McManus wasn’t exactly a punk, and by his own admission, he wasn’t even angry. He told Nick Kent that the motivation for the songs on My Aim Is True were “guilt and revenge.” But that's not strictly true either. Although he would go on to cheat on his first wife, Mary Burgoyne, he hadn't done so at this point – he's hardly a stud; he looks like me, as Dave Lee Roth might observe. And nor was he notorious enough to have made any significant enemies, despite the little black book of lying journalists he told Kent he kept. It was good copy though. Proof that the 22 year-old Costello had spent more time reading rock magazines than philandering or conspiring. We tend to think of guilt and revenge as the feelings of the small man, but they are the luxuries of the pampered king who has enough time to ruminate and scheme. Up until now, Elvis – his own shot at the title of king – had been messing about in useless bands (Flip City!) and working for a cosmetics company (“Spent all my time in a vanity factory”): guilt and revenge are just fantasies and he's not angry, he's disappointed. Frustrated that he isn’t a rock star, that he isn’t yet a professional musician like his father, that he’s stuck in a dull job and a young marriage. For Costello, frustration proved just as combustible as anger Costello knew better than most what the life of a working musician meant. His father, Ross McManus, was a professional singer, as were his grandfather and great‑grandfather before him. He understood music as a job, but still a more desirable job than Elizabeth Arden’s offices. When he walked out for good on July 9, 1977, weeks before the album’s release, My Aim Is True bore the sound of someone forcing open the door to that career, equal parts defiance and desperation. Welcome to the Working Week makes this all very plain: the person whose photo is being rhythmically admired, whether glamour model or some celebrity wanker, still has to put in the hours and, in time, the thrill will go and death will approach. What is the difference between a page-three girl and the shop girl that inspired Alison? Both disappointed in their own ways. Everyone has to punch the clock. With this personal insight, why does he want it so much? And why does he want “anyone that (he) ever desired”? It's a compulsion and an occupational hazard. One might imagine that financial and critical success might satisfy you, but look at what charts and at how journalists lie. The trick, then, is to find some artistic satisfaction between the press junkets and the tour bus and the chart failures. McManus has the advantage over this father that, not only is he a singer, but a songwriter. It's much easier to ignore the drawbacks of the business, if you can trust your artistic vision – if your aim is true. My Aim is True was a moderate success in the UK and invisible in the US. Obviously, enough of the songs have stayed in Costello's setlist over the decades that they must represent something of a success for him. There are several he would be a fool to deny: Red Shoes and Less Than Zero are essential works. Alison, of course, was covered shortly after recording by Linda Ronstadt, which confirmed Costello as a successful songwriter. However, the record does not confirm him, yet, as a rock star. Nick Lowe's production is thin and the decision to include those background whispers on I'm Not Angry was a horrible mistake. Sneaky Feelings and Pay It Back are weak writing efforts, while Mystery Dance, Miracle Man, and No Dancing are too indebted to Costello's early influence from Bruce Springsteen. Partially, we can attribute this to Clover, the backing band brought in to support him. Despite John McFee's now timeless guitar parts on Alison and Red Shoes, the band settles on a generic rockabilly shuffle for most of the album. Of course, Costello will make a career of genre exercises, exploring the wide range and depth of his interests. Yet, it never sounds like mere weekending. His encyclopedic knowledge and avaricious appetites are the qualities that allow him to source his artistic satisfactions – the satisfaction is in trying everything! On this record, Costello isn’t exploring his full range - he’s constrained. The sessions were quick, with musicians who barely knew him, and what they shared was a common vocabulary of country, rockabilly, and roots. It works, but Costello would refine it, and do it better, later. Indeed, he will do everything better later. The signs are there in I'm Not Angry. The toms and keyboards in the pre-chorus sound like something the Attractions might do only a year later. However, when that band starts playing live, they will elongate and distort that song, taking it from just under three minutes in length to six minutes – even while they are increasing the tempo on everything and ending shows after twenty five minutes. In performance, Costello teases the title, but rarely finishes: “I'm not... I'm not...” he sings. The press were calling him an Angry Young Man, but he doesn't even have to dignify that by concluding: “I'm not angry anymore.” He's over it. By that point, on the second album, he was a rock star. He probably wasn't disappointed by it yet, but he hadn't really got his bearings. In the song, the protagonist is left downstairs listening to another man's success with a woman above. Now Costello is the man upstairs and the rest of us are the ones listening. He would, as the title promised, find his aim. But on his debut, he is still the ruffian on the stair, steadying his sights, figuring out how to break into the room. Not angry. Just disappointed. And all the more dangerous for it. 3 There are at least half a dozen terrific songs on Elvis Costello's debut. That, along with the fact that he arrived on record fully formed as a confident and distinctive singer, are the thrills of this album. That's nearly enough to be honest, shouldn't I just take my head out of the gift horse's mouth? Well I have no idea how highly I would have thought of this album in 1977, but knowing that the Attractions are coming rather inclines me to harshness on the band that play here. Honestly it is all sound, energetic accompaniment but it does consist of comparatively undistinguished musical gestures - the colour and detail that the Attractions would bring with them is conspicuously absent. The production, raw and often live-sounding, adds to the sense of a phenomenon that isnt quite realised yet; like a Beatles Cavern Club recording. So to an extent the album feels like a series of pencil sketches - all impressive and some exquisite (Welcome…, Alison, Red Shoes, Less than Zero). Knowing the oil on canvas that was coming though it's difficult to look back on it and say honestly that My Aim is True is a truly great album. I'm glad we discounted Watching the Detectives here as well. All weekend I listened to it in sequence every time of course (how could i resist?) but listening analytically i was struck more than before that it truly doesn't belong here. Sure Andrew Bodnar and Steve Goulding aren't the Attractions either but their playing is still far, far too exciting (and the recording too careful and intimate) for that track to sit comfortably alongside the rest of My Aim is True. 3/5

I'm not arguing whether this is country, but I don't think this was even a modern sound in 1962. The big band arrangements are syrupy, but they are not really hook led. The backing vocals are excruciating. Ray Charles' voice is great, but I'm not sure this weird experiment in turning country into diabetes is the best use of that voice. 1.5 This is awful. The brash richness of the horns by themselves would make for an over-egged pudding but oh God…oh Jesus Christ, what sublime horror this set has in store over 70+ minutes. The strings are a water-boarding with pure syrup. They didn’t even ask me any questions. The pièce de Room 101, however, is the backing vocals. Volume Two teases you for the first few tracks with the idea that They might not return for the sequel. ‘You are my sunshine’ and ‘Don’t tell me your troubles’ have a pair of recognisably human backing singers doing quality work amid a few tracks with Ray duetting with himself or with no backing singers at all. It’s the best stretch of the album. But from ‘Take these chains from my heart’ onwards They return for their most relentless, merciless showing all the way to the bitter end. I am referring to that crushingly antiseptic sweep of reverbed, gender-neutral backing singing that typically opens the track by cooing the title of the song - like a torturer naming the next implement for the edification of the chap strapped to the table before him - then Oooooos a lot in the background before signing off with the title of the song once more. The torture chamber aside - this style of backing vocal is most redolent, with the assistance of the strings, of stepford wives escalating with fixed smiles, dead eyes, and absent souls, through the shopping mall. Perhaps it is this more than anything else that leaves the impression that Ray Charles is merely selling you something. Volumes 1 & 2, together for the first time in history in this essential set, available now at incredible value for only 74 minutes and 19 seconds of your time. I do like that the impossible-to-number backing singers - could be 3, could be 20, who knows? - sign off the entire project cooing the words ‘Hang your head in shame’ even if like everything else they sing they don’t mean it. It’s just words. There is no shame to be found here. 1.5/5

If you’ve ever wondered where Stevie Wonder found the idea for “Ebony and ivory, side by side on my piano keyboard,” it surely comes from his fondness for chromatic phrases. Between those runs, his harmonic extensions, the sudden backing-vocal interjections, and that woozy pitch-shifting synth, Wonder’s arrangements are often murky with sophistication. Like another, far lesser songwriter, Nick Boyle, he sometimes floods the keyboard with so many notes that the vocal melody gets subsumed. He may be writing songs simply because that’s the popular musical mode, but what he really wants, it seems, is simply to mess about. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. It can be frustrating, but there are worse sins than making dense music for your own enjoyment. Still, the album’s obvious standout – Superstition - works precisely because of its restraint. Harmonically static, yes, but built on two interlocking keyboard parts of dazzling economy. No backing vocals, no pitch-shift, just a sly chromatic horn figure in the middle. Nothing murky here: the instruments are cleanly separated, every gesture feels purposeful, and Wonder sings with real gusto. The lyric may be silly, but fair play: it’s an underexplored subject tackled with conviction. I'd never considered the peril of the 13 month-old baby. Elsewhere, though, the lyrics reveal how little Wonder seems to care about what he’s singing. When he leans into daring subject matter or phrasing, as on Big Brother - “Vote me President of your Soul” - we’re drawn back to the music. It's a lot of fun. But most of the record defaults to love songs, and these are where his limitations show. Consider the album’s opener: “You are the sunshine of my life, That’s why I’ll always be around.” The metaphor collapses immediately - what does “always being around” have to do with sunshine? It’s lazy and poorly thought through. Other expressions of devotion - “looking for a pure love,” “when I fall in love, it will be forever” - are naïve to the point of parody. Nothing in his writing suggests an understanding of the complexities of human romance. Instead, the lyrical clichés compound the musical schmaltz with sentimental schmaltz. Because Wonder is so prodigiously talented, it’s these oddities and indulgences that jar most. What’s with the stray vocalisations on You Are the Sunshine of My Life? Why does Maybe Your Baby drag on so long? What’s the enduring appeal of the pitch-shifter? These are the details that stick out when you listen critically. Would they grate in another context? Some of them. But the fascination is in the friction: Stevie Wonder can dazzle and frustrate in equal measure. Talking Book is the sound of an accomplished musician at play, and sometimes, play is exactly what it sounds like. When he talks about love, it is pure childishness. Perhaps this arrested development is the result of being a child prodigy. 3 Stevie Wonder is alright. His music is cool, if a little overwrought. The electric piano and synth sounds he picks are silly. They are hardly fit to accompany a race in Mariokart 64, nevermind a nebula of maudlin insights about Special Ladies. He writes about some other stuff here to be fair, also without poetry or wit. I am certain he hasn’t read 1984. 2.5/5

Once you concede that all honky-tonk is novelty, the question is not “is this authentic?” but “how long before the joke palls?” These songs are not testimonies, they are sideshows, stunt doubles for lived experience. They are padded bras of emotion. Buck Owens declaims Streets of Laredo with chesty solemnity, the chest itself buzzing like a fridge. It sounds great, but it is also hilarious. We are supposed to hear gravitas. What we get is pantomime gravitas: a cowboy hat worn indoors. The band plays with immaculate snap, the production gleams, yet everything is excused by the wink. Honky-tonk never resists it. Owens flashes smile upon smile until charm curdles. Wink too often and too quickly, and you give yourself epilepsy. Owens, perpetually sparkling, is not far off. 2 Obviously there is a cap on how high you can rate this sort of thing because it isn’t quite asking to be taken seriously. But I did manage to listen to this twice. The band are great - I especially liked the fiddle playing on Maiden’s Prayer. Enjoyed Wham Bam a lot. I danced to it in the kitchen with the woman with whom I live in sin. 2/5

One of us said of Exile on Main St. that the Stones were having more fun recording it than we were having listening, but that the surplus was infectious. With Ragged Glory the reverse applies. Neil Young and Crazy Horse are plainly delighted, but their glee is sealed off, the private merriment of men who have known each other too long. The sound is less rock and roll than a family function band: oldhands getting back together after decades because the guitarist’s son is marrying the drummer’s daughter. The speeches drag on, cousins pair off in the corners. Grim, insular, faintly incestuous. Even the garage of this garage rock has been converted into a wedding venue for hire, complete with fairy lights and a stall buffet. And yet what we traditionally call garage rock is fast, raucous, reckless. Ragged Glory is none of these things. It is plodding, rickety, shapeless: beer-warmed sludge dressed up as spontaneity. The band grin, slap backs, toast themselves: "Still got it, man." The listener is left at the trestle tables, picking through the congealed coleslaw, wondering how to sneak out before the next interminable jam. At least you're only here as someone's plus one, no one will notice you're gone. 1 It’s easy to intuit that Neil Young is the underdog. His voice, thin, shaky and strained is like the voice of a kid in his first band nervously giving singing a go because none of his mates will. His guitar playing, mere enthusiastic hacking much of time, similarly invites the listener’s pity. Crazy Horse are a good fit for Young because they spark the same effect in the listener; you want to root for the underdog. Ragged Glory has the quality of sitting in while your dad and his friends rehearse; they always wanted to start a rock band but career and family and not being any good at music got in the way. They are giving it their best now, lumbering through basic riffs and three chord sequences over dragging, desperate timekeeping by the man who always wanted a kit and when his last bonus cheque came in at work thought ‘fuck getting new carpet for the stairs, this is my time’. How can you not be on their side when the Spirit of Rock n Roll commits them to going on for 10 minutes at those same riffs and 3 chords? That’s it lads. Keep it going. You can do it. They had a dream once and here you are glimpsing it. It’s touching. The only problem is that this is Neil Young‘s 20th album and his 6th with Crazy Horse. Give yourself a shake listener, you’ve been tricked by Neil Young, the Godfather of Lies. This is an indulgent fantasy of rock primitivism by a bunch of privileged imbeciles. It didn’t have to be this way. The songs could have been more sculpted. There was no elemental compulsion for 10 minutes long jams. Just a bunch of musicians experienced enough to know that all of what they’re playing over 6, 8, or 10 minutes is purely masturbatory after 4 minutes and not caring that they’re wasting your time. I will acknowledge that the drummer quite legitimately sucks. No illusion there. It would be acceptable really if lurking inside some of those long, smug jams there were decent two or three minute songs - but honestly there isn’t even one good song on this album. Shite. 1/5

Better than Ragged Glory, but Neil Young still baffles. He is not a good singer, though sometimes almost characterful. He can be nearly poetic – “the aimless blade of science” – before collapsing into bathos – “slashed the pearly gates” – or plain cliché - "There's more to the picture that meets the eye." Thrasher is almost Everybody’s Talkin’. The album and songs sound thrown together, the lyrics hardly crafted, but Young has clearly been thinking long and hard about some of the themes. Still, “better to burn out than to fade away” is hardly an insight, and Young does not seem convinced himself: the acoustic version fades away, the electric one burns out. Which is it? The first sounds like a demo awaiting a decent band, the second like a rehearsal waiting for the band to get out of its own way. Neither is the finished article. Why bother? 2 This is survivable. With Neil’s lyrics - which are always turgid and childlike in some degree, never elegant, never truly poetic - everything he does runs somewhere around a fine line between passable and boring. He gets away with it here through the novelty of presenting an album in two halves - a soft, sweet acoustic half and a fuzzy rock band half. If all was done in one style then the album would be intolerable. Christ that drumming is bad though. And the singing not great, the guitar playing pretty bad and the sweet West Coast backing vocals always misplaced. Who thought the handclaps on Welfare Mothers was a good idea? Or anything on Welfare Mothers? Shite. 2/5

I thought I would have reams to say about what I once called my favourite Smiths album, but here we are. It is more expansive and varied than its predecessors, but that expansion is really just the sound of the band pulling apart. Johnny Marr had a fight with producer, Stephen Street, about the old sound. Bent on abandoning the jingle-jangle that defined the Smiths, he reached for keyboards. Unfortunately, his piano playing is exactly what you would expect from a brilliant guitarist moonlighting: a right hand bouncing octave shapes, a left hand twiddling its thumbs. Interesting only insofar as it isn’t. Legend has it that Morrissey’s request to cover Cilla Black detonated the partnership. Marr didn’t want to play twee pop, though what he did want to play remains a mystery. Certainly the fascimiles of past glories sound a little tired., the experiments inconsistent. Yet when Morrissey finds the right perch, the songs are great: Death of a Disco Dancer is redeemed by its tuneless piano (better than anything Marr played with intent on the instrument); Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loves Me is magnificent despite those ghastly fake strings, and I Won’t Share You is an elegy worthy of closing the book. When it fails, as with Paint a Vulgar Picture, Morrissey can hardly be blamed: Marr's big chords are silly. Marr was wise enough to treat this contractual obligation as a laboratory, but it showed how uncertain he was of his own direction. He went on to be the perfect guest star, adding jangle where it was wanted. Without the jangle – Midnite Vultures by Beck; Naked by Talking Heads - you scarcely noticed he was there. I wasn't expecting to have such a negative response to an album that I genuinely like a lot, but there you go! Their best album is still Louder Than Bombs. 3 We have a Karaoke night looming. This album put me in mind of it because The Smiths seem to me to be in a sort of Karaoke mode here. Part of the effect is a sense of increased self-awareness, Morrissey mugging Morrissey with perfect confidence, Johnny Marr more showy in diversity of sound than on previous albums. Part of the effect is that some of the music sounds inorganic and a little detached from the vocal. I don’t find much in this album to love - indeed it has one of my least favourite Smiths songs on it. Girlfriend in a Coma has always seemed to me the creepiest of songs. Disturbing without being funny, deeply oppressive in its lightness. But it is an impressive album nonetheless. There are distinctive pop songs, arranged and performed with great assurance. There are also some genuinely beautiful moments - Death of a Disco Dancer, Last Night I Dreamt…, I Won’t Share you. And I like the title. 3/5

My friend Aug writes pun-laden comic pieces full of music references. Van Halen and Kiss mostly. American stuff. I usually keep up, but not with a piece called We Got the Beet. I grasped the root vegetable, not the pop song. Never heard of it. Aug was shocked. Perhaps it never made it over here. (I just checked and it didn’t.) I only knew Our Lips Are Sealed via Fun Boy Three, which remains the better version. Jane Wiedlin of the Go-Go’s co-wrote it with Terry Hall during a fleeting tour romance. Both bands recorded it. The British rendering is lusher, gloomier, more apt to the subject. The Go-Go’s take is lighter, frothier, determinedly Californian. Inexplicable really, as though the affair itself had no real tangible effect. That distinction seems to frame the whole record. American new wave here is all cheerful affect. But it is less well-crafted than the Cars, less arch than the Waitresses, less shiny than the Bangles. Harmonies nod to the retro, but without the B-52s’ bravado. Even the eccentricities feel half-hearted: This Town could pass for Wall of Voodoo, but only if they toned themselves down. On How Much More they sing “tonight” until you’re weary, then title the next track Tonite as if one repetition weren’t enough. It is pop by rote, like a salad assembled from pre-chopped bits. The Go-Go’s are all surface, all bounce, all beat. Aug would say they had the beet, though I’d add it was more garnish than substance. (I also know nothing about salad, so don't concern yourself too much about that last line). 2 This is pleasant enough. There are some neat twists on procedure in these numbers and everything is done very slick. I can’t disapprove of anything, I just can’t remember anything either. It’s like lemonade that is all fizz and no flavour. Where’s the lemons? 1.5/5

“Too much confectionery, too rich: I choke on such nutritious images.” 1.5 The title track is very nice. I know it from somewhere (although certainly not 11 minutes of it). As for the rest, well…I held the line for half an hour, so my call couldn’t really have been important to them could it? 1.5/5

Structurally, it calls to mind the talking head inserts of Spike Lee's first joint, She's Gotta Have It, mixed with the Cindy Shermanesque character portraits of Tori Amos' Strange Little Girls. However, it lacks the depth of either of those, reducing human sexuality to the transactional and desire to objectification. While the record ultimately admits the sadness of such a viewpoint, it gets there after much wearying, distancing, dehumanising language and without any seeming sense of how depressing the whole thing is. Why is it the generalised, objectified "That money keeps that pussy wet?" rather than the specific, humane "Your money keeps my pussy wet?" Maybe this is just an observation on the materialist vernacular of much contemporary r'n'b, but Audre Lorde was very clear that the master's tools will not dismantle the master's house. Especially if your master is R. Kelly: filling up every inch of sonic real estate with vocals, believing so completely in your voice that you will sing anything, however unmusical the meter. I kept hearing the cramped and indulgent I Admit It throughout, which I'm sure isn't what Jazmine Sullivan wants. But, then, I'm not entirely sure what she wants: not the banal, nihlisitc worldview expressed by her characters but never challenged. 2 Well, it’s 32 minutes long and I can’t say I was bored exactly. Insofar as its quality is staked on its music, I can say I don’t think very much of this album. This style of RnB with its showy vocal sophistications of dull, stock melodies, can fuck off generally, regardless of the technical quality of whoever is doing them and the number of overdubs. It’s not good music - this is posing. Insofar as this album’s quality depends on the power and boldness of its presentation of a multifaceted account of female experience of sex and relationships, as many glowing reviews of it suggest…well I still don’t think much of it. The half-formed ideas and utterances that appear in the ‘tales’ along with the half dozen songs that riff on their themes would seem to me to add up to an account of human experience that is, while not exactly niche, definitively an American experience. The sadness of this account of destructive hedonism and transactional sex as ‘empowerment’ - briefly glimpsed at in the final ‘tale’ - is underpinned with a sort of body horror. There is an almost Cronenbergian fusion of the female body and capitalist accumulation, especially in the second half of the album: ‘ima take all I can get/ that money keeps that pussy wet’ (Price Tags) ‘To be honest…money makes me cum’ (Precious’ Tale) ‘Ima find me a rapper/ He gon' buy me a booty…/ I’m hoping these titties can get me out the city’ (The Other Side) While this is territory long acknowledged in RnB and Rap (TLC’s No Scrubs and Missy Elliott sprung to mind) it is striking here both for its viscerality and its nihilism. Nothing is ironic (as far as I can detect) and nothing is analysed or problematised. It is simply all dumped on the listener as someone’s ‘truth’. This album, itself product and conspicuous branding/re-branding exercise (‘Heaux’), might perhaps make itself ridiculous trying to supply meaningful critiques of the soulless, dehumanising feeding-frenzy in late stage Capitalism in America. Nevertheless - that is plainly the major antagonist in this horror film of a record and utterly, horrifyingly unacknowledged. Perhaps I am being naive here, forget that I have heard very little RnB from the last 20 years - I have heard very little popular music at all from the last 20 years. Is it all this depressing? 2/5

In the 2000s, visiting friends who had emigrated to London from Northern Ireland meant learning that my jokes didn’t travel. In Belfast, you could trade black jokes about bombings and kneecappings across the Protestant–Catholic divide and find yourself, oddly enough, closer to your opposite number. In London, the onlookers would respond to our ironic exchanges with polite horror. What was to us the hiss of air escaping from a pressure cooker sounded to them like we were tapping the cooker with a hammer. Gallows humour is a form of intimacy, and intimacy can be terrifying to the uninitiated. That, for me, is the shock of Johnny Cash’s At Folsom Prison. The songs land with the jarring force of jokes overheard at the wrong table. 25 Minutes to Go turns the countdown to the gallows into a comedy routine. The Wall leaves its protagonist in a heap of suicide and barbed wire, with applause in its wake. Cocaine Blues is less a morality tale than a barfly’s boast, like something an oul fella might roll out at the Felons, knowing he’ll be indulged. What we hear is not a series of moral lessons, but the jokes prisoners tell each other about the things they’ve already seen, already done, or already survived. And when I listen in, I don’t know whether to laugh, flinch, or call a meeting. There is certainly some gross about it. The effect is not unlike the “Ooh Ah Up the Ra!” chorus at the Féile an Phobail. Politicians clutch their pearls, commentators scribble furiously, but the singers are not holding a seminar on constitutional politics. They’re singing a song they half-mean and half-don’t, and the power lies in the ambiguity. Cash’s prison record anticipates the same dynamic that later scandalised America with gangsta rap: the pantomime of menace, grotesque bluff dressed as authenticity. The audience knows it isn’t entirely sincere, but neither is it entirely insincere. That’s the point. It’s not sociology; it’s supposed to be a good time. For someone, anyway. Of course, not everything fits neatly under the banner of gallows humour. When Cash drops the word “bitch”, it doesn’t sound like black comedy at all. It sounds like my Uncle Francie, who unfailingly referred to his ex-wife as “The Bitch” and meant it with the sort of commitment you could only envy if you were in a particularly bad marriage yourself. There’s nothing survivalist about it, no wink of complicity - just plain nastiness. I didn’t like it when he was alive and I don’t much care for it now. The performance of nastiness easily becomes the performing of nasty acts: the tit-for-tat murders of the East Coast/West Coast feud are testament to that. One suspects, though, that the in-group, whether prisoners in Folsom, festival-goers in the Falls Park, or gang members in Compton, aren’t terribly bothered about the out-group’s opinion. They’ve already seen enough to treat disapproval as background noise. That leaves the listener - or me at least - adrift. How do I engage with the problematic elements of the performance? One way is to treat them as pantomime, to recognise the performance as performance, bounded by humour, held within the magic space of art. So, is Johnny Cash, then, exploiting his audience - the authentic prison response - to heighten his outlaw persona? Or is he humanising those men, letting us hear their laughter and their recognition? Perhaps both. By singing Greystone Chapel, a song written by an inmate, he cedes the microphone for a moment, allowing that inner world to speak. Yet, at this remove, far from California in 1967, and – for me – far, too, from God, the song’s appeal to redemption can sound unconvincing. And yet, for all the gallows gags and criminal boasts, the loudest cheer on the album comes not for the blood or the bluster but for Jackson, the hit duet. Maybe that’s wishful listening on my part, but I swear I can hear it. Marital squabbles, thwarted egos, love that doubles as war… suddenly the private jokes of prisoners become the shared joke of everyone: not universal, perhaps, but less insular, less bound to the survival rituals of a closed world. In that moment, the salt circle opens up (yet will be unbroken). Everyone knows what it is to argue, to boast, to love. Indeed, for my money, Cash gets better as he gets older and ages away from the outlaw Man in Black performance and becomes the husband and widower of June. A kinder partner than my Uncle Francie. Perhaps he achieved the redemption of Greystone Chapel himself. 2 Prisons are like holiday camps these days. Books, paints, games consoles. We need another Johnny Cash to step up and remind these crims that it’s a punishment. 1/5

The trick of Low that manages to shock repeatedly is the omissions, the caesuras, the moments of unexpected less. In comparison, the songs of "Heroes" are much fuller. More complete and, in that way, conventional. Whereas Low shuddered into instrumental abstraction, the collection of wordless tracks on Side 2 of this album suggests an absence of ideas: failure to complete an album of more conventional songwriting and repeating the model of the previous record. Absence of ideas is the enemy of absence as idea: when you have no ideas, you throw everything at the problem. Bowie, Eno, Fripp, Visconti, Alomar, Davis, Murray, and Maass are massively talented and a lot of what they throw sticks. It is still, after all, an incredible record. But is also after Low. And, after hundreds of listens, the only thing that still surprises me every time is the second iteration of "Get me to the doctor!" on Blackout. The first iteration is followed by a slew of verbiage, but, after the second... nothing, no vocal, just forgotten rhythm section. Unexpected less. Four stars. One star absent. 4 No matter how familiar this album has become over the years it is difficult to judge “Heroes” without thinking ‘Low’. “Heroes” side 1 songs are musically leering and thick with lyrics - grand, only that Low’s side 1 seems to achieve more impact with less. Sound and Vision is a masterpiece of concision - a paragon of pop music; the title track of “Heroes” has its bloviation fatally underlined by the release of a single edit which is not only entirely sufficient at almost half the length but is on a par with Sound and Vision in its sublimity. Then “Heroes” ambient side actually has less musical detail than Low’s and yet feels heavier. Moss Garden’s 5 minutes go on far longer than Warsawa’s 6 1/2. With all that podium-placing out of the way - the conceit of a ‘pop’ side 1 and an ‘ambient’ side 2 aside, these albums really aren’t alike. And, by any other standards, “Heroes” is really very good. I’d like to praise it in more detail but I have to go listen to Low now. 3.5/5

If Norah Jones is a digestive biscuit - bland enough to dissolve before you’ve even noticed it’s in your mouth - and Céline Dion a vat of schmaltz dumped over your dinner, then k.d. lang’s Canadianised Americana, adulterated with Métis accordions and Parisian torch song touches, falls somewhere between the two. It's more butter than straight schmaltz and most of that is on the lens that took the soft-focused cover photo. But, as it happens, a digestive biscuit slathered in butter is a quiet indulgence of mine: humble at base, but I'm willing to let several make me sick. The songs themselves are so earnestly intimate they border on the absurd, but lang’s soft masculinity is charming, like a teenage girl's sexless love object. There's no threat here. The production is polished, though full of questionable choices. So too with the composition: on Season of Hollow Soul, lang repeats the same grammatical error as on Live and Let Die. It's faintly embarrassing, but it's preferrable to some of the more banal sentiments. You quickly learn the lesson of too much seemingly humble indulgence. 1.5 k d lang’s singing voice is as nondescript a voice as I’ve ever heard. So marked is the effect of vocal blankness that I feel a pang of doubt about writing that because despite having just listened to ten of her songs I can’t recall her voice at all. I am just left with the odd realisation that the English language has no power to capture positively what k d does. The defining qualities are only what isn’t there; accent, personality, edges, colour, air, life. She sang. There is so much else to not care about remembering here. Were there drums? I have no idea. There could have been lots of instruments - I have flashing recollections of violins, double bass, accordion - but their presentation was so clean and precise that they had an unreal quality. Like the bowl of plastic fruit my granny kept on her dining room table. It looked so real. I couldn’t believe it wasn’t. I tried a grape. Later I tried another grape just in case there had been a plastic one there by coincidence the first time. Every grape must have been a fake. The most plastic effect on Ingénue is k d when she does her backing vocals. They map so precisely to the main line and with so little variation in the ease of delivery whether up or down her range that they simply repulse. There is too much control here. Too little air allowed in. It leaves the impression of a very sanitary album. If there were real instruments none of them had any oul pathogens on them. All was safe and inoffensive. I do remember being slightly offended by The Mind of Love. It felt like a weak send-up of Joni Mitchell’s Jonicentrism. Mitchell was self-obsessed sure, but a great artist in her self-interrogations, certainly always good enough that she could never have written anything as trite as: ‘Surely help will arrive soon/ To cure these self-induced wounds/ Why hurt yourself Kathryn?’ So k d’s sneering joke didn’t land as far as I’m concerned. SNL-level stuff. It was meant to be a joke right? Well I don’t really care, let’s forget about it along with almost everything else here. Almost. Because there is one thing that will stay with me from this record. I was in the middle of listening to Season of Hollow Soul. I was thinking that this must already be one of the worst songs I had ever heard; a ghost of some forgotten German cabaret number tortured, half-captured in a summoning circle of pure bleach. Then the sudden wail of the clarinet. I should have seen it coming of course - the genre markers were there. Yet I felt a shiver of anticipatory horror go through me as when a slight, blurred movement in the background of the camera shot shows that the killer is in the house. ‘This couldn’t possibly be about to get worse,’ I told myself in that moment. The grotesque klezmer joke - the sad clown doing the deflating balloon about 6 times in a row - then the song immediately returned to its putrid chorus and hook, like a dog to its vomit. Later I actually listened again with the lyrics up to confirm that Season of Hollow Soul is indeed, objectively, one of the worst songs ever written and I should know because I’ve written a few of them. So that’s not nothing. Even if it’s a bit worse. 0.5/5

The early Bad Seeds albums sound mannered in comparison to the genuine violence and chaos of The Birthday Party. I much prefer the latter. I prefer that to his 90s and 00s Hammer Horror Liberace mode as well. And only his more recent works, exploring the deaths of his sons, is so sincere as the self-loathing adolescent that sang Nick The Stripper. Nick The Stripper isn't on this album and I have no idea why Junkyard was selected over the superior Prayers on Fire or Hee Haw or the Peel Sessions or Drunk on the Pope's Blood. Still, these clattering drums, these needling guitars, and Cave's flagellating awfulness don't deserve to be in the twenty lowest albums on this list. Even if it's not great, it's not boring. 2.5 A funny thing happened to me on the way to the giving this 1 star. First I remembered, on my second listen to Junkyard, that I gave 1 star to Murder Ballads. Now I loathed Murder Ballads and begrudged my second listen to it. To be fair, the only reason I was giving Junkyard a second listen was because it occurred to me that, instead of dismissive contempt, sober deliberation would have a nice irony to it here. Yet I softened to Junkyard on that second listen as I thought of the later Nick Cave album, and not just because Junkyard is 20 minutes shorter. Should I have given Murder Ballads less? Probably, but the recollection as it turned out skewed positively for Junkyard rather than negatively for Murder Ballads. I don’t like Nick Cave, as you know, and I think the core of my dislike of him is the combination of his intellectual self-regard and his being, obviously, an idiot. The prevailing persona Cave has emphasised through most of his career as I have understood it, in my admittedly limited experience of his music, is of a Cohenalike poet struggles to make with God, cursed with good hair, who is obliged to take out his frustrations at being mistaken for a mere pop star by fantasising about murdering women. I find Cave’s melodies laborious. I find the oft-cited idea that he compares to Cohen as a lyricist ridiculous. The Good News about Junkyard, then, is that very little of this criticism applies. There is no pretence to musical depth here. No one, even if they happen to love this record, can pretend that there is anything like a Beefheartish deliberation here. This is the sound of drunk kids breaking into the practice room at night. Look at me lads I’m a drummer, bash bash bash bash lol. Look at me lads, I’m Elvis but also bark like a dog. “Pow pow pow pow pow pow” (Hamlet Pow Pow Pow) “Ho ho ho ho ho ho” (Dead Joe) “Hey hey hey hey hey” (Kiss Me Black) “Shake shake shake shake shake” (6 inch Gold Blade) Lyrically there is still some look at me lads (and girls) I’m a poet who kills women. But it seems to me to be in correct proportion here - there is only 1 part Hamlet to 3 parts Pow pow pow. This musical and lyrical reduction of Cave shows him in his sleekest and, for me, most sympathetic form; as an attention-seeking missile. And a day after k d lang I am anyone’s for their making a dirty lot of noise. 2/5

"Still, here you have a story written with the sole object of inspiring a pleasing terror in the reader; and as I think, that is the true aim of the ghost story." Some Remarks on Ghost Stories, M.R. James. After yesterday's engagement with Junkyard, a gothic rock album that everyone on this site seems to hate, we get to Disintegration, the gothic rock album that everyone - on this site and elsewhere - seems to love. I have admitted before that, while the Cure are among my top five bands, I don't know that they've released a five-star album. Disintegration, laden as it is with garlands from others, is surely the challenge to that. I bought my first copy of Disintegration on the afternoon when I would have my first kiss. She was a lovely goth girl, with Robert Smith's dimpled chin. To situation this memory in early 1999, I'll admit that I bought the album because some character in South Park had called Disintegration "the best album ever," shouting after a winged Kaiju version of Smith. However, the whole interaction was awkward and embarrassing. I wasn't ready for any of it emotionally. I thought I was already in love with a different girl - not a goth, but a quiet and withdrawn. I had also already fallen in love with some of these songs from the live Show album which I'd borrowed from the CD library. Those recordings were leaner, more energetic and the epic cuts, such as Pictures of You, were leavened with shorter, more exuberant tracks from other parts of their career. Let's Go To Bed shouldn't comfortably beside Fascination Street, but it does in the live show. In comparison, the unmoveable slabs of Prayers for Rain and The Same Deep Water as You are a challenge. There are other instances of Cure albums that present such a dense track lists, but it is a hallmark of their two most successful albums - Disintegration and Wish - that there is a specific homogeneity of tone across the whole record. Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me is infinitely varied, as is the Head on the Door. Faith and Pornography are constant in their onslaught. However, on both of those successful records, the pop songs and a depressing dirges are dressed in exactly the same raiment. On Wish, the pop songs are exceedingly pop and pull the epic downers closer to them. On Disintegration, it is the other way around, so heavy is the mood of those later big songs that the singles get caught in their wake. Even, Pictures of You, a song of multiple of hooker parts and a hit single of sorts, is stretch out to epic status, as though the line between the two parts of the Cure is being intentionally mangled. Disintegration often seems like a daunting, dark effort to me, so I rarely listen to it. Unlike Pornography's manic writhing, Disintegration seems to wallow. And I understand the pleasure of wallowing: that is what goth - though the Cure, like everyone else, hates the term - allows you to do. Wallowing is often a put-on or an indulgent exaggeration of events. And, certainly, distinct from the despair that Smith harnessed to write Pornography or the grief he exorcised on Songs of a Lost World, at the time of Disintegration, he was happy, I think. He married he childhood sweetheart - Lovesong is the gift he gave her. In the studio, the band bullied alcoholic bandmate, Lol Tolhurst, because they didn't know how else to handle the challenge of his behaviour. It was a weird, mixed moment and weirder still that it produced such a constant record. I think this consistency is the reason that Disintegration fares so well with others. While the strength of the Cure lies in their extreme poles of pop and desolation, this album melds the two in a way that softens the edges of both in a way that seems to suit most people: a pleasing terror. The main terror for me, however, is Roger O'Donnell's synth strings which upset me even now, but, overall, I have come to admire, if not completely love Disintegration, just as I did not completely love that goth girl back in 1999. Too much, too early. Too much even now. 4 We could have done with this on a weekend but sure… Disintegration is great, there’s no doubt about that, but it’s also the definition of too much of a good thing. By the time I am through the twenty minute stretch of Same Deep Water… and the title track, both of which I admire very much, I am aching to stop. There’s fifteen minutes still to go. There is so much that is memorable on the album - marvellous riffs on every instrument, iconic, gripping drum patterns - and at least half a dozen of the best songs Robert Smith ever wrote. But it doesn’t quite work as an album, for me. There are other records that I love that seem to require reserved energy and a deep breath before sitting through in one go - Ys by Joanna Newsom, Ladies and Gentlemen… by Spiritualized, or even my favourite album OK Computer. But there doesn’t seem to me to be any way of girding myself for Disintegration. It is simply not digestible. It’s not just that it is too long, it’s that it doesn’t have a narrative (emotional?) shape - it sits there like a mountain of champ and gravy. It is always ending and then beginning again with diminishing welcome, even as it impresses and satisfies. What I should have done is listen to Plainsong and Pictures of You - both absolutely wonderful and as good a start to an album as I can think of - and then just glanced down the tracklisting for a moment in remembrance of how good almost all of these tracks are (I could still leave Last Dance in any case). Then I could hand Disintegration its five stars. It’s the listening to it - enduring it - that’s the problem. 4/5

“We cannot live in a world interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a hope. Part of the terror is to take back our listening, to use our own voice, to see our own light.” Hildegard of Bingen Lou Reed expelled John Cale from the Velvet Underground because Reed wanted commercial success. Thus, it is obvious why - for all the influence the smart, street-talking Reed had on Patti Smith - that she chose Cale to produce her first record. She didn’t want to make commercial rock (although, as Because the Night would later prove, she – or Springsteen - could do it). She wanted whatever it was Cale could do. Early Velvets had Cale, Angus MacLise, and Nico: a mystical tension pulling against Reed’s poetic street cynicism. It couldn’t last of course. The Marble Index suggests what the Velvets might have been without Reed’s grounding grime: a band of mystical endlessness. The mystic element of those early Velvets came in part from Cale and MacLise’s immersion in La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music. Young’s drones were not just experiments in sound but acts of duration, designed to dissolve the listener’s sense of time and place, entering Diviner's Time. The tones stretched out like an eternal now, encouraging a suspension of ordinary perception and opening a doorway to what felt like timelessness. MacLise took this into his percussion, drumming in patterns that suggested trance rather than timekeeping; he practiced the occult and drumming was part of his ritualistic practice. Cale wasn't a magician, but he bowed his viola in long, unending arcs, which is much the same thing. This was mysticism by way of minimalism: sound as eternity, repetition as revelation. The presence of that practice within the Velvet Underground created the tension - between Reed’s earthbound reportage and the others’ quest for transcendence - that gave their early work its unique charge. But Smith wasn’t that sort of mystic either. Like Reed, she was influenced by poetry, but she gravitated toward the visionary line - Rimbaud, Blake. She saw rock and roll as continuous with that tradition, and she saw tradition as alive in the present, not embalmed in the past. Thus she rejected many of Cale’s production suggestions – overdubs and the like - but she needed him to tap into the vein of drone, trance, improvisation. Without his discipline and depth, Horses might have been another garage rock punk record: urgent, but not timeless. We hear this most clearly in the opening track: Gloria. It was already a garage rock standard, but Smith turns it into an incantation. Of course, the song’s author, Van Morrison, would also make the move from punk sneer to mystic invocation on Astral Weeks. Morrison’s folk-soul incantations turn backward, dwelling in memory and longing for the lost Eden of Cypress Avenue, where Gloria is always a teenager. Smith, by contrast, seizes the incantatory mode and thrusts it into the immediate present, insisting that transformation is happening now, here, through the body and the voice. Morrison loved Blake and Yeats too, of course, but he read them as elegists. Smith read them as visionaries of the now. Her first line, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine,” is not just blasphemy - it’s a statement of method. Transcendence, for her, comes from within. It’s powered by the individual body, the voice, the dance floor at Max’s Kansas City: “I loved to dance, and you could dance for hours to the music of the Velvet Underground.” Ecstasy is not delivered from above but generated in the present moment. The music of the Velvets may have inspired her to dance, but the moment of transformation takes place inside her and goes out into the world, elevating her and the music with it. The music is there to be grabbed, harnessed, but the magical work is done by the listener. You surrender to the music, but the transformation is your own. This is where Smith’s distance from Reed becomes clear. Reed, working with Cale’s drones and repetition, created sonic states of stasis - heroin nods, lives stuck underground. The two-chord lurch of Heroin accelerates and collapses, capturing a body sinking into itself, succumbing. In contrast, Smith seizes repetition and pushes it outward. Birdland takes a handful of chords, lets them cycle, and builds them into an expanding, accelerating vision. Where Reed retreats into sleep, Smith bursts into apocalypse. It’s the difference between descent and revelation. What it reveals, I don't know exactly. Perhaps only the revelator knows. The album's centrepiece, of course, is Land. It is no surprise that this track was later used, uncut, in the series two climax of grim, millennarian TV show Millennium, appropriately titled The Time is Now - a television apocalypse. Over ten minutes, Smith creates a vision of madness and transformation: Johnny as victim, Johnny as vessel, Johnny as energy released. It is rock and roll as ecstatic ritual. Not reportage, not nostalgia, but the moment of revelation happening as we listen: is Johnny John the Revelator or rock's foundational Johnny B. Goode? Are they any different? Compare this to Lou Reed’s Rock and Roll, written in 1970 (a Velvet Underground without Cale). Reed sings of Jenny, age five, listening to a distant AM station: the story of rock and roll as memory and as something far away. It’s already in the past tense, already documentary. Van Morrison does better when he chants the names of Jackie Wilson and Fats Domino, invoking them incantatorily - but even there, it’s memory, homage. Smith reinvigorates Gloria, and folds Land of a Thousand Dances into Land, not as quotation but as re-presentation. She brings the ecstatic tradition forward into the present. It is almost blasphemous to say she re-enacts the sacred, not merely cites it - but, then, blasphemy is her project, declared in the album’s first breath. The action doesn’t necessarily work in reverse. When The Smiths (no relation) lift the riff from Kimberly for The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, the result isn’t transformative. Morrissey’s narrator, a mother, seeks to shield her child from music’s supernatural power. As “a piano plays in an empty room,” a sure sign of music's possessive allure, she soothes the child: “The ghost and the storm outside/Will not invade this sacred shrine/Nor infiltrate your mind.” Here, music is dangerous precisely because it can open the self to other forces. Morrissey acknowledges that power but retreats from it. He likes Yeats too, but he doesn't get it. His nostalgia wants to protect what little he has or had. He won’t risk apocalypse. He won’t open himself as Smith does. Or perhaps, when Marr stole the riff, Morrissey knew the power of the original record and counterpointed that power with a mother's anxiety. This comparison also points to Horses’ unevenness. Not every track detonates like Gloria, Birdland, or Land. Kimberly is lovely, but not transcendent. Free Money surges but doesn’t necessarily ascend. Break It Up is more conventional in shape, despite its visionary imagery. Redondo Beach is simply wick. I can't excuse that one. I don't like it. Still, the peaks are so high they define the record. Maybe that make a man complacent about the other material. Maybe that unneveness is necesary. Nay, vital. But those tentpole invocations - Gloria, Birdland, Land - are the album’s revelation, its ecstatic core. Horses, then, is not a perfect record. It is a record of peaks and plains, ritual and rehearsal. But that’s part of its power. By refusing polish, by rejecting Cale’s more elaborate pretensions, but not his instincts, Smith ensured that the record kept its raw charge. It is not commercial rock, not even really punk in the narrow sense. It is an experiment in ecstatic art, channelled through garage riffs and visionary poetry. In that sense, it belongs not just to the tradition of rock but to the tradition of prophecy, of poetry as transformative speech. And like prophecy, it is uneven, jagged, sometimes obscure, sometimes gibberish - but when the words hit, when the chords string out one after the other then back to one, when Smith wails and chants and howls, the world ruptures and something new comes through. That is what makes Horses enduring. It is not nostalgia like Morrison, not eternity like Nico, not cynicism like Reed, not drone like Cale. MacLise disappeared down the mythic rabbithole; Horses sticks around. It is apocalypse - personal, poetic, ecstatic. It makes the old songs live again, not as memory but as immediate, dangerous presence. It doesn’t describe rock and roll. It is rock and roll, burning in the moment, opening the self, demanding transformation. And from that opening line on, it insists: no one else can do it for you. Not Jesus. Not Lou Reed. Not John Cale. Transformation is yours to make, now. 4.5 Of all the albums that I would call my favourites, this is the one that took the longest to grow on me. I liked nothing on Horses the first time I listened to it. Over many years this has improved to liking everything on it and counting ‘Gloria: In Excelsis Deo’ as one of my favourite songs anyone has ever recorded. I think the sin of my initial distaste is excusable. It is easy to read Smith’s singing and lyrics as shallow affectation. I was imagining Smith entirely beholden only to the (obvious) cultural references that I was able to conjure up myself - Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. They are certainly both in there but the truth is that Smith’s singing and writing is idiosyncratic and frequently brilliant in its own right. Kimberly turns a Beat style to something touchingly personal on Kimberly. Redondo Beach is magically concise in turning an implicit scorn for everyone who’s standing around looking so dismal into the narrator’s own sorrow. It’s a great, weird pop song. Birdland, where I think Smith is boldest in risking ridicule, is simply mesmerising. It’s a committed dramatic performance of a terrific lyric. Land… is deservedly iconic. I’ve already mentioned what I think of Gloria: In Excelsis Deo. If the album has weaker moments it’s actually the tracks that must have sounded, at the time, less dated; more 70s than 60s - Free Money and Break it Up. Perhaps a little neat and a little keen to please by comparison with the rest. Still terrific. I love the cover of the album. It is as perfectly fitted to the music as any artwork I can think of; strange, aloof, utterly beautiful. 4.5/5

As my son seeks to convert to Judaism in Montreal, it is hard for me not to be a little moved by the Shaar Hashomayim Synagogue choir. And it is the best of the music here, surely. To the extent that there is any music at all. However, Cohen has often made powerful songs of simple chords and plain speaking, usually with fine arrangements. I don't know if he's done that here, on these first listens - after the year I was having in 2016, I didn't need another memento mori - but I will give him the benefit of the doubt that they might reveal something over time. Hard not to compare with Blackstar, of the same year, which was musically more exploratory, but less focused. Unlike that sonic burst, I understand that these brief thoughts had been worked out (completed, maybe?) as poems long before the record. Maybe they didn't need the music, but Cohen needed the record to complete his cycle. Or we did. Or somebody did. Hard too not to compare it to Go Set a Watchman of the year earlier. So, I don't know if this is a complete record, with depth and meaning. Too soon for me to tell. Perhaps the repeating image of the card game and the flame (or all the -am end rhymes) and the use of the word 'real' are intertextual and not a single idea repeated across texts because there only was one idea. Perhaps the unidentified 'you' will become clear. Perhaps the multiple yous will become clear. Perhaps giving the benefit of the doubt might be Leonard Cohen's final lesson. Perhaps just doubt. I don't know. 2 Christ. Leonard Cohen was lucid enough near the end to still be able to knock out couplets as if he was merrily completing the crossword puzzle. Why shouldn’t he package and sell them on the crest of his coming death? He was lucid enough to know that there was no good reason not to in the 21st Century. There would be no expense to his dignity and certainly no expense to ours. This same sort of product had been rolled out before and consumed. And though his talking over entirely forgettable music that he had little to do with would add not an ounce to the artistic weight of his life’s work, Cohen was lucid enough to know too that this would sell, would be critically acclaimed, and would be celebrated as an essential album; one that people ‘must’ listen to before they die. And so proceeds this grim pageant of an album. Leonard dons his hat and mugs for the audience - generous enough neither to vanish into introspection nor to expose any judgement about all those peering into the little window he opened for them. It’s good humoured (‘I’m running late, they’ll close the bar”) and rather gaudy (the pious cooing of the choir, the stately funeral parlour string reprise). I dare say he wanted to and was happy to make this for various reasons. I am just a little unhappy that one of those reasons is that, as Cohen knew, we were greedy to hear this sort of thing. ‘Dying?’ bubbled our morbid culture eagerly at his door, ‘that’s Gold! Let’s get you mic’d up. Don’t try to sing - just intone quietly about your regrets and mistakes.’ Leonard chuckled to himself. These assholes didn’t seem to realise he’d been making that album repeatedly for 50 years. 2/5

Perfectly good screaming - virtually the end of Meat is Murder. Ridiculous buzzing too. Terrible version of Roll Over Beethoven. I don't know why this is better received by listeners here than Junkyard by The Birthday Party is; that's just as sloppy, but more immersive. The gothics of Junkyward are truly grotesque, whereas The Witch is a tame effort. The Birthday Party is trying to get at something. The Sonics are just trying to get through the songs. The Sonics’ significance is supposed to be their influence: they were from Tacoma, and grunge came from the same postcode. Yes, Mark Arm liked the screaming. Yes, Cobain fancied the drum sound. But these were passing infatuations in a polyamorous marriage with Kiss, Aerosmith, and Black Sabbath - the actual gods of their adolescence. Grunge did not spring fully formed from this garage. And it would have formed anyway. 1 I have very little to say about this. The Sonics suck. The production would be commendably awful if it wasn’t mainly in the service of recording worthless covers of songs that were bate out by 1965. An attempted second listen was aborted after a few waoows. 1/5

Ray Davies had already been sketching out his vision of the English village green by 1966, though it would not fully bloom until The Village Green Preservation Society two years later. Which leaves Something Else in an awkward spot: a Kinks record released in the long shadow of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, without the cohesion, scope, or studio wizardry that defined 1967’s high watermark. Davies, forced into the producer’s chair after Shel Talmy’s departure, did not have the luxury of the Beatles’ sonic palette. Something Else is not beautifully or cleverly produced, nor is it particularly well sequenced. What it offers instead is a patchwork of Davies’s miniatures - sometimes sharp, sometimes shapeless. Davies has often been lauded as pop’s master of character studies, but McCartney was already excelling in that field. Eleanor Rigby in 1966, She’s Leaving Home in 1967 - these were exquisitely detailed human portraits. By contrast, Davies’s formula was becoming predictable: a few light observations in the verses, a neat chorus, little development as the song unfolds. You heard it on Dedicated Follower of Fashion. Tin Soldier Man is the worst offender here, the weakest in Davies' string of Man songs stretching from A Well-Respected Man, through Session Man to Ape Man. Even David Watts, taut, punchy and enjoyable as it is, tells us little about its subject - or its narrator, hiding behind a coy homoerotic fantasy. Davies was always coy about the person here. Elsewhere, the narratives - when there are any - fall flat. The moral of Two Sisters is traditionalist schmaltz, especially in an era when Sgt Pepper was encouraging even civil servants to expand their minds. Situation Vacant reduces itself to a stale mother-in-law gag, while McCartney was busy drawing grannies into the psychedelic fold. Lennon sneered at such fare as "granny shit," but the point stands: the Beatles were redefining the generational conversation, while Davies seemed stuck in your granda's music hall. In hindsight, I wish Davies had bided his time, learned his way around the studio, stockpiled the strongest songs. But that wasn't the way things were done then. His later albums would be criticised for their thematic rigidity, but at their best his Hogarthian sketches coalesce into broader social commentary - as they would on Village Green. Here, you wonder what is the point of listening different people who smoke on Henry Rag. Still, without Something Else, we would lose some of the Kinks' finest moments. Singular works, there would be no place for them in Davies' thematic preoccupations. Waterloo Sunset is not a character piece at all but a panoramic canvas, a Whistler-like view of the Thames that captures both the sweep of London life and the solitary contentment of the man in the crowd. Terry and Julie - Stamp and Christie, or just some young lovers that any of us might know - exist simultaneously as Swinging London icons and anonymous figures on the embankment. That duality is what made the psychedelic moment so powerful: the extraordinary rendered universal. And then there is Death of a Clown, one of the best of Dave Davies’s turns, rough-edged, sure, but somehow it pierces right through your heart. Throw in David Watts and End of the Season and you're golden. Something Else is uneven, awkward, and frequently slight - but also the cradle of one of the greatest songs of the sixties. It is the Kinks caught between worlds: too restless for the old beat boom, not yet equipped for the new studio age. It is not a masterpiece, barely a record, but it was, at least, the sketchbook in which Ray Davies finally drew Waterloo Sunset. 3 This is a delightful album and I was very happy to listen to it today. There’s a little dip in the middle with Situation Vacant, which doesn’t quite work, and Love Me Till the Sun Shines which is ill-fitting and dull. Those tracks aside, Something Else is very special. Certainly more special than anyone could have guessed from the self-sabotaging title and cover art, which have the air of having been thrown together by the record label in 5 minutes. Of course there is a double meaning to Something Else, but poor Americans, for example, who had been lumbered with a Capitol faux Beatles album a couple of years before called ‘Something New’ must have struggled to find it. It’s hard not to think of The Beatles when you listen to the Kinks in their pomp. The baroque delicacy and the English character sketches and the mix of sweet and silly. I think part of the reason I love the Kinks is that I feel a bit sorry for them. Why should any band that are capable of pop music as slick and idiosyncratic as David Watts or as profound and beautiful as Waterloo Sunset have to suffer comparison with anyone? Well they just do sadly, but The Kinks deserve all the laurels they get, however crushed, and I will add that Ray Davies is funnier than The Beatles. ‘Sybilla looked into her mirror/ Percilla looked into the washing machine’ It shouldn’t be possible to have that line open a song and then have the song turn out beautiful and affecting but there is the unique magic of The Kinks at their best. 4/5

I understand it is easier to write poetry in French, as there is a larger pool of repeated vowel endings. French words also tend to be longer and, thus, a string of French words can be more rhythmically complex. That's what I understand anyway. It's probably a good language to rap in. 1 Bof. 1.5/5

My cousin is a jazz guitarist. He once dated a woman who played marimba. They landed a cruise ship gig, spent months at sea, and split soon after. Not her fault - there is only so much marimba a person can take. It is a limited instrument: charming in flashes, unbearable in excess. The trick is knowing when to stop and when to get out. You put up with the relationship until the job is done. You keep it all in until you get home. Jack White, apparently, has not learned that lesson. In Take, Take, Take, he meets Rita Hayworth, pushes too far, and ruins the moment. It is a parable for the whole record: overreach, repetition, collapse. White and Meg locked themselves in a studio with a piano, a marimba, and no ideas, and tried to hammer an album out of it. What is left is a bundle of songs that sound like first drafts stretched thin, basic notions padded into "arrangements". Even Passive Manipulation - 35 seconds long - feels overextended. Its one idea is dead after 12. That is the problem everywhere here: riffs with nowhere to go, lyrics that confuse petulance with passion, and rhythms that are more like going through the motions. After six albums, the spontaneity is gone. And spontaneity is no substitute for depth or effort. Jack and Meg had been divorced for years, and despite attempts to spice things up with unfamiliar instruments, there is nothing much here. If there ever was. Worse, they did not even have to put up with it. They could have gone home at any time. 1.5 There is a prevailing sense on the White Stripes’ fifth album that anything will do rightly. And it did. People lapped up this gruel as usual. The first guitar riff that falls under Jack’s fingers; the first (same) drum pattern that Meg felt like playing. Melody? Sure it could just follow the guitar riff. Or Jack could do his old-timey squeaky voice bit. Songwriting is for suckers - folks who don’t have a colour scheme and a widespread rumour of incest. Why would you risk embarrassing yourself with an earnest lyric and fancy fourth-chord music when a large chunk of the record-buying public are aching for more Polly Wolly Doodle with a distortion pedal? Why make art when you can execute a brand identity? To be fair, there is nothing here anywhere near as good as Polly Wolly Doodle but that is actually true of many albums. Polly Wolly Doodle is a classic. What is the protagonist doing down on his knees behind the barn? That’s the sort of haunting, risk-taking line that makes a song Great. I didn’t mean to put it down just then. 1/5

I used to be cautious of Bob Marley. The bands that I liked who liked reggae namechecked dub acts: King Tubby, Lee Perry, Augustus Pablo, the deep-end experimentalists. Marley felt like something else - the reggae your mother played when she found her way into Buddhism. Or my mother at least. He was also the face on the bedroom walls of people I didn’t much enjoy being around: stoners who used his image to sanctify habit into culture. There was always something of the appeal to the noble other in their lionising of Marley. That's not cool. And, in truth, neither were they. Some of the reviews here call Natty Dread “chill.” My mother was highly strung and the stoners were all twitchy. Surely, they were looking for chill in Marley, an excuse to drift. Natty Dread is not that record. It is not chill. It is angry, mournful, hopeful, and sacred. If anything, it feels esoteric. Certainly, there is much of it I don't understand. Perhaps it’s a disservice to flatten it into poster-ready bromides like “Lively up yourself” or “Everything’s gonna be alright.” Or maybe those phrases are the chinks in the armour - flashes through which you glimpse the real, beating heart of the record. Whatever that is. Or, instead of puzzling it out, I can just enjoy the delightful playing. 3 This album, delightful for the first few songs, conspicuously fades after the title track. There are still nice moments to be had in the second half - Marley thanking the backing vocals in Am-a-do or the tea-spittingly good line ‘I feel like bombing a church’ in Talkin’ Blues. The Wailers are absolutely terrific players and I find Bob Marley’s voice captivating, even on No Woman No Cry where I am much more used to the live version on Legend with a little more gravel in his voice and a little more poignancy in the pacing. 2.5/5

I once went on radio and raved about McLaren’s Madame Butterfly as the ideal pop single: catchy, trashy, highbrow, lowbrow, exploiting the latest technology, and completely disposable. That was probably just on‑air jibber-jabber, but some of it holds, especially because Un Bel Dì, Vedremo is gorgeous, whatever you do with it. You could make a similar argument for Buffalo Gals or Double Dutch, McLaren's UK hits. They were clever, infectious, but not long lasting: like a cold virus. But here’s the rub. No one cares much about McLaren exploiting Puccini. The plunder of African musics, however - Highlife, mbaqanga, South African township sounds - sits uneasily now. McLaren’s failure to credit the records he pillaged and musicians he played with seals his reputation as cultural irritant rather than musician. Zeppelin and Paul Simon caught flak too, but no one denies they had chops in the material they lifted. As Eliot had it: immature poets imitate; mature poets steal. McLaren stole, sure, but was he mature, or just a cheeky wee glyp? It’s worth remembering that in the early ’80s, no one was crediting samples. Only in the ’90s, after black artists fought labels in court, did the law grudgingly recognise recorded sound as property. And there’s a line of precedent stretching back through musique concrète, Cage, the avant‑gardists who stitched reality into art. McLaren, ever the Situationist huckster, liked to cast himself in that French tradition rather than the bloated rock lineage of Zeppelin and Simon. In that light, Duck Rock is closer to Joni Mitchell’s Burundi rhythms on The Hissing of Summer Lawns, but brasher, gaudier, more self‑consciously Now. Then, at least. It couldn' last. McLaren was no great artist. He was a scavenger of ideas, sometimes of people. But that’s what gave his work its bite: you were never sure if he was creating or conning you, or both. If you share his taste in music (his jukebox in the Sex shop was legendary), you’ll like it; if you find him unbearable, you’re supposed to. Either way, irritation was part of the show. And yet - let’s be blunt - Duck Rock was beaten to the punch. Byrne and Eno’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts did the same trick two years earlier with more depth and less smirk. Duck Rock was probably fun at the time, a bigger hit in the UK, but there doesn’t need to be two of them on the list. 1.5 I sense that this album is designed to invite a listener’s puzzlement. Is it earnest pop music or mere comedy? Is it affectionate curation of World Music or is it scornful exploitation? Thoughtful innovation or mere arbitrariness? Fortunately before Duck Rock is any of these things it is, first, shite. The clutter of mundane musical ideas with a side slop of McLaren’s clowning obviously passed for entertainment for a lot of people (I was bored personally) but they didn’t waste their time analysing this right? Everyone knew this was silly rubbish, didn’t they? Didn’t they? 1.5/5

Another one from my ma’s stash. File under Emotional but not too Mawkish. Not this exact record, of course, but close enough: same voice: warm, husky, like she’s telling you a secret while also sort of daring you to laugh at it; same guitar, steady and unfussy; same sort of songs - they never quite catch fire, but they glow nicely in the corner like one of those three-bar fires with moulded-plastic coals covering it. This third album was her breakthrough, apparently. Though the breakthrough leaned hard on Love and Affection as a single. If this is the only Armatrading album on the list - and I’d bet it is - I can’t shake the thought that it should really be The Best of Joan Armatrading. That's probably the one my ma had. Yes, I know: Alan Partridge vibes. But that’s how you get the good stuff in one place. Me, Myself, I; Drop the Pilot; I’m Lucky; All the Way from America, and, yes, Love and Affection. Those are the Joan Armatrading songs you have to hear before you die. They are available on one album, but it isn't this one. 2.5 It’s very difficult not to compare Armatrading with Joni Mitchell. The intimacy of the vocal, the free rhythms of the melodies, and a band with one foot in jazz, all of it in service of songs confessing hopes and crushed hopes in love. How on earth is one supposed to avoid comparing ‘Save Me’ with ‘Help Me’? Or ‘Help Yourself’ with ‘Help Me’? This is an album of good songs. But they’re not that good. The lyrics of ‘Save Me’ or ‘Tall in the Saddle’ express sentiments too trite in situations sketched with too much coyness to really bear comparison with Mitchell. ‘You stand on the bank/ Immune or evasive/ Throw me a lifeline, save me’ ‘I looked to you for love/ Thought you walked on holy ground/ But oh, you're mean’ Absent here is the poetry and the drama of something like A Strange Boy or Lesson in Survival. Although Water With the Wine (the one dud on side 1) might cost you a mouthful of tea. The backdrop of Joni Mitchell’s protagonists throws Armatrading’s into unforgiving relief also. Armatrading portrays herself passive in love and sometimes prey. Mitchell always gives a sense of being in control - philosophically at least - and even the predator. She doesn’t need anyone’s help. There is hardly justice in throwing a comparison with Joni Mitchell in anyone’s face at the same time. These are good songs. Worth a party of their own. Love and Affection is a great song - and the one most unlike something Mitchell would do, I think. The band are hot. I loved the guitar playing on Like Fire and the drums on Tall in the Saddle. The drums sound brilliant throughout. 3/5

“He do the police in different voices.” —Working title for The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot Kate Bush’s first records provoked a curious irritation in some listeners. The complaint was always the same: that voice. Too shrill, too thin, too girlish. It could pierce but not sustain; it fluttered rather than commanded. And though there is a grain of truth in that critique - a reedy harshness is there - it misses the point. For Bush was never aiming at the voluptuous maturity of a torch singer, at least not yet. What she offered was a young woman’s voice unafraid of awkwardness. Still, it meant she was quickly boxed in: precocious, eccentric, not quite serious. A regency virgin playing with the spinet and mucking about with puppet theatres until the time comes to be married. By the time she reached The Dreaming in 1982, Bush had been famous for five years. In interviews she appeared the same as always: polite, well-mannered, unwilling to rock the boat. Which is precisely why her vocal grotesques on this album should not be mistaken for retaliation against those early detractors. She is not Yoko Ono pissing off Chuck Berry. She is not Diamanda Galás pushing her voice into abyssal territory to confront the horror of AIDS. Bush does something subtler, stranger. She simply “do the police in different voices.” The phrase comes from Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend: the foundling Sloppy entertains his household by reading police reports in a gallery of accents. Eliot borrowed it as a provisional title for The Waste Land, his great poem of broken voices. In both cases, mimicry is more than play; it is a form of resistance, a way of exposing the limits of expectation and “good taste.” Sloppy’s ventriloquism let working-class families parody their betters; Eliot’s shifting registers cracked open the high modernist poem. Bush, likewise, borrows the parlour trick, but repurposes it for the 1980s. The Dreaming is packed with funny voices, silly characters. A Cockney bungler in There Goes a Tenner, an Australian adventurer in the title track, a donkey braying defiantly in Get Out of My House. This might sound like whimsy, but it is also liberation. By populating her imaginative world with voices, Bush escapes the cage of that supposedly “shrill little girl” voice. Within the record she can be outlaw, mystic, soldier, spirit. Outside it, she remains bound by the narrow expectations of the industry and of gender. Where a pop star is expected to be pretty, sexual, pliant, Bush allows herself to be grotesque, inhuman, excessive. This is far from the musical book reports of The Kick Inside. But even in these acts of flight she admits defeat. The Dreaming is haunted by failure, by the sense of being pulled back. This is most obvious on Suspended in Gaffa, where Bush admits herself that there is always “something to distract” her from the goal of... beauty, perfection, godhead, knowledge. She can't have it all. However, it is unfair to lay the fault solely at her feet. “Just when I think I’m king…” she sings on Sat in Your Lap, leaving the thought unfinished. It is the same unfinished ambition David Sylvian sings in Japan’s Ghosts of the previous year: “Just when I think I’m winning… when my chance came to be king, the ghosts of my life blew wilder than the wind.” For Sylvian, the ghost was class: the feeling of not deserving the life of the mind, of being a working-class boy unworthy of the throne of art. For Tricky, who quotes the line on Aftermath, the ghost was race and poverty: “Just when I thought I could not be stopped.” And for Bush, it is her sex: no matter how imaginative, how original, she is still not permitted to be king. The line reveals the hierarchy itself - patriarchal, patrician, white - against which each artist crashes. The artist cannot be king. This hauntedness suffuses the album. The spectral soldier in Pull Out the Pin, the Houdini séance, the intruder-animal at the close of Get Out of My House. Bush’s parlour trick slides toward spiritualism, invented by the Fox sisters, young women throwing their voices into darkness, making a living by summoning ghosts. It got them out of the parlour, made them a little money, got them a little notoriety. Whether or not the spirits were real, the feelings conjured were real. That is Bush’s wager too. What makes the record extraordinary is not only the conceit of “different voices” but the sound world that carries them. The Fairlight sampler, then a futuristic tool, shatters the songs into percussive fragments; rhythms stumble, collide, reform. In Sat in Your Lap, drums pummel with manic insistence, while Bush’s voice lurches between chant, shriek, and whisper. The Dreaming layers call-and-response vocals until they become a chaotic chorus, each line as strong as the next, refusing hierarchy. And in Pull Out the Pin, she screams “I love life” with such feral intensity it seems to come from the other side of death. This is not the parlour piano of her early records. It is not demure, polite, or refined. It is not in “good taste.” Back in The Waste Land, Eliot’s Madame Sosostris, the fortune teller with a head cold, shows how easily the voice collapses into parody, how fragile the authority of performance really is. Bush courts that same risk. Her accents are often dreadful: bad cockney, bad ozzie, but the Irish turn on The Line, The Cross and Curve is worse still. But like the mediums channeling spirit guides in the voices of Native chiefs or Ottoman princes, the point is never accuracy. It is freedom: to let other voices pass through, however ungainly. To lay claim to any possibility as an artist, free of the expectations of the industry or the rules of what a good girl does. Critics call The Dreaming difficult, even wilfully obscure. But that difficulty is the point: it resists easy consumption, insisting instead on being lived with, puzzled over, returned to. Its refusal to please is its gift. Kate Bush takes the frivolity of parlour mimicry and shadow play and explodes it into art. Like the psychic, she passes off performance as transformation, but, if it connects with the listener, if it makes them feel something, what is the difference? Kate Bush may never be king, but in doing the police in different voices she created a kingdom of her own, and invited us in. This is her voice. My wife throws her voice from the other side of the room where I am listening and writing: “There is no way on Earth you are going to give The Dreaming anything other than five stars.” 5 “Sometimes it's hard to know if I'm doing it right" (Suspended in Gaffa) Works of genius often look so easily made. Mozart is particularly frustrating to contemplate because there is such simplicity to his music. You listen to something like Sull’aria or Soave sia il vento and you think ‘sure anyone could do that, it’s mostly just I-IV-V’. Then you have a go and realise yours is shit without knowing why. Or, even worse, you have a go and don’t realise that yours is shit and you start to think ‘I must be a genius as well’. Then begins the slow, painful process of gradual realisation. It’s not easy being not a genius, as almost anyone can tell you. The sort of elegance in art that folds ungraspable complexity into the absolutely obvious has its paragons in pop music as well. Kate Bush’s album Hounds of Love is among them. Side one, particularly, makes the creation of great songs seem so simple. Unremarkable chord progressions and melodies that feel inevitable - like they were sitting there just waiting to fall into any artist’s lap. But just try to write a Cloudbusting or a Mother Stands for Comfort. Then there’s The Dreaming. It really has nothing to do with what I’m talking about. Here Kate Bush makes genius look really, really difficult. By Hounds, I think that sentiment above from Suspended in Gaffa was obsolete; Kate Bush knew she was doing it right. But there is, on The Dreaming, tangible doubt in the form of reckless complexity. Simple time careers off into compound time, rigid beats are interrupted with formless ambience, and melody suddenly makes way for barks of theatrical declamation. We are lavished with a library of atonal mouth noises - occurring not as momentary accidents but devotedly double-tracked and used as a structural feature. She gets one of her engineers to bray like a donkey. She joins in. There are multiple narrative voices in several songs. She does accents. There is nothing here but bad ideas. Yet most of this ends up being not only addictive but, inexplicably, beautiful. Bless thee Eeyore thou art translated. The Dreaming is a dazzling high-wire act by an acrobat who wants to know for themselves whether they can pull it off, disregarding what horror might await the audience below if they can’t. In my humble opinion ‘Leave it Open’ is the only shaky bit. I can’t tell what went wrong anymore than I can tell what went right with all the other songs. Here’s genius with the good grace to leave you properly stumped and with no notion of ever going up there yourself. Notes: *There Goes a Tenner is near verifiable as the worst Kate Bush song. Quite inexplicably, it is a masterpiece and a top ten Kate Bush song. *Terrific bass playing on Pull Out the Pin, RIP Danny Thompson 4.5/5

There is a great quote attributed to Miles Davis. When asked for his thoughts on critics, he replied: "If I don't like what they're saying, I just get in my Ferrari and drive away." Excellent line. Very funny. So true. Two stars. I did not think much of this record. There is a fair bit of ambient noodling. Fine, very nice. There are textures to be enjoyed here for however long you can stand to just sit and look around a pleasant room. A bigger problem is that in the second half it invites you to pay attention by laying out a fairly conventional riff (the section called ‘It’s about that time’) which is, in my opinion, naff. I am not one to make bald accusations of that sort against one of the Great Men of Twentieth-Century Music but that riff is like something Des O’Connor would dander on stage to, except that version would swing and it wouldn’t take Des 10 minutes to do it. Shite. 1.5/5

By 1968, it was almost impossible for a British band dabbling in psychedelia to avoid comparison with the Beatles. Yet the Zombies, on Odessey and Oracle, are closer in spirit to the Beach Boys, if the Beach Boys’ harmonies had been drilled not by a stern Californian father but by a choirmaster at St. Albans Cathedral. Their harmonies are exquisite, yes, but there’s something eerily juvenile in those stacked voices: they shimmer with purity, but purity here feels like an absence, a refusal of sex. As I say: Beach Boys. Argent's arrangements lean toward the baroque. Not so exciting as Wilson's, but, like him, Argent is unable to escape the bounds of pop. Romantic gestures abound, but they lack the bite or danger that psychedelia was beginning to explore. By the time this album appeared, the Beatles had already shattered the form with the fragmented brilliance of The White Album. Against that backdrop, the Zombies’ flirtations with poetics feel precious rather than daring. A Rose for Emily pretends toward Faulkner but never gets its hands dirty in Southern soil, while Butcher’s Tale risks reducing the Western Front to a curious trifle rather than elevating the pop song into tragedy. Still, it’s a lovely album to listen to: feather-light, beautifully crafted, but so airy it must be tethered to its era, lest it drift away into oblivion. Its afterlife is secured mostly by Time of the Season — ironically, the least psychedelic track here — which continues to soundtrack film and television montages of “the sixties.” That, perhaps, is the Zombies’ fate: remembered as a perfectly preserved echo of a time that was already slipping away when Odessey and Oracle first appeared. Something dead that keeps coming back to life. 2.5 I wish we’d had this on a weekend. First of all because listening on YouTube was annoying (this album is not on Deezer). Second because there are so many interesting things that are wrong with this album and I wish I could have an hour or two to pull them apart properly. I didn’t know Odessey and Oracle but I gather from my lunchtime read of its Wikipedia page yesterday that it is a ‘cult classic’. The squares (people listening to pop and rock music in 1968) didn’t ‘get’ this album, in any sense, and so the poor Zombies were obliged to break up. As ‘smartcookie2022’ on the YouTube comments puts it: ‘Fantastic ablum. The crime of the last century was this album not selling and being No. 1 around the world.’ And still only 802k views. History is a nightmare from which too many of us are still trying to awake. And I’ve only had a day and I’m not a morning person. So groggy and still scratching myself - excuse the confused take that here follows. Odessey and Oracle is a bit shit. It is at times bluntly derivative of the Beatles and the Beach Boys and given that there is a fair amount of musical talent on display on this record, that can’t help feeling like cynicism. McCartneyish bass lines, PennyLaneish plonky piano, mellotron, British brass-band horns, and there is even tabla at one point. Alongside there is the cooing of three-part backing vocal harmonies in the style of California’s best-selling. How could the Zombies miss? In a nutshell by being nowhere near as good as either. ‘A Rose for Emily’ is a poundshop Eleanor Rigby. ‘And as the years go by/ She will grow old and die/ The roses in her garden fade away/ Not one left for her grave’ I try to see the prettiness of the Zombie’s music in its own right (not a string quartet, to its minimal credit) but I can’t take my eyes off the gulf in imagination and poetry between it and The Beatles single of 18 months before. ‘Maybe After He’s Gone’ makes a bold attempt at out-Beach Boying ‘I’m Waiting for the Day’ by presenting a protagonist so pathetic that even Brian Wilson might wince. It does no good; the spirit of flaccidity is certainly present in the lyrics but the music hasn’t the elegance to distract us. The melody has a rigid, awkward contour characteristic of much of this album, perhaps as much to do with the performance as the writing; no swing, no freedom in the line, a mere locating of each note in an almost robotic way. A stick up its backside. Which brings us to the pronunciation. Now I’m not one to invoke Class Struggle every time News at Ten comes on or anything but the way, for example, your man sings the word ‘after’ in this song put my back up. It doesn’t feel right in a pop song. I don’t know whether that is (again) the Beatles fault for valorising Northern accents - I have never given the Fab Four any credit merely for being from Liverpool. But in any case - these Zombie voices don’t work for me. They are too RP. I don’t believe for a second that they have mates in prison, unless they were in for tax fraud but sure when does that ever happen? This sense of the Zombies as class intruders in pop music is reinforced by the antique poise of some of the lyrics. ‘A sweet vibration seemed to fill the air I stood astounded, staring hard At men with flowers resting in their hair A sweet confusion filled my mind Until I woke up only finding Everything was just a dream A dream unusual of its kind That gave me peace and blew my mind’ (Hung Up on a Dream) Your hole, Percy. This sort of cod-Romantic shit is all over this album and it is excruciating. I know other artists were doing this in the 60s but taken with the album’s other sins the horror really pops. I do actually like some of the music here with the reservation that almost every musical idea worth celebrating on Odessey.. is reused without variation two or three times in a song. Yes pop music often does that but you know who doesn’t? The Beatles and The Beach Boys at their peak in the couple of years before the Zombies released this album. The Zombies know they are doing us wrong and they don’t care. And that is, presumably, the banality of evil. 2/5

There isn’t enough time - certainly not with this project. Not enough time to live inside an album until it yields its logic, until it becomes more than sound. With Electric Ladyland, that lack of time is especially acute, because the record itself refuses to be consumed quickly. It looms, excessive and disorienting, less an album than an environment. When I first owned it on CD around the millennium, I didn’t even know it was meant to be a double album. Compressed into a single disc, it felt unending, too big to take in. The major landmarks - All Along the Watchtower, Voodoo Child - both striving to be the definitive ending. Everything up to that point felt confusing, overabundant: a jumble of styles, lengths, tonalities. Can a single record really hold together traffic jams and tantric deities, three-minute fragments and fifteen-minute improvisations? What binds it is Hendrix’s compositional intelligence. He isn’t trapped in the circular indulgences of Cream, where songs stand still to give space for solos. Circularity is paucity. Hendrix’s excess is teleological: everything moves forward, arcs outward, pushes toward revelation. His solos don’t decorate the song; they are the song’s continuation. In its most expansive passages, the record is symphonic, a suite in everything but name. But its tracks don't collect into suites anymore than it divides into a double album: there’s no satisfying midpoint, no separation that makes sense. Instead, there are two perfect finales, a double surplus, dessert on top of dessert. Even now, the record eludes me - after another day of listening! Not enough time. The record resists total comprehension, but that resistance is precisely what makes it compelling. In its inchoate sprawl, it embodies the utopian charge of the ’60s, when it seemed that even a “rock album” could remake perception, and the melancholy of our present, where such futures have been foreclosed, leaving us only with the echo of what might have been. Sad. 3.5 In the last couple of days we have had the nonplus indulgence of Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way (1969) then the fey psychedelia of the Zombies’ Odessey and Oracle (1968). I laughed at both those albums and thought I’d got away with it. Well now the Generator laughs at me. What a mercilessly appropriate warm-up they were for Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland, an album I take seriously. ‘Go on,’ gloats the Generator, ‘be a hypocrite’. Look. There are crucial differences here between that other shit and this seminal masterwork by a genius at the height of his inspiration. For example… [runs away] 3.5/5

Thinking about time again, after yesterday's review. Nevermind came out in 1991, a moment that arrived fully formed, even if it had been a few years in gestation. Grunge was a last hurrah for rock as mass culture: major labels, MTV, guitars all over the radio. To me, Nirvana looked like adults: troubled, damaged, wives, children. Loud, scary, not for kids. And yet five months before Nevermind, Spiderland appeared. Not on a major label, not heralded as a generational shift, but as something obscure, subterranean. A record that felt like it belonged to another temporality altogether: slow to spread, slow to be recognised, slow to be understood. By the time I first heard it, the authors of Spiderland looked like children to me - I must have been five years older than they had been then! Britt Walford was twenty; David Pajo twenty-two, barely older than Dave Grohl. To think of Nevermind and Spiderland as coeval is difficult, as if they occupy parallel timelines: one of adulthood magnified and one of juvenile distance. How can post-rock exist during rock's big blowout? Yes, it’s impossible to think of Nevermind and Spiderland as contemporaneous without tearing a hole in history. Nevermind was all immediacy: verse-chorus-verse, melody, beat, a voice that sounded like everyone's feelings all at once. Spiderland was delay, suspension, guitars staggering into compound time, music that seemed perpetually on the verge of collapse. Both are records of guitars and drums, but the distinction is one of ontology. Nevermind’s songs were designed to be absorbed instantly, to circulate endlessly on MTV. Slint’s were unassimilable: badly recorded, awkwardly timed, too strange to be broadcast. Creepy rather than scary. But the networks overlapped - Albini recorded both bands - but the separation between Nirvana’s mainstream eruption and Slint’s cult marginality reveals how many worlds can exist simultaneously, how culture is never one story but many, divided by qualities of ambition, distribution, luck. Bleach is more mainstream than Spiderland because of Nevermind; In Utero for much the same reason, even though they got Albini in to indie it up. Of course, Cobain and company could have made Spiderland had they wanted to. But they didn’t. Or maybe there was something in both Cobain and Grohl that couldn't. They chose the path of mass resonance, and briefly succeeded in detonating the mainstream from within. Endless Nameless and Gallons of Rubbing Alchol… are hidden tracks on their multi-million unit shifters. Could the lads in Slint have made Nevermind? Britt Walford played on Pod, but didn't stick around for The Last Splash. Pajo was in Zwan. So I guess not. At their most effective, they built something smaller, stranger, but enduring. To discover Spiderland years later, through the ruins of grunge, is to glimpse the parallel culture that was always there underneath, a hidden continuity that suggests other futures for guitar music—futures that were never realised, but which continue to haunt and count awkwardly. 3 “Ooooooooooo look at us we can count to 7 and play guitar quiet…seriously though, don’t look at us.“ (Slint) I appreciate that Math Rock and Post-Grunge are entirely different genres but honestly I was getting Badnose vibes from some of this. Lame. 1.7/5

Can we believe what we see and hear? With John Phillips, not at all. No sickly sweet production could cover his unpleasantness. In 1960, Psycho was the first film to show a flushing toilet, hinting at the effluent that pop culture tries to imagine away. The bidet on the cover of this album makes the same transgressive move: can the four hippies in the tub be as wholesome and peace-loving as their image and their sound makes out? Can we really believe that Phillips "stopped into a church (he) passed along the way" without bursting into flames? He's tempting us to prod the surface and touch his gross, wriggling id beneath. It should be no surprise, then, that the music is so insubstantial: it's a fake front, there is no heart, because the heart is small and black. The veil of production is as garish and thin as Jimmy Savile's running shorts (I just googled Savile to check the spelling of his surname and the platform describes him as "media personality and DJ. John Phillips too is a "singer-songwriter.") Of course, one can and should separate the artist from the art, but, when the artist is toying with you, as though he were the Zodiac Killer, you don't have to be taken in. Wan, banal stuff. 1.5 Sure they are all on the cover piled in a bathtub together but that’s as indecorous as this album gets. Everything here feels clean and polished to sparkle. Careful arrangements and lovely little details in the piano and the bass, and the strings, and of course the vocals weave in and out spotlessly. But for the most part there is only the sparkle and nothing much behind it. Most of these songs weren’t worth the effort. Inoffensive fluff. Can the Polished Turd help but spring to mind? There is a toilet on the front cover. Looking at that toilet actually - did toilets used to sit lower? It just seems too close to the floor. I could research that - that’s something for me to do instead of ever listening to this again. 2/5

Van Halen with the pyrotechnics taken out. Tidy riffs with no eruption. Conservative sexual postures without DLR's excessive posturing: men dress well; women show off their legs. Diamond Dave just shows off, full stop. Even when these Biblical patriarch are demanding love, they ask for hugs like a trio of fuddy-duddies. 1.5 Dire. It’s difficult to pick a low point but it was probably the line ‘someone like you, I just want to do love to’ in I Need You Tonight. The high point was when I thought, for a minute, that TV Dinners was about eating TV Dinners. I can’t remember why I made that mistake. 1/5

Johnny Cash: "They're filming this for England. But I'm not here to do what they want. I'm here to do what you want and what I want! What do you want to hear?" Prisoners: "Jackson! Jackson! Jackson!" Johnny Cash: "This one's called I Walk The Line." Not as consistently funny as An Evening with Quentin Crisp. 1.5 This was a grim listen. Clodhopping guitar and drums while Cash half mutters over the top and that’s when there is an attempt to play music. A good portion of this record is Johnny Cash doing banter and inmates hooting and of course those things are why this record exists. The vicarious thrill of visiting one of America’s most notorious prisons. Millions of copies were sold. Rotten playing and near worthless music was transmuted into dollars courtesy of the nebulous hollering of incarcerated men. 1/5

Time has not been kind to Richard Dawkins. Neither has it treated his ideas gently. The meme, in Dawkins’ original sense, was a cultural gene - an idea that replicates itself through imitation. The irony is that the concept itself has now been consumed by the very logic it described. What once named the process by which culture reproduces has become a symptom of it: the meme as cartoon, as content, as joke template. Yet the original notion still tells us something about how culture persists after belief has drained away. Memes rarely exist in isolation. They cluster into what Dawkins called meme complexes - networks of mutually reinforcing ideas that keep one another alive. A religion, for instance, is a meme complex: a set of interlocking rituals and prohibitions that endure long after their original meanings have been forgotten. “Fish on Friday” is a faint echo of that structure, a half-remembered practice carried out by cultural inertia rather than conviction. The ritual continues because it once mattered, not because it still does. No one remembers why. Pop culture works the same way. It is full of half-dead memes performing themselves. Think of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony: its opening da-da-da-DUM has outgrown the work that birthed it, surviving as shorthand for destiny, triumph, or doom. The symphony remains the best host for the motif, but the meme has long since crawled away. For most of the world, the rest of the composition is merely scaffolding for that four-note invocation. So too with Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs. The title tells us everything: a dominant meme and its attending parasites. Layla is the living idea; the “Other Assorted Love Songs” are the relics, the forgotten devotional fragments orbiting it. Yet even within Layla itself, the logic of the meme complex persists. The riff - that ecstatic, spiralling phrase - was not even Eric Clapton’s. It was Duane Allman’s. Allman’s line is the animating principle, the piece of vital energy that keeps the rest of Clapton’s dull song - and the entire project - alive. Just as the Other Assorteds feed on Layla, Layla feeds on Allman’s riff: a flock of flukes sucking at the juice of four bars. When I first heard it, in a Vauxhall Astra advert in 1989, the riff was already a ghost: detached from its origin, living on as pure affect. Returning to the song reveals how much it props up. The verses are awkward, the chorus a mere superimposition on the riff, the coda shapeless indulgence. The riff carries everything. It is the selfish meme - the gene that refuses to die, sustaining even what should have fallen away. Clapton’s Unplugged version from 1992 completes the cycle of parasitism. He slows the song down, drains it of urgency, and reabsorbs Allman’s vitality into the Clapton brand. Perhaps this is how he always imagined it: retooled for the corporate Clapton of the 1990s. Either way, it exists only because of Allman’s riff. It is Layla only in the sense that Allman made Layla matter. What was once ecstatic has become tasteful; what was once desperate has become self-consciously authentic. That riff never belonged in a love song - too showy, too high-octane. It belongs in a car advert. But that is the logic of capitalism itself: subsuming the subversive, repackaging intensity as nostalgia. Allman’s riff survives, but only as a museum exhibit, a fossil of emotion presented as content. Religious practice persists in the same way. Belief has long since gone, but the gestures remain: the mantilla worn to mass, the fish on Friday, the hand raised in benediction. Layla endures like that - a ritual emptied of conviction, repeated because it must be repeated. Time hasn't been kind to Eric Clapton either. And he himself has become a meme: a symbol of Boomer exhaustion, of blues reduced to brand identity. His reactionary drift feels less like a choice than a symptom - a man becoming the cliché his music already predicted. The memeplex eats its creator, as capital always does. As his reputation decays, the question is whether Layla & Other Assorted Love Songs - or rather, Allman’s riff - can survive him. Can those four bars continue to circulate as a free-floating fragment, detached from its origin, a surviving meme in a dead cultural ecosystem? Here it all is again on a list of “1001 Albums To Listen To Before You Die,” when albums themselves have died. But the truth is that the compilers don't want you to hear the album. They don't want you to hear Derek & the Dominos even. But the ritual of putting on a record remains because they don't know what else to do. The album and the band exist now only as complexes to sustain the longevity of the riff. However, if you want to experience it properly, there is an 1989 ad for a Vauxhall Astra on YouTube. 0.5 Ignoring the two lumbering blues bores here - Key to the Highway and Have You Ever Loved… - at a profit of 16 minutes, we are left with material that mainly recalls late Beatles and the first two albums by The Band. Despite their apprenticeship with George Harrison, Derek et al can’t match the imagination and sonic variety of Abbey Road. Despite having admirable musicianship they don’t produce anything as elegant as the music of the Brown album. The guitars noodle constantly but very little is memorable. Then there’s Little Wing. Hendrix‘s original, 2 1/2 minutes long, is full of uniquely mesmerising guitar lines. This version, 5 minutes long, hasn‘t a lick worth hearing. It replaces the relaxed intimacy of Hendrix‘s vocal with a double-act of harmonised hollering and the freedom of Hendrix‘s mellifluous melody is wrestled into a much more conventional rhythm. It is an ignorant, awkward piece of butchery. 1.5/5

If You Want It Darker, which we reviewed a few weeks back, felt like a weak offering to approaching Thanatos, the reason is simple: unlike so many of his contemporaries, death was not an unexpected discovery for Leonard Cohen. It was there from the start. Cohen spent the first half of his life trying to be other things - a poet, a novelist, at one point he considering becoming a country singer. So when his first album emerged from the New York folk scene, it was a surprise even to him. His story stands apart from that of most popular singers, who begin in youth, long before they have a clue who they are. They develop their art in public and fall away once it turns out they had nothing but youth to talk about. The industry fetishes immortal youth and nobody knows what to do when the idols discover their mortality. Cohen, by contrast, started old. He had served his apprenticeship elsewhere. Following the guidance of Federico García Lorca, who “gave (him) permission to find a voice, to locate a voice, that is to locate a self”, Cohen arrived at music with a self intact, and thus already in conversation with mortality. If his deep, oaken voice sounds mature on that debut, it is because he himself was mature. Rock music, as a culture, rarely deals with ageing well. Its mythology demands early death or eternal adolescence. It is only in recent decades that rock has begun to speak openly of old age, frailty, and the long shadow of death. Some still refuse to face it - the latest Rolling Stones record could have been made at any point in their career, even though Charlie Watts has gone. But Cohen was never like that. From the beginning, he admitted that his work, following Lorca, aimed “to express the great inevitable defeat that awaits us all”. You can hear that in the voice: the cracked dignity, the grain of resignation. It is the voice of a man who always sounds at least a decade older than you are now, old enough to guide young men and seduce young women - a voice he could never have summoned in his twenties. Most thirty-year-olds would not dare to face down the handful of themes that Cohen would go on to explore again and again: love, faith, failure, time, and the quiet certainty of death. “The artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word. He must heed only the call that arises within him from three strong voices: the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love and the voice of art.” – Federico García Lorca Cohen began with all three already entwined, impossible to separate. That is why his career never felt like a progression, but a deepening. Each record sounded like a continuation of the same conversation: one between desire and its failure, faith and its exhaustion, life and its vanishing. 4 The songbook of this album sat on a bookshelf in our front room for my entire childhood. The Master Song and the Stranger Song were two of the first songs I learned how to play on guitar. Still, it seemed less like a music book than a book of poetry. The tablature for the relatively simple music was on one page above the first verse then would come the sprawl of 6, 7, 8 verses. The book, ten years older than me, was my father’s and being well used it had a more venerable quality than it was really entitled to. How could I have escaped seeing it as a near Holy text? When you are 12 and your main frame of reference for lyrical achievement is Eagles (the Desperado album songbook was also on the shelf) Songs of Leonard Cohen is limitlessly impressive.* Even the posing anachronisms of guff like ‘Teachers’ (‘soft she answered ‘no’….not for thee’) seemed legitimate. Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Cohen. To be fair I hadn’t actually read any of those other ones at that stage. ‘Thee’. Fucking brilliant. In the many years since, the aura of the Mystery of Scripture about this record has evaporated for me. It’s odd to contemplate this as the work of a man several years younger than I am now but it brings certain things into focus. The obvious insecurity in some of the poetic posturing; the hunger to impress women by donning the vestments of the visionary and telling tales about strange and cruel women. But Cohen was also perfectly sincere in wanting to be a good songwriter; it’s not just sheep’s clothing. There is respect, even love, for the form in the care taken to fashion the delicately beautiful musical phrases of Suzanne and So Long Marianne and Sisters of Mercy. It is tempting to see a sort of condescension in an established poet’s almost rigid adherence to even verses and simple couplets but the truth is that Cohen himself did not view that as a meaningful restriction and it is difficult to say otherwise confronted with the power of, for example, the Jesus verse in Suzanne and its mesmerising proliferation of sibilances. If there is some self-regarding cant on this record (Master song, Teachers) there is also the sublimely direct, transparent and powerful. ‘Hey, that’s no way to say goodbye’ is my favourite Cohen song and one of my favourite songs by anyone. ‘I'm not looking for another as I wander in my time/ Walk me to the corner, our steps will always rhyme/ You know my love goes with you as your love stays with me/ It's just the way it changes, like the shoreline and the sea’ I have no commentary to offer on that, except to say that it’s wonderful and I am glad it exists. So Songs of Leonard Cohen is a puzzlingly uneven record; where to look among the garbage and the flowers? It’s also true that Cohen became a better, more sophisticated songwriter in the years that followed. A key aspect of his identity as a lyricist, his bleak humour, was not quite revealed on this first album which is mostly a po-faced affair. However this is, probably, still his best album just for the sheer burst of inspiration that produced four or five of his greatest songs in one go. *Note: Eagles ‘Desperado’ is a very good album, their best in fact, and it should be on this list. 4/5

Yesterday we listened to The Songs of Leonard Cohen, and I wrote about how Cohen’s voice spoke of maturity: the calm poise of a man looking forward, prepared, as he once said, “to express the great inevitable defeat that awaits us all.” Sinéad O’Connor’s I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, released in 1990, sings from the opposite direction. Where Cohen peers toward death with stoic composure, O’Connor turns her gaze backward, toward the scene of injury. Her voice - raw, exposed, terrifyingly unguarded - is the sound of someone refusing to grow up, not out of immaturity but as an act of resistance. For O’Connor, childhood is not a place of innocence but of vulnerability. The very word suggests safety, a world that protects; yet her music insists that childhood is the first site of betrayal, where institutions announce their cruelty and love becomes conditional. In Three Babies - the album’s most naked song - O’Connor gathers loss, birth, and abortion into a single lament. It is not a political tract about reproductive rights but a mourning song for the fragile life-force itself, the impossible closeness between what lives and what does not. And in The Emperor’s New Clothes, she begins with the devastating line: “It’s been years since you held the baby.” The phrase refers, perhaps, to her partner and producer John Reynolds, but its resonance is wider: the baby is both literal child and symbolic self, the part of the psyche that remains uncared for. The music’s insistence on the child is not metaphorical. O’Connor grew up in an Ireland that punished women and children with equal ferocity. Her mother was abusive; she spent her adolescence in a Magdalene Home, one of those carceral laundries where “fallen” girls were taught repentance through forced labour. To have survived that world is already political. Her later rebellion - against the Church, against the music industry, against any structure that confused moral authority with domination - was a lifelong attempt to protect the child she had been. The shaved head she adopted in 1987 became a kind of living philosophy of the body. It was read as Joan of Arc cosplay, as ecclesiastical tonsure, as defiant androgyny, or as self-punishment. But there is another, stranger possibility: that she was trying to re-enter the condition of the infant, the bald-headed creature before gender, before the market, before sin. Pop’s logic depends on the circulation of desire; O’Connor’s gesture was to remove herself from that economy altogether. In a culture that required women to be desirable to be visible, she chose to look like a baby just as she was becoming a mother herself. That contradiction - at once maternal and childlike - runs through the album. In the concert film of I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, she performs I Am Stretched on Your Grave over its looped Funky Drummer beat. When the traditional Irish fiddle enters, she suddenly breaks into an Irish dance: stiff, arms held tightly by her sides, the jerky discipline every Irish child is made to learn. It’s a gesture both comic and cathartic. She parodies the national culture that trained its children into awkwardness and, in the same moment, reclaims it. For an instant, she looks like a child performing for no one, and therefore free. Her critics were quick to call her childish. In Black Boys on Mopeds, the lover dismisses her politics as “childish” outright, and the press often agreed. O’Connor’s protest was too unfiltered, too direct, too emotional to qualify as “serious” politics. But that charge tells us more about the adult world than about her. To be “adult”, in the culture she rejected, meant to compromise, to accept the world as it is. “Childishness” becomes, in that sense, a subversive stance - a refusal to naturalise cruelty, to outgrow outrage. O’Connor’s bluntness, her supposed naïvety, exposes a society that mistakes cynicism for wisdom. Her voice insists that feeling is a form of knowledge. This insistence reached its most infamous form on Saturday Night Live in 1992, when she tore up a photograph of Pope John Paul II and told the audience to “fight the real enemy”. The act has been flattened by history into a meme, retrofitted with the slogan Sinead Was Right. But to say she was “right” is to miss the point. Her gesture was not a fact-checking exercise on the clerical abuse scandals - though they were part of the story - but an indictment of an entire moral architecture: the Magdalene Laundries, the industrial schools, the borstals, the unmarked graves of children and women shamed into silence. It was, above all, a defence of the vulnerable against the institutions that claimed to protect them. In rehearsal for that episode, she had used a photograph of a refugee child instead of the Pope’s image. She didn’t tear it up. The gesture’s meaning, then, was never solely Irish. It was about a world that is hard on small things. When she tore up the Pope’s portrait, she was not desecrating an icon; she was naming a system of sanctified cruelty. The logic of The Emperor’s New Clothes - the child pointing at the emperor and crying, “He’s naked!” - was not allegory but method. The backlash was immediate. A few days later, at a Bob Dylan tribute concert, she was booed mercilessly, and it took Kris Kristofferson to steady her on stage, whispering: “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.” It is one of those small moments that crystallise an entire career: the child being protected by the fatherly voice she never had, even as she refuses to become what the world expects of her. Her art could never be revolutionary in the programmatic sense - she didn’t want to seize power or rebuild institutions. Her logic was haunting, not transformation. The child, once injured, cannot be resurrected; it can only persist as a ghost, a reminder, a refusal. This is why O’Connor’s music so often sounds unfinished, unresolved, full of raw edges and unresolved grief. The incompletion is the point. The album’s biggest hit, Nothing Compares 2 U, threatens to overshadow this more radical project. And, of course, it does. Written by Prince, the song carries a polish and composure foreign to the rest of the record. Yet O’Connor’s performance transforms it utterly. She dedicates it to her mother - the figure of both love and trauma - and in doing so turns a pop ballad of romantic loss into a ritual of abjection. “All the flowers that you planted, mama, in the backyard, all died when you went away.” The line sounds simple, but it encodes an impossible paradox: the mother’s departure is the wound that creates the artist, and also the wound that can never heal. To sing to the mother is to risk becoming the mother; to mourn her is to repeat her. The music video, that stark close-up of O’Connor’s face, owes its grammar to Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. Like Renée Falconetti’s Joan, O’Connor appears both martyr and adolescent, her tear falling unbidden, a sacrament of conviction. The comparison feels inevitable. Both women were punished for their faith - not faith in doctrine, but faith in feeling. Both suffered at the hands of patriarchal institutions convinced of their own holiness. And the punishment did come, not from the Church this time but from the culture industry. Pop can tolerate women’s suffering, but not their defiance. It rewards trauma when it can be aestheticised, not when it threatens the market’s smooth operation. O’Connor refused to play the game: she would not perform repentance, would not apologise for her outrage, would not grow up in the way the industry demanded. She existed as an irritant within every system she entered: an Irish Muslim, a female priest, a childish mother. She didn’t want to destroy the system; she wanted to reveal its contradictions from within. Her cameo as the Virgin Mary in Neil Jordan’s The Butcher Boy feels like the zenith of that trajectory. She appears as a hallucinatory mother-figure to a boy who has lost his mind, a vision of tenderness amid ruin. The casting is perfect. In Catholic mythology, Mary is chosen precisely because she is a child; later, in the Pietà, she becomes the mother who holds her dead son. The circle closes: child and mother fused in perpetual grief. “I do not want what I haven’t got.” The title phrase, repeated at the album’s close, sounds like acceptance but is really a refusal. O’Connor wanted no redemption, no posthumous vindication. What she asked for, through the grain of her voice, was something smaller and harder to secure: that the child - bruised but unbroken - might be allowed to live. She knew that the world would never grant such permission. Yet she sang as if it might. And that, finally, is the power of the record: a faith not in salvation, but in the persistence of the wound as a form of truth. I've gone and made myself cry and talked myself into a more stars than this warrants on the music alone. 3.5 Sinead O’Connor was a good singer. That every bar she sings here is slathered in reverb is not only needless, but ruinous. Was it for the allurement of American money that everything Sinead sang was treated to sound like it was issuing from caves by the roads from Tara? If she had a message she wanted people to hear on ‘Black Boys on Mopeds’ it could have done with the lyrics being discernible. I did go read them afterwards. ‘Roses’ and ‘Mopeds’ doesnae work.  This is a 10p mix-up of an album in which you find pompous string writing, wispy folk over drum loops, wispy folk over acoustic guitar, meat and potatoes guitar pop, accapella…etc. None of it is any good for you. There’s little inspiration here and no sense of artistic conviction or direction.  No hang on - Nothing Compares 2 U is amazing. How did that happen? Well that’s just one of those inexplicable things. This version with its elegant correction of the original harmony and inspired variation on the original melody absolutely blew the Prince-penned original out of the water. How many people can say they mugged Prince?  2/5

“If he thought you were doing something wrong, he’d throw up five fingers, or ten fingers, and that’s what he would dock your salary.” Clyde Stubblefield There are more important things, James! 2.5 his is interesting, it just isn’t very good. Here is a nice, crisp account of female fans shrieking their hearts out while Brown’s band plays tidily and efficiently. James Brown’s singing is sporadically brilliant but largely sounds like the squawking of an indignant old lady. The main issue though is simply the songs. I understand they’re hits - Fats the hype man explains this at the start - and that they are, here, about as well performed as they could be. The songs just aren’t very good. 2/5

Rubber Soul My wife went on a trip to Amsterdam once and listened to Rubber Soul while on hallucinogenics. Her recollection is that the carpet melted and that the Beatles sailed across in tiny vessels of tears, while Michelle - in all its creepy coyness - expanded to fill several hours. As much as I enjoy Rubber Soul, I know that it is the Beatles first psychedelic record and that my wife’s description of Amsterdam is how Rubber Soul should be experienced. I am too scared to try that, of course. Still, it makes you listen to the album differently and with a certain trepidation. Run For Your Life is a horrific sentiment delivered with psychopathic banality. Imagine that looping forever. Or the sickening tooth sucking sound that imagines itself a hook in Girl. The bare sentiment of In My Life would become painful. The painful sentiment of Nowhere Man would become unbearable. What were the Beatles playing at getting into drugs! For me, the album is always tainted now. To be handled carefullly with gloves. The less thrilling songs, like Wait, What Goes On, You Won’t See Me, are to be studiously ignored. Drive My Car, The Word to be taken in moderation. 14 seconds of sitar on Norwegian Wood is often enough. 4 Rubber Soul - The Beatles Rubber Soul is very good. If you were looking for flaws - The Word is a bit naff, What Goes On is forgettable, and Run for your Life is dull and one of the worst Beatles album closers. And you are looking for flaws of course, because you think about the Beatles so much that ‘which is the best Beatles album?’ has become the sine qua non of all music criticism. By ‘you’ I mean me, so there is also the problem of Nowhere Man. A teacher in St Mary’s - I forget which, I wasn’t in his classes, he was old and an idiot if that narrows it down at all - took a group of us into the chapel and gave us a short, inspirational speech about our impending career choices. The bottom line was that we should be ‘leaders’ and not ‘gophers’ if possible (these were roughly the two types of man in the world) and then he stood glaring at us with his arms folded while Nowhere Man played at us from a little boombox. Don’t be Nowhere Men lads. Have a plan and ambition and all that. I was sure then, as now, that this was not John Lennon’s message but I can’t shake the association. The song starts and something in me twists in disgust. Great song all the same. I understand the temptation to favour this above all other Beatles albums. It is right in the middle and they all still have the same haircut on the cover and are clean-shaven. It is easy to romanticise this as the last glimpse of the band’s solidarity as a commercial and artistic unit before a long, glorious dissolution into their disparate personalities, diverging musical interests and radically different-looking heads. In truth McCartney had already, on the previous album, written and recorded a song without any of the other Beatles (Yesterday). There are still enough musical and studio experiments on Rubber Soul that it anticipates the second half of their career even as it embodies, more perfectly than any of the albums before, their genius in crafting commercial pop music. No discomfort with perceived artistic pretentiousness will be felt listening to Rubber Soul. It’s almost a diplomatic choice as a favourite Beatles album - ‘Early Beatles v Late Beatles? I like all of it. Everyone is right. Rubber Soul. The Best of the Beatles.’ Fuck that. Music is a competition, even when there is only one band. Well it’s very good. There are so many brilliant songs here it feels silly to give this a mere 4, but that’s what it’s getting from me. There are better albums than this. Mostly by The Beatles. 4/5

Fred Neil A cluttered production, where a lovely bass sound is largely obscured by aimless guitar noodling. How Harry Nilson found the charming core of Everybody’s Talking among the mess of these arrangements, I don’t know. 1.5 Fred Neil - Fred Neil Great title. I liked the first half of this record but my enthusiasm waned beginning with Everybody’s Talkin’. Sorry Fred, I’m used to Harry Nilsson doing it, but fair play to you for having written it. Good song. The Dolphins and I’ve Got a Secret are good too. 2.5/5

Speakerboxx/The Love Below “Musicality, blah blah blah” - My father, listening with me this morning I recently listened to a podcast where the journalist-presenter made an impassioned argument for Big Boi as one of the greatest rappers of all time. The host may be correct - as this project has gone on, it has become clear that I have no idea what really differentiates good rapping from great rapping. What did become clear to me, through the host’s argumentation, was that the attributes valued in rapping are speed, dexterity, and diction. And that ranking these skills and ranking rapping was an important part of the culture. I realised that rappers are not vocalists or singers, but guitar heroes. They are shredders. And the competition that fuels much guitar talk is replicated in rap culture. This is not really how we talk about singers, who are rarely put in direct competition with each other - outside the rank of the divas but it how we speak about virtuosos. I don’t really care for virtuosity. Especially when virtuosity - speed, dexterity, diction - is skill at the expense of musicality. The bragaduccio that is an integral part of hip hop lyricism is an expression of that competitive virtuosity. It is all in aggressive conversation with everything else and at such speed that you have to be really invested to follow it. I’m not that invested. Even the two halves of this double album are put in argument with each other. There is no sense of a whole and one has to pick a side as to which is better: Big Boi’s true hip hop or Andre’s light Prince. It should be clear then that the musicality that my father noted, with surprise, was on The Love Below and I have to agree. More songs, more playfulness, even when that means painful skits and trite jazz parody. But some of that aggression peeks through anyway. For all the imitation here, Prince was never so mean-spirited about the women in his life and that sours the taste somewhat. I don’t know if Big Boi is mean to his ladies, as he’s shredding through it all and I can’t keep up. In recent years, Andre has said that, at 50, he is too old to rap - it is a young man’s game, fuelled by young man’s passions and concerns and a young man’s competitiveness. His most recent album was an instrumental flute record, a turn to pure musicality ( for better or worse). The first track is I Swear I Really Wanted To Make A “Rap” Album But This Is Literally The Way The Wind Blew Me This Time. 2 Speakerboxxx/The Love Below As everyone has long agreed, there is a decent single album hiding inside Outkast’s double album and it’s ‘The Love Below’ half. Imagine my surprise to discover, after not listening to it for many years, that this is untrue! The Love Below half is shit and all. There are many moments of brilliance throughout this slog of a record. The problem is that almost every one of them is then copied back in without variation. The Way You Move has that chorus - cut and pasted to absurdity - and nothing else. Amid the airless buzz of pointlessly repeated choruses there are only the attempts at comedy to keep us going. The multitracked ‘funny vocal’ style in the songs grates very quickly. The actual sketches are excruciating. I still like Hey Ya and Dracula’s Wedding. Take Off Your Cool is very nice, and even if it is only a miniature it ought to have been the template; say the very little you have to say musically and leave. Nothing here should have been longer than 2 1/2 minutes. 1.5/5

American Beauty I was sure, going in, that I disliked American Beauty immensely. And, certainly, it is tediously neat. Hardly, the work of actual hippies who drop acid and take to the road. It is clear that American bands - and faux American bands, like Cream - often confused country with psychedelia and blues with psychedelia and any boring procedural music with psychedelia, so long as it had guitar solos and vocal harmonies. As time as passed, I’ve grown to like country more, so I didn’t dislike American Beauty so much as remembered. However, it is too American and too conventionally beautiful to expand the mind as the fabled Dead were reported to do. 2 American Beauty - The Grateful Dead The child seemed to enjoy listening to this in the car. I don’t blame her - it’s very nice. Especially Ripple. Still, the best thing here as with anything by the Grateful Dead is their excellent band name which they never could have lived up to. 2/5

In Utero I’m cautious of listening to In Utero too critically, so fundamental a component of my musical development was it. I really came to contemporary music in 1996, in the space after Kurt Cobain was a generational voice, but before he became eternal. I have a - probably false - memory of his death being announced on kids TV by two puppets. I had heard the name Nirvana, but didn’t hear Nirvana until it was too late to experience it in real time. The reality, in relation to the hype, was much smaller than I imagined - a three-piece. And more vulnerable - even here, where they rage and rip up most of the time. If I listen too closely now, the underlying fragility of the record may not take it. 5 In Utero - Nirvana We had In Utero as our weekend album and on Monday I still couldn’t find my tongue. It is a hard album to think about and talk about. It has meant a lot to me, although that meaning has taken many years to grow out of the mere puzzlement with which I first encountered this record at around age 14. Nevermind, which I was introduced to around the same time, was so immediate in its impact on me; a delightful sugar rush. In Utero barely felt like the same band. It felt indigestible at the beginning. Disappointing. Puzzling. Listening to In Utero now, decades on and familiar with every bar of it, it continues to puzzle because it gains power with every listen. I am as sure as I can be that it is quantifiably excellent; the work of a team of artists perfectly clear in what they want to achieve aesthetically and perfectly positioned to achieve it. How much of the engine of this artwork is the morbid fascination of Kurt Cobain’s self-destruction? That is a question that troubles me every time I listen to it. I have no such issue with Nirvana’s other records but here I cannot disentangle the intensity of the writing and performance on In Utero from its place in Kurt’s biography. I don’t just mean the screaming and feedback and amp kicking, there is also intensity in the lighter, more pleasant moments here. Dumb, Pennyroyal Tea, and All Apologies have a terrible beauty; the sort of light that reminds you of the depth of the darkness around you. Perhaps this is just my (romantic) misreading and Kurt made this record with smiles inside and out. He certainly gained a good deal of satisfaction in frustrating his record company’s expectations. Perhaps it was just more brilliant work by a brilliant young musician and I err in experiencing it as an ever deepening chasm. I feel sadder for Kurt than I used to. In Utero is better than ever. 5/5

Cool began as rebellion and ended as wallpaper. When Miles Davis released The Birth of the Cool, he wasn’t trying to start a trend; he was trying to get some air. Bebop had turned jazz into an Olympic event - all velocity and virtuosity, no room to breathe. Davis’s answer was silence, space, and understatement. He made stillness sound radical. His cool was an act of refusal: a rejection of spectacle, of demand, of the social compulsion to perform. The horn spoke quietly, so you listened harder. For a while, that kind of calm was thrilling. It suggested control in a noisy world, a way to stay dignified while everything else boiled over. Cool was courage disguised as detachment - standing up and standing apart as roughly the same thing. But rebellion, like a good riff, only works once. The moment it’s copied, it becomes attitude. The controlled tempo, the self-contained posture, the immaculate minimalism: all absorbed, flattened, commodified. The pose of indifference replaced the substance of resistance. It became disdain - then worse. The sound of cool was laminated by culture, translated into advertising’s dialect of detachment. It ceased to be oppositional and became ambient. Now it sells coffee, sunglasses, hybrid cars. It is the official soundtrack of the middlebrow - the hum of playlists and loft apartments. What was once a defiant whisper against hysteria has become background music for people afraid of sincerity. Cool’s relational nature doomed it. It could only exist as contrast - to heat, to hysteria, to sincerity. Once those oppositions were appropriated, cool lost its tension. The birth of the cool was, inevitably, the beginning of its death. The embers that glowed under Miles’s quiet horn have cooled to ash - elegant, tasteful, and entirely cold. 2 [over ‘Rocker’] Maria: “I don’t want that.” Me: “You don’t like this song?” Maria: “No I want a happy song.” Me: “Is this not a happy song?” Maria: “No this isn’t a happy song, this is a bad song.” I actually thought it was alright but the Birth of the Cool was not cool enough for my two year old. And she hadn’t even heard its stupid title, which is the squarest thing about it. 2/5

Having read some of the reviews here, before listening to the album, I steeled myself for the much-derided yodelling on Spaced Cowboy. I was going to like it no matter what and everyone else could suck it. Well, it is certainly the most daring and animated vocal performance by Stone on the record. Indeed, the mumbled, lysergic drawl that comprises the rest of song makes the yodel an even greater relief. As an aside here, I just looked up lysergic to make sure I was using it correctly and Merriam-Webster offered this example: "In large measure, Sly and the Family Stone bridged the gap between the choreographed cool of soul music and the lysergic abandon of white psychedelic rock." —Rolling Stone Maybe I’m wrong, as abandon doesn’t sound quite right for this record. Neither does “choreographed cool.” Rather, there is druggy sludginess on the part of Sly’s apathetic delivery. There is doom bass. Neatly syncopated guitars that go round and round, seeing no way out. It’s pretty heavy, man. And, when Sly spends the last seven minutes of this LP repeating a vocal hook from a previous hit, suggests he is not looking forward. Of course, that song, Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin), also references previous Stone hits, but the mood on There’s a Riot Goin’ On is so dark that is the callback suggests exhaustion rather than playfulness. Despite a few a bright moments - I prefer Brave & Strong and Runnin’ Away to Family Affair - this is a slog. 2.5 There isn’t much songwriting going on here; to my ears the top line when there was one often sounded like ad libs by a man who is stoned to his toes. So the record relies mainly on shifting textures and atmosphere and they don’t quite support it over 45 minutes. The satisfyingly farty bass playing is the best thing here. The drums are sporadically interesting in texture even if there isn’t a pattern or fill worth remembering. The most memorable moment for me was 3 1/2 minutes into Africa Talks to You when I glanced over at the display and registered the shock that there was 5 minutes left to go. I do like the bit where they go ‘Timmmbeeeeeeeeeeeeer’ but 9 minutes? Put the pipe away. 2.5/5

There was a week in 1996 when my radio alarm woke me each morning at half past six with Susan’s House. It was the single of the week on Chris Evans’s Radio 1 breakfast show, and it was testament either to the wave begun by Novocaine for the Soul or to the strange cultural power Evans then wielded that the single reached number seven in the charts - the highest UK placing of Eels’ career. I would have sworn that Mr E’s Beautiful Blues went higher, but no. Susan’s House it was: a very mid-90s nightmare of Pasadena that could almost have been Andersonstown too - except there were no doughnut shops in Andersonstown then. It’s the unsettling precursor to the follow-up album Electro-Shock Blues, which I’m fairly sure was in the ‘two-for-one’ bin at HMV from release. Mr E’s Beautiful Blues so starkly borrows elements from the first two album titles that I’m surprised its parent record, Daisies of the Galaxy, isn’t the canonical choice - the true amalgam of Everett’s competing modes: gentle champion of the loser and loser himself. But no: Beautiful Freak remains the one we’re told to listen to, just as Susan’s House is the one that charted. Go figure. It suggests a novelty. I bought the album at the time and always found it hard to play through to the end. E’s sad-sack persona feels wearily mid-nineties - too articulate to be as directly affecting as Mark Linkous - yet his commitment to the bit, to sadness and vulnerability and the genuine tragedy of losing his mother and sister, makes it hard to doubt his sincerity. He means it, man. It may not be sophisticated, but it can be touching at times. And I’d be lying if I pretended I wasn’t once a sad sack myself. Sure, the quiet-loud dynamic of alternative rock is done better elsewhere - with actual dynamics! - but the fuzz bass on Not Ready Yet still pleases me. And Susan’s House still wakes me up at 6.30, though I no longer have a radio alarm. 2 This is fine. There are no great songs here but there is a musical identity. Well…maybe musical identity is a bit strong, it’s more of a gimmick. You get pretty, often nursery rhymeish melody supported by twee minimalism mainly in the form of cheap keyboard sounds or untreated guitar contrasting sharply with cynical and often darkly snide, quasi-confessional lyrics. Sometimes this dualism of sweet and sour is underlined musically as garage rock gestures sprout up like mischievous weeds. It’s an idea worth [checks the rest of Eels’ career] flogging to death and far beyond, apparently. 2/5

Here's Madonna entering middle age and, for the first time, seeming aware of time’s passing. The album’s sub-Debut electronica and spiritual searching marked a turn inward after decades of provocation and reinvention. Earlier incarnations - the streetwise provocateur of Like a Virgin, the art-house sensualist of Erotica, the stylish ironist of Vogue - are still cool now precisely because they were anchored in irony, control, and surface. Ray of Light, by contrast, tries to sincerely make Kabbalah cool and misses. It is the first Madonna persona that feels dated not because it failed necessarily, but because it was genuinely felt: a woman approaching forty seeking transcendence in yoga, motherhood, and ambient soundscapes. Fair play to her. Perhaps it’s the middle-brow of it all, perhaps it’s the late-90s, perhaps it’s the title of the first song, but it feels faintly Ballardian: the ego dissolving into a vast, flooded psyche. Like J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World, Madonna’s vision is one of submersion — fame and identity melting into dream, light, and liquid. The ecological apocalypse in Ballard’s novel becomes, in Madonna’s hands, a personal one: the collapse of celebrity into humanity, into herself. Yet the mix of not quite contemporary electronics and very of the time mysticism now feels tethered to the self-conscious spirituality of the late 1990s. That’s Ballardian too - the datedness of the future. At the time, Madonna was able to coast on the coolness of uncoolness or to elevate the uncool with the residual cool she had. But the Sex and the City style euphoria of Ray of Light now seems as out of touch as Sex and the City. Of course, the opposite of a Drowned World is a frozen one and Frozen remains the best track here. 2 For me, here is as dull an album as almost any we have listened to so far. Madonna is an unremarkable singer but even a good singer would struggle to hold a listener’s attention with the pedestrian melodies on offer. Aside from the title track and maybe Frozen, both of them a couple of minutes longer than they deserve to be, this was absolutely brain-numbing. 1.5/5

I used to think Michael Jackson’s bizarre persona - that contradictory mishmash of black and white, male and female, child and adult, innocent and dangerous - didn’t come together until the 1980s. But its central and most terrifying component appears right at the start of Off the Wall. ‘You know, I was, I was wondering,’ he intones, ‘if you could keep on, because the force, it’s got a lot of power and it makes me feel like, ah, it makes me feel like, ooh…’ What makes Jackson so uncanny is the sense of obsessive compulsion barely concealed beneath his quiet, polite exterior. At the beginning of Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough, the mask slips. He may be asking nicely, but he won’t take no for an answer. He recalls no one more than Norman Bates - that other demure transgressive who straddles the lines between genders, between parent and child, between romantic naïf and sex predator. When Jackson began wearing an actual mask in 1986, he didn’t become any less strange. He somehow inhabits Don’t Stop honestly, which makes it such a remarkable opening track - possibly his best single. He isn’t yet in the myth-making mode of later years, with their messianic self-pity and self-aggrandisement, but he’s escaped the mawkishness of his early Motown records. The song’s energy carries the first half of the album through to Get on the Floor. It’s significant that most of these four tracks are credited to Jackson alone: their tense funk and disco pulse maintain that compulsive force, even when Jackson pretends to be a working man - a performance that rings hollow. The second half, however, sinks into the unlistenable Broadway schmaltz of Girlfriend, She’s Out of My Life, and the rest. Written by relative normies like McCartney and Wonder, these are stylised continuations of the safe, universalist Motown mode. But Jackson isn’t safe or universal. When the album ends on Burn This Disco Out, note the phrasing - not burn down like Disco Inferno or Morrissey’s suggestion, but burn out, as if running out of energy. Jackson’s compulsive power works best in single bursts - singles - rather than extended forays. It’s the fevered wank, not the night of passion. And the wanker’s fervour easily becomes fantasy of self, as Jackson would later prove. Allegedly, just before his death, Jackson begged his doctor to keep him alive, lest ‘God give my ideas to Prince instead.’ But Jackson and Prince were never working from the same material. Prince was the generous lover pretending to be a creep. Jackson was the creep trying too hard to play innocent. Prince believed in sex as communion, as exchange. Jackson believed in compulsion, in the drive that annihilates the other. The force that “makes me feel like, ooh…” is the same force that empties him out. But, on the first half of Off the Wall, when he embodies that force without shame, you understand why it was so compelling to him. 2.5 A brutal contrast with Madonna from a day before. Off the Wall is no less a commercial fishing expedition than Ray of Light but my goodness what an exceptional singer Michael Jackson sounds after an hour of Madonna. He really had a wonderful voice with dramatic commitment built into every second and dazzling variety in timbre. He also had an instinct for vocal arrangements that grab your attention, even during the weaker songs (Get on the Floor, Girlfriend). Lyrically it’s all either dancing or pining and although the horns and strings are very slick they are inescapably generic. Still I can’t say I was bored - it’s a tight 40 minutes and if you are going to have just one of these tracks be six minutes long then ‚Don’t Stop…‘ was the right choice. 3/5

What is the substantial difference between this collection of distended grooves and those on the Eric Burdon album we listened to a few months ago? The Burdon record was a studio indulgence, a project; this sounds like the document of something that was happening, whether the tape was rolling or not. There is a world and a culture that exists beyond the LP, and though it may be exhausting on record, it is also sweaty, alive, and unavoidable wherever it is actually happening. 3 I shouldn’t have read anything about this album. It is very difficult not to build in credit for Kuti’s courage in the making of a political and moral statement here - given what ‘Zombie’ would cost him personally. I don’t want to give in to that temptation. There are different forms of courage everywhere in music making. In the Jazz albums we have encountered so far there is often obvious musical bravery and a spirit of bold endeavour. I give these Jazzers no extra credit for any of that. Context is always important and useful but ultimately I try to keep the stakes no higher than here is some music, what do I think of it. Jazzers usually get 2/5 or so. To give extra marks even for risking life and limb in making your album would unfairly disadvantage those artists who are unlikely to have their family thrown out of a window regardless of the content of their record. So where does that leave Zombie? It is certainly not as dull as an album with this much musical repetition ought to be. The grooves are delicious and the unpolished horn sound has an especially nice edge to it. The simple episodic structures also make this much more digestible over long track lengths than most jazz tracks of similar length. So it is dance music but also much less boring as pure listening material than dance music. Still it feels rather slight somehow. These 4 tracks aren’t quite enough to build a sense of narrative shape over 50 minutes. Obviously the album has musical and lyrical identity but from my scant knowledge of him and his work I suspect that most of what Fela Kuti produced had that built in. 2.5/5

Smiley Smile is a concise half-hour of very silly pop music, whose only pretension is the idea that any of it is funny. The Beach Boys don’t have a sophisticated sense of humour. Indeed, little about them is sophisticated, beyond Brian Wilson’s ear for arrangement. For decades, the Smile mystery dangled the possibility of a truly sophisticated Wilson work, one that integrated ideas and themes and allowed him to move beyond the limits of a US pop vocal group – “a teenage symphony to God” and all that. But when Brian Wilson Presents Smile finally saw release, it was clear that Smiley Smile had the right idea: brief, cheery tunes, one after the other. That’s all it takes. Smile contains all those catchy little hooks but tries to string them together to no real effect. It’s no failure that it isn’t a symphony – it’s still just a seventeen-track pop album – but, as with McCartney’s symphonic efforts, it reveals a pop writer’s lack of focus. One catchy idea follows another, with no development or integration, and the songs themselves are harder to locate within the unnecessary transitions. Wilson’s collaborator Van Dyke Parks did a better job on his own 1967 album Song Cycle – less catchy, less beautiful even, but a more complete work. And he’s funnier too. 2 I’m glad we had an extra week to think about this one because it is an unusual case. I have heard it before and found it pleasant enough but trying to think critically about it this time opened a can of worms. Although I do like worms. Or do I? I am no great fan of the Beach Boys. But I love the idea of Smile - the masterwork so ambitious that it eats its eccentric creator and self-destructs. That it can be carefully reconstructed over thirty years later to allow the audience to hear what it was ‘supposed’ to sound like and to imaginatively insert it in an alternate 1967 is a singularly engrossing idea. There are several problems with this though. First there is the suspicion that Brian Wilson was brought down less by gazing too long into the abyss of Art than by just taking far too much LSD and making himself very ill. Second and Third, and both more nourishing and fatal to the function of this particular conceit, are Smiley Smile (1967) and the Smile Sessions (2011). I actually listened to ‘Brian Wilson Presents Smile’ before I heard either of those other releases. Which you would think would give BWPS an advantage. Here was the first time I heard ‘Wonderful’, for example. I didn’t appreciate until years later when I listened to Sessions, that Wilson’s re-recording amounts to a meticulous, even uncanny, version of the unreleased 1960s recording. And now the worm that I don’t like begins to gnaw - ‘Why?’ Setting aside any complications there might have been about licensing and rights because I dare say I wouldn’t understand or care, the essential answer to why Brian Wilson ‘presented’ Smile in the way he did seems to me to be disrespect. There is disrespect for the other Beach Boys and their (patient) work in 1967. There is also disrespect for Smiley Smile. Poor Smiley Smile, kicked by critics and consumers in 67, kicked also I recently learned in its exclusion by the compiler of ‘1001 Albums…’, was here on BWPS given a fresh kicking for the new century by its chief creator. It isn’t merely that the romantic conceit of ‘Smile’: The Greatest Pop Album Ever Not Quite Made’ requires that Smiley Smile be continually acknowledged as failure; as the mere flotsam of a lost Galleon. It is the tone of ‘Brian Wilson Presents Smile’. It’s so clean. So airless. Every note less played than presented in a spotless mix, lest anyone mistake that anything accidental, much less chaotic, happens on the path to Great Art. Even the music of Good Vibrations gets tidied up a bit - the backing vocals in the chorus are clarified and the phrase neatly tied off in a way that they aren’t in the original. The subtext of this sort of behaviour is that Smiley Smile’s failure was built in from the start because it wasn’t properly ‘composed’. Well let’s get down to it. Smiley Smile is a far, far better album than Brian Wilson Presents Smile. The versions of Vegetables, Wind Chimes and Wonderful on that record are the best versions of those songs. Moreover it is a charming record, full of atmosphere. BWPS is not. Smiley Smile certainly has flaws but the biggest of them is that one of the greatest (and most expensively recorded) songs in pop music was dumped right in the middle of it. Good Vibrations on Smiley Smile is like seeing someone in a tuxedo turn up uninvited to your student house party. Diverting for a minute but ultimately unsettling, especially once a little weed has been smoked. You know who wears tuxedos probably? Narks. Additionally The Smile Sessions is a far better presentation of a ‘Smile‘ that wasn’t than Brian Wilson’s. Granted there is very little quantifiable musical difference between several tracks but here I can stop and thank Brian Wilson for his efforts. Smile Sessions taken alongside BWPS’s meticulous recreations stands as a valuable and unique testament in popular music that there is something in music beyond the notes and even the studio techniques. Call it ‘relaxed expression’ or more idealistically ‘spirit’ - the Beach Boys 1967 recordings plainly have ‘it’ and BWPS does not. That’s notwithstanding the fact that there is frequently a sort of artifice in Smile Sessions as well. The full version of ‘Surf’s Up’ that appears there, for example, is a composite version that never *really* existed. It is also so far superior to the Surf’s Up that appears on BWPS that I almost can’t feel that it’s the same song. This is an experience I encounter often enough as a listener to classical music, but there is much less opportunity to experience it in pop music. Incidentally I think the Surf’s Up on Sessions is also better than the one that appeared on the 1971 album. The second best version is the Brian Wilson solo piano version, also on Sessions. The Smile Sessions is marvellous. So where does this leave ‘Brian Wilson Presents Smile’? I won’t say that it was needless - at the very least it is uniquely interesting. But even if there is plenty to engage your thoughts and a seductive invitation to go down a week-long wormhole of pondering one of the great myths of popular music, its artistic value is very questionable. Musically I think it represents more harm than good. I feel queasy listening to this version of Good Vibrations especially. It’s not that it’s bad - although the lyric change is certainly no improvement - it’s that despite how much it is Good Vibrations I can still tell it isn’t Good Vibrations. Brian Wilson’s Smile is the smile of a Stepford Wife. It’s not that it isn’t beautiful it’s just…what kind of person wants that in their house instead of their real wife? 1.5/5

There are harmonised triplets on that Born Ruffians record. There are Highlife guitars on the Vampire Weekend albums. And there’s plenty more of the same on records by actual Highlife musicians. There are compound time signatures all around us! There is really no reason to go to White Denim for any of the music they make on D. But if you’re short on time or money, there’s no harm in carbo-loading it all here, I guess. 1.5 Slightly unexpectedly, I hated this. I went back to it several times. Come on, I thought, nifty players energetically counting to 5 every so often with the satisfying crunch of multiple lightly distorted electric guitar everywhere, this is right up my alley. No. It’s vacuous, posing bullshit is what it is. The main problem is the top line. These aren’t real melodies - they are just a veneer to give the impression that a song is being performed when what everyone here is really interested in is the splicing together of hypnotically busy loops. The razzle dazzle of mixed time signatures is all well and good but melody should be the main event, not a sideshow. The lyrics - once you’ve looked them up, for they are indecipherable in the mix - are nothing at all. For technical musical achievement this lot are well worth their Rock School Grade 7 certificates. Who goes home and listens to the exam book CD afterwards though? 1/5

A possible criticism of David Bowie, if you were really searching for one, is that he was dependent on collaborators and couldn’t achieve what he did alone. He wasn’t, in that sense, a true solo artist. But the truth is that Bowie was the collaborator par excellence – he brought out the best in others, just as they brought out the best in him. In the seventies, at least. In brief flashes in the eighties. Occasionally in the nineties. And again towards the end of his life. I don’t think Iggy Pop is a co-equal partner in this collaboration, and it hardly needs saying that Bowie was responsible for the best work Pop ever did outside the Stooges – possibly including the Stooges. Still, the record itself is nothing without Pop. It is, fundamentally, a Pop record, and he recognises himself completely in the lyrics of Funtime, for example: Last night I was down in the lab / talkin’ to Dracula and his crew. He is a character from a million novelty monster mashes, bashes and graveyard parties – grotesque and goofy. And just as Bowie let Lou Reed play the poison dwarf on Transformer, here he lets Pop be Frankenstein’s monster: the creature Svengalied into revealing greater humanity than his creator. He’s not just an ugly face. Of course, the title captures the dual nature of Pop himself: he sings like an idiot, but he reads Russian novels. 3 I like this album. The sound palette of Low and Heroes - the industrial crudity of the drum sound, the comic pop of the bass, the screech of the guitar and ignorant blurt of wacky sax - I love. The drama and diversity of Iggy’s voice is a worthy substitute for Bowie’s. I might even prefer the version of China Girl here - dark and messy - over the clinically brilliant execution of Bowie’s later hit. The Idiot isn’t quite in the league of its sister albums however. Once you have, charitably, pretended that the 7 minutes of Dum Dum Boys doesn’t exist the album feels rather slight by comparison. 2.5/5

The voice of Elvis Presley has been parodied for so long by goofballs, grotesques and eccentric amateurs that we forget how thoroughly ludicrous it was to begin with. Warbled in the upper reaches, overegged in the lower, it is the sound of a nineteen-year-old pretending to be an adult, pretending to be a libertine, pretending, in short, to be alive. He was always a parody, even before the jumpsuits. And I guess that's how pop should be. However, I was looking at some spirit photographs the other day – those turn-of-the-century curiosities where the bereaved were duped into seeing their dead relatives hovering in artfully blurred silver nitrate. They are, to modern eyes, laughably inept: all crude double exposure and vaseline smudge. Yet people believed them because the medium itself was miraculous. One can only assume that, a century from now, AI’s convincing simulacra will appear equally preposterous. So too with Elvis. The miracle has faded. What was once radical – the slapback echo, the hiccuping libido, the made-in-Memphis fuzz – now sounds like a conjuring trick exposed. Those rockabilly progressions were new once; now they’ve ossified into pastiche. Even the album cover survives only as citation - The Clash quoting it, fashion reappropriating it, history feeding back on itself. The various recordings here flatter no one. Scotty Moore’s guitar is kinetic but often turns into ectoplasmic blur, the double bass reduced to a rumour, and the piano shackled to the clichés of a style still being invented. Only Blue Moon interrupts the charade. A Rodgers and Hart relic smuggled into the repertoire, it sounds like an intruder from another century - eerie, suspended, slightly embarrassed to be here, but successful precisely because it is not dated modernity, it had already weathered time. Presley sings as if overheard rather than performing. It is the record’s true spirit photograph: a transparent illusion that, despite itself, convinces credulous idiots like me. 1.5 I like Elvis. I think he had a great talent in singing and in stage presence. He wasn’t interested in songwriting much less making ‘albums’ and that lack can and ought to be credited to his era more than some artistic deficit on his part. So let’s lay the credit for this Elvis ‘album’ at the door of RCA Victor. Here is Elvis, recorded half a dozen different ways in different places over 18 months, still figuring out how and what he wanted to sing. Some of it is iconic and some of it is bound to extract a wince even from the King’s biggest fans. All of it was singles. This is a compilation and it is a sloppily assembled one. That this compilation was consumed in huge quantities and as such represents a key artefact of a moment of cultural explosion is nothing to its artistic value which is near zero. I except the album cover from this assessment - it looks terrific. Do pink and green ever fail when they work together? Listening to this is rather like watching the whole two and a half hours of broadcast footage of the first moon walk. Everyone watched it at the time but now only those with specialist interest need bother because, honestly, it wasn’t a great show. The rest of us make do with the couple of minutes where Neil Armstrong climbs down and does his line. It’s the Blue Suede Shoes of the moon landing. 1.5/5

A few days ago, The White Stripes were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Jack White, never one to pass up a chance to be both gracious and perverse, used his speech to shout out some of the artists he’d unaccountably leapfrogged on his way in: ELP, Pavement, Minor Threat, Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow. None of whom, it must be said, have much to do with White Blood Cells, the first White Stripes album anyone in the UK paid attention to. Violent Femmes aren’t in the Hall either, though you can hear them plainly in crass lead single Hotel Yorba. White also namechecked The Breeders – a sly nod to the Frank Black-like Spanglish yelping on Fell in Love with a Girl. Pixies, of course, aren’t in the Hall either. Jack White knows it’s absurd that he became a rock star. There isn’t enough in his scrappy little songs. He doesn’t want to record them well. He doesn’t want to deliberate over them. There is, quite evidently, nothing over which to deliberate. In the seventies or eighties he would have been just another compulsive, expulsive home-cassette mail-order eccentric, an R. Stevie Moore in red and white. But Jack arrived at the turn of the century, when guitar rock was desperate for anything that looked like salvation, and when the machinery of hype was willing to believe almost anything. After that, nothing was really right again. 1.5 40 minutes of the same old shtick. ‘Look at us, we’re inbred and we’ve just found half a drum kit and a distortion pedal!’ 1/5

S&M isn’t wrong. This is like being hit on the head – if not the bottom – with a velvet cosh. The album and performance are all expulsive excess, but Metallica were never truly extreme. They always had things under control – or at least sounded as though they did. If their thrash peers Slayer ever roped in a symphony orchestra, it would have to sound like Penderecki. Metallica’s, by contrast, sounds like the Boston Pops. They are, after all, a pop group of great competence. And this is a pop concert – a Best Of disguised as an experiment. A step outside their comfort zone, where they play crowd-pleaser after crowd-pleaser. The real addition here isn’t the orchestration – which adds little, like when the UO accompanies a screening and just drowns out the dialogue – but the pleased crowd itself. Few of Metallica’s peers wrote such anthems, and none with such melodic reach. Listen to them sing along. It’s very endearing. You can hear, in every unified shout, the sound of disbelief: This is actually fucking happening, and it is awesome! And it is awesome. Briefly. In the moment. It’s dumb, and it’s pandering, but that’s who Metallica were in the ’90s – self-aware showmen with stadium-sized egos and tunes to match. I went in dreading what I was letting myself in for, but it turned out thrilling. Sure the orchestra do nothing truly significant, but the ground is there for Metallica and they play their best songs one after another and sound really happy about it. Sure, two hours and thirteen minutes is too much. A masochist should never be completely satisfied. 2.5 I haven’t listened to this since it came out. I recall it being funnier. All these years later I can find nothing to laugh at - this was, just, a bad idea horribly executed. It is entirely excruciating and over two hours long. The one concession here to the presence of an orchestra is that the guitars and bass are turned down in the mix but Metallica make absolutely no musical room in their arrangements. They simply perform their songs as usual, leaving the orchestra to play where they can - burnishing cadences, throwing nondescript melodic fragments in between Hetfield’s vocals and, of course, making horror film noises. There is no realisation, even for a moment across more than two hours of music, of the real power and depth of an orchestra. The San Francisco Symphony here sound staid and prissy - exactly how most people who dislike or don’t listen to orchestral music think orchestras always sound. If it was painful for metal fans to hear Metallica so neutered, it is doubly so for anyone with affection for orchestral music listening to this nonsense. That the concert happened was forgivable because there is nothing wrong with trying something new or a bit different. But to release it for broader public consumption is unforgivable. We are only about 200 albums into this project but I am certain that S&M will prove as potent a piece of torture as anything this list can throw up. You know what, I have been unjust. I’ve only now remembered that at the very end of the concert someone says ‘Same time next year!’. That is genuinely funny. 0/5

The best Peter Gabriel album, though its author remains in the long shadows cast by Kate Bush and David Bowie - artists who ventured more decisively into the uncanny and poetry. Gabriel approaches it, reaches towards it, but ultimately retreats. The theatrical excesses of Genesis were pure pantomime: a masquerade of menace rather than the thing itself. Melt makes a stronger claim, but even its darkest corners are lit, eventually, by the open-hearted conscience of Biko. Gabriel is ultimately too soft. From there it’s a short slide to the vaseline-focus sentiment of In Your Eyes and the pristine pop engineering of Sledgehammer. Yet in those first three self-titled solo albums he comes close to something far less audience-conscious, far more disquieting. Moribund the Burgermeister, A Wonderful Day in a One-Way World, and much of Melt gesture toward a genuine otherworldliness - a space where the strange isn’t a pose but an emergent property, “within the magic circle of an alien will,” as Jung would have it. Intruder, No Self Control, And Through The Wire: his flirtation with obsession parallels Bush’s with spirits and Bowie’s with the occult and madness: a brush against unstable forces rather than a full embrace. It doesn’t last the length of the album, which is ultimately frustrating. In my review of So, I criticised Gabriel for angling too eagerly toward the mainstream - an instinct at odds with his own self-appointed status as Not One of Us. But perhaps So is not the aberration; perhaps this album is. Perhaps Gabriel is, fundamentally, too sane, too solid, too well-calibrated to cross the thresholds his contemporaries passed through, to do real art and real poetry. He visits the uncanny; he does not dwell in it. That might be an unfair assessment, as I like this album a lot, regardless. 3.5 This album sounds very good. Peter Gabriel has a remarkable talent for making records that sound polished and pristine without sounding sterile; a delicate balance. Here’s a hero of the age of Hi-Fi. The mixture of keyboard sounds, however diverse, always seems well judged. The drums pop nicely. However, Peter Gabriel 3 is not as good as it sounds. The songs are a bit shit. The melodies are rather turgid and lumbering and perhaps then well fitted to the lyrics. The lyrics stink. I salute the ambition of songs like Family Snapshot or Games Without Frontiers but Gabriel hasn’t the poetry in him for the task. These are bad lyrics, sometimes painful. 2/5

“And yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low, gleams in all its power. Otherwise the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could a smile run through the placid hips and thighs to that dark center where procreation flared.” Archaic Torso of Apollo, Rainer Maria Rilke Although Dionysian with groupies, Zeppelin are Apollonian in performance: logical, considered, muscular, spry. There is no drunkenness, no chaos, no possibility of the unexpected. Even the moments of free time feel like a gentleman’s agreement—improvised only within boundaries already tacitly agreed upon. Olympians know they need chance to win, but they never risk leaving anything in chance’s lap. If this sounds dismissive, it isn’t meant to be. The oiled gymnopaedist in his posing pouch is to be admired, not loved, and there is much to admire here. The writing and playing are exceptional. The sheer number and velocity of notes should be gratuitous, yet somehow every one lands as necessary and effortless. Except perhaps Living Loving Maid. And the drum solo in Moby Dick. And Bring It On Home. It is a shame that among these musical demigods, only Robert Plant must show his Achilles heel. The others communicate directly through their instruments; the singer must find words equal to his melodies. Apollo may be the god of poetry, but there is little poetry in Plant’s lyrics. The band has moved on from the merely salacious ribaldry of their debut, but even in a song like Thank You—something more than rock posturing—Plant allows himself no true vulnerability. The gods are vulnerable, yes, but their vulnerability is vanity. And Plant, at this stage anyway, will not risk even that. His bandmates, of course, are spared this problem. Their “poetry” is allowed to be about itself—self-contained, self-justifying, pure Apollo. Plant must name the thing the others only have to play. 3.5 The commonplace that 2 is ‘the heaviest Led Zeppelin album’ is a superficial account of ‘heaviness’. Yes there is plenty of guitar distortion here but really this is the lightest - the goofiest - of the early Led Zepp albums. While the others have a long, earnest, luxurious dark heart - Dazed and Confused, Since I’ve Been Loving You, Stairway - this album gives that slot to the Lemon Song. That this 6 minutes of goofing around a blues standard is absolutely mesmerising music (John Paul Jones’ exquisite bass playing I could have listened to another 6 minutes of) is beside the point. The only true attempt at straight-faced earnestness on this album is Thank You and, in my opinion, it falls strangely flat. There are other dips - Living Lovin Maid.. is disposable and Moby Dick is…well it’s a drum solo, which it seems unreasonable to begrudge Bonham at just a couple of minutes long but…it’s a drum solo - but these stumbles and stalls fit comfortably under the umbrella of easy-going goofballery provided by the Lemon Song and the gregarious tone of the other, wonderful landmarks on this album - Whole Lotta Love, What is…, Heartbreaker and Ramble On. No this isn’t ‘heavy’- this feels like a light, capricious album to me; somewhat thrown together, rather unfocused. Frequently terrific, in any case. 3.5/5

"It was easy to see them They were the best band to be in” American Guitars, The Auteurs The music press liked to cast Britpop as a rejection of America – a return to Englishness, a repudiation of grunge, a refusal of US cultural hegemony. “Yanks go home!” But this was always a fantasy, a compensatory fiction. The American influence didn’t disappear; it merely returned as the repressed. The thing that could not be named. Luke Haines acknowledged it openly with his 1993 hymn to Tad, years before the movement had the confidence to admit its own contradictions. With Blur, the repression finally breaks down. This is the band they always were. Coxon’s guitar style had always betrayed the secret. Those supposedly “English” riffs owed more to US indie - Pavement, Dinosaur Jr, Mission of Burma, hardcore abrasion turned melodic – than to the Kinks or The Small Faces. Albarn may have written Modern Life is Rubbish as a reaction to a humiliating American tour, but by Look Inside America he sounds depleted by the very forces he and the press once defined himself against. In this sense, Modern Life and Blur work as bookends: the moment Britpop asserts itself, and the moment the coherence of that assertion collapses. Yet, Blur are always the same band. Despite superficial differences, these are largely the same guitars, the bass, the same drums. The usual narrative is that Britpop dies with Be Here Now or This Is Hardcore. But Albarn’s exit is more interesting because it is not a collapse into excess or ennui, but a strategic withdrawal – a move into an Americanised guitar minimalism that paradoxically allowed Blur to escape the very Britishness they had once amplified. Without changing much. Fitzgerald’s line about “there (being) no second acts in American lives” is less an aphorism than a symptom of American cultural fatalism. Blur’s second act only becomes possible when they abandon the Britpop posture and embrace the transatlantic feedback-loop that produced it in the first place. They’re they same band. It just the times and media narrative that have changed. This, ultimately, is the significance of the self-titled album: its declaration of identity is a negation. Blur becomes Blur by ceasing to be the Blur that Britpop required. Same band though. Albarn’s persona, always a shifting surface anyway, gives more space to Coxon’s musical programme – looser, harsher, more porous to outside currents. The same band, but a calibrated shift that allows them to weathers the demise of Britpop. For a little while. The result isn’t their best album, but it is their moment of liberation. It opens up the temporal space that Britpop foreclosed, allowing the band to continue after the movement’s death. Blur survives because it stops playing the meta-narrative game and just becomes a band. Like the once were. Like they would be on and off over the coming decades. The best band to be in. 3.5 This was the first Blur album I ever bought. It wasn’t until their next album 13 (not on the list) and seeing them live on that tour that they became one of my favourite bands. Ultimately I preferred the two albums before ‘blur’ and the album after it - three of my favourites by any band - but this album, sitting not quite as high in my admiration as the others, still ranks high in my affection. This is a misunderstood album I think. ‘Graham’s Album’ is a common moniker. Well they’re all Graham’s albums and actually the guitar playing here, although more dominant in the mix than before, represents no great stylistic departure for Coxon from a style he established as early as Modern Life is Rubbish. It’s also plainly a Damon album, despite the relative dearth of funny keyboard noises. Though dressed in the rags of alternative music this is, with the exception of Essex Dogs, disciplined pop music. Hooks, choruses, carefully written top lines - the only other track that touches 5 minutes is Beetlebum, a no 1 hit. There are arch instrumental touches - the harps on Look Inside America or electric piano on Strange News. There is as much Great Escape here as 13. Though it trails off at the end - Movin’ On feels procedural, Essex Dogs, a sort of trailer for 13, is nevertheless a bit of a bore; all of 13 is better than Essex Dogs - blur is still an excellent album. I would be happy to bore you with a track by track but I will settle for recording that Beetlebum has one of my favourite guitar solos by anyone - those 7 notes going round and round at the end are the brilliant Graham Coxon in a nutshell, contrariness and strange beauty. 3.5/5

I didn’t realise that this was a partial covers album until Country Comfort and, even then, it was only Bernie Taupin’s tell-tale awkward Bumpkin schtick that gave it away. Stewart and cohort do manage to create a homogenity across the whole thing (nice rhythm section, recorded badly; sloppy slide guitar over folk acoustics), but, listening closer, it is obvious that the songs are by different authors: sometimes sweet, sometimes basic, sometimes clumsy, frequently dumb as a sack of rocks. Stewart’s raspy voice is doesn’t make much sense to me as an interpreter of these different characters, but he certainly gives it a lot of phlegm. 2 This is certainly boring. Whether you think it is ‘pleasant enough’ to compensate for that depends on your enthusiasm for Rod Stewart’s voice, which is the only distinctive feature here. I am not a big fan. Well done on the ugly album cover though. 1.5/5

Merriam-Webster defines William Orbit as "the producer of 13 by Blur and also Beautiful Stranger." 1 Nothing strange to see here. There is some variety of sounds and textures but it all feels arbitrarily thrown together and yet without even the interest of skipped beats or uneven phrases. It just ticks along. Mid-tempo, four beats. No music worth developing apparently, certainly none worth remembering. Many of the keyboard sounds, especially the straight piano voices, would have sounded cringeworthy twenty years ago never mind in 2025. It’s a bit bedroom Pro Tools. All this, taken with the ‘awesome’ track titles (‘Time to Get Wize’, ‘Best Friend, Paranoia’) and the tits on the cover leave an overall air of adolescent naivety about the whole thing. Still, you can’t blame young people just for being young I suppo…sorry what? He was 36 when he made this? Oh. 1/5

I have three very definite memories of Casanova before listening to it proper. 1. Asking Noel, the manager of Games Workshop, what this odd, galloping, whooshing song was that was playing in the background of some orc battle. It was Something for the Weekend. 2. Paul Feeney sidling up to me, during lunch, handing me a headphone and saying "listen to this." A Woman of the World, followed by My Girl by Smokey Robinson, was the template for the various projects we would produce over the coming years. 3. Friday nights in the O'Reilly's living room watching Father Ted. They turned all the lights out, which I thought a little strange. It is a challenge to evaluate Casanova objectively. It is now a phenomenal record, not a masterpiece, not the best Divine Comedy record. The very flappable Neil Hannon is not unflappably cool. Indeed, his archness and clumsy pretentions are only saved from cringiness because they speak to my own clumsy pretensions. There must be something approaching universal in it. That's why it caught my attention in the stupid, geek strategy game store. And that's why it provided the foundation for the music Paul and I would make: expressing our characters without ever expressing our thoughts or feelings.  And this was before I knew that Neil Hannon was Northern Irish. Another lonely oik, hiding from this damp climate by reading books in an upstairs room. If Father Ted felt like absurd Ireland finally visible on TV. The Divine Comedy was something of awkward Northern Ireland on record. The Northern Ireland that was changing. Or I was changing. Or the period between the ceasefires and the Good Friday Agreement just happened to coincide with my coming of age and opening myself up to a world of art outside the rather grim confines of the early nineties. And it's not as good as Promenade. And it's not as good as A Short Album about Love. But I would be lying if I said it wasn't important to me. And it is silly that it is important to me, because there is so much insulation around Hannon's heart. But that insulation is wit and Joby Talbot's orchestration and Neil's ridiculous, but somehow touching voice and the silliness itself. And yet, maybe I feel nothing as keenly as The Dogs and the Horses. 3.5+ Yeeeeeeeeooooooooooo 4/5

You can never go home, Elvis. You can never regain your innocence. Niaveity becomes sanctimony. Sincerity, sentimentality. Explorative expanse, indulgent excess. Gospel, country soul. There was a version of Suspicious Minds that was always on VH1, where he was having more fun than he’s having here. 2 Elvis Presley‘s voice, here both sublime and ridiculous, is the only element that saves this record from being insipid. I think it’s sad that following the 68 Comeback Special, the moment Presley came closest to cutting his own way artistically, he settled back into the rut of procedural hit-making under the yoke of other people‘s ideas and other people’s arrangements. Safe Country Soul shit with plenty of leaving and dying. Even Ringo was finding his own voice as a songwriter by 1969. Don’t Pass Me By is better than anything here. In The Ghetto is a terrible song - the worst of the Best of Elvis. 2/5

Back in 1959, “genius” obviously meant something very different: you took an old tune, sang it like you owned it, and people called you a visionary. Done. Interpretation was the job. You didn’t need to write anything. Arrange anything. You didn’t even need to let Alexander’s Ragtime Band scan properly. By the following decade, of course, genius had changed postcode entirely. It no longer lives in interpretation but in authorship, in the self-inventing demiurge who writes his own myths. Dylan mumbles some poetry, the Beatles discover the Lydian mode and suddenly genius is Sui generis, not a man in a dinner jacket crooning someone else’s cleverness. Which leaves Ray Charles here, stuck with a title that promises more than the record delivers. These dense arrangements smother most of the charm of the songs and Ray doesn’t add anything that wasn’t in the writing: no particular subtext, no fresh feeling, no special phrasing. He hasn’t even select anything particularly great from The Great American Songbook. It is like Hollywood before The Method, a fantasia of what the mid-century thought sophistication sounded like. But genius isn’t sophisticated. Nor is it professional. Nor is it dependent on Quincy Jones. I’m going to look like an idiot when the notion of genius changes again, aren’t I? Ray Charles will have the last laugh. 1.5 So here’s Ray Charles’ ‘Genius’ in a nutshell apparently. But what kind is he? A genius of songwriting? He didn’t write any of the songs here. Arrangement? These arrangements aren’t his. Piano playing? His piano is barely discernible beneath the maximalist orchestra and choir arrangements for almost the entire album. That leaves singing. Yes, Ray Charles is a very nice singer. I have no affection for the Great American Songbook. It is overrated. Whether I am right or wrong it is impossible to believe that anything found on this record represents a superlative account of any of these songs. The arrangements - obnoxious, overwrought, witless - are a chore. Antiseptic glitz. 1.5/5

Beyond the repetitious beats, the boring recurrence of specific words, the pounding on the same few ideas of pantomime violence and sexism, the thing that is truly chronic about The Chronic is its shallow self-referencing. Plenty of record labels have made mythic brands of themselves, but Deathrow is mentioned so frequently that the whole record feels like an informercial for itself. There is nothing here other than the fact that the record exists and its existence is exhausting. 1 ‘You never been on a ride like this befo' (One of the raps on this album) Such ‘flow’. Such ‘beats’. And from ‘The Streets’. Guns being fired and ‘bitches’ castigated over a few seconds of music on a loop. One hears such wonders and what else can one say? It can only be a Rap album by someone. 1/5

I just read Christgau’s review and he describes “the B side (as dragging) more painfully… than intended.” Then I checked his review of My War, where he describes side 2 as being wasted on dirges. He and I clearly disagree. Black Flag is better when it is slower. And this isn’t slow enough for my liking. 2 Black Flag suck. While it is difficult for some people (me for instance) to listen to Damaged without summoning the spectre of Kurt Cobain to nod along approvingly the entire time, the truth is that Black Flag suck. Damaged is not unmemorable and it is not without something like heroic conviction and defiance throughout. I think this makes it rather like the Charge of the Light Brigade, which was also those things but, in the main, stupid. Stupid feelings. Stupid illusions. Stupid everything. 2/5

For all the ideas on Rings Around the World, there is too little energy. Plenty of bold decisions, but they feel deliberate, rather than the unavoidable eccentricities of old. This doesn't mean I don't like it. Rhys writes strong melodies regardless of what else the band is doing. It is an enjoyable experience, more enjoyable as an album than most of the songs are as songs. The appearance of Paul McCartney chewing celery on Receptacle for the Respectable, as he was rumoured to have done on the Beach Boys' Vegetables, is a case in point: borrowed eccentricity and late style establishment valour, rather than the brash inventiveness of earlier. 3 I knew Super Furry Animals’ Rings Around the World was on this list but seeing it come up was still worth a double take. Eh? This? People loved and revered this one apparently. Nominated for the Mercury Music Prize I see. Someone says it was the best album of the year. Someone else says it was the Furries’ best album. All Mandela Effect for me. I honestly thought Rings Around the World died in prison in the early noughties. Well…at least that it was an album that needed a little defending. I liked this album well enough when it came out. I think I saw them on that tour (Mandela Hall maybe, were you there too?) and liked the show. Wasn’t there a general sense at the time though that the Super Furries, if they hadn’t quite ‘sold out’, had become much less interesting? To be fair their previous was a cheaply recorded Welsh language album - which perhaps sets the bar unreasonably high for interesting. Still the singles on Rings seemed to lack something. The title track deserved no particular disrespect simply for being a pastiche of Status Quo (although again - I remember that there was widespread disrespect) - pastiche was always an element of SFA - however, there was nothing uncanny or ‘off’ about it. That I think is the missing element. Sure ‘Northern Lites’ felt like pastiche as well, but of what exactly? It was odd while being brilliant. There was much less of this on Rings. Worse - there is less sense of a band here than before. Rings is a rather sedate album. Songs like ‘Herman ❤️’s Pauline’ or ‘Do or Die’ or ‘Ice Hockey Hair’ - all recalled here in superficial musical effects - simply had too much energy to have sat comfortably here. I can’t quite justify a straight comparison between the Furries’ Rings and the Manic’s This is My Truth… as neat an all-Welsh event as that would be. It’s tempting - TIMTTMY also felt like a band drained of energy and yearning for a moment in the sun of the charts. Like Rings the comparatively beige production of that album nevertheless produced music that was also, in parts, quite beautiful. Still - TIMTTMY did feel like a significant step away from the Manics previous sound(s). Maybe it was a step to the side and probably backwards, and quite possibly accidentally off the side of the stage, but a step it was. Rings sounds like SFA. It sounds like the group that made Guerrilla, but Guerrilla feels like the later album. Rings politeness of production and composition coming later seems to oddly recast Guerrilla’s aural eccentricities as the band not having had the time, money, and creative space to be boring. Much of this album is boring, in my opinion, especially the bits that make special effort to be interesting (Sidewalk Surfer Girl, Receptacle…, Juxtapozed). Of the straight material - ‘Run! Christian, Run!’ is far and away the best track. Beautiful stuff (if somehow a little smug and patronising on its take on extreme cultists) Perhaps I would say that it is beautiful because the track is all a bit Radiohead - it’s especially reminiscent of The Tourist. Was this the problem with the production on Rings I wonder (looking at the Manics here as well)? Nigel Godrich’s production is so conspicuously clean and tidy, and late in the 90s he presided over the artistic triumph of Ok Computer and the commercial triumph of The Man Who. Did other artists err in thinking that this way of making records was necessarily a way forward? Well in any case we must listen to Rings.. before we die. Which isn’t an unreasonable ask to be honest. Still, the only other SFA album on this list is Fuzzy Logic. Why not Mwng for its singular Welshness? Why not Radiator for being absolutely brilliant? If we are only listening to 2 SFA records there is definitely no room for Rings. If we were listening to 4 there still wouldn’t be. 2/5

Something did happen on the day he died. I screamed liked a baby. If it needs justification at all, I’d played a handful of Bowie songs on guitar at my mother’s deathbed the day before. She wasn’t yet gone – she had another ten days - but she was living the end of her life as pleasurably as she could amid the excruciating pain and her strength and consciousness slipping away. She had given me my first Bowie record when I was fourteen, though we’d listened to him in the car for years, especially on those long drives to the hospice when my grandfather was dying two decades earlier. Bowie has always been tied, for me, to grief and dying - and, by extension, to love and living. The surprise release of Blackstar allowed me to briefly share the idea of Bowie’s new work with my mother. But when he died so soon after, we agreed she didn’t need to hear it. If we could only fit a thousand and one albums into her last ten days, she didn’t need something new - certainly not one of her favourite artists confronting the thing she herself was approaching. She was content with the music that had brought her happiness during the five short decades she had on earth. People call Blackstar a grand final statement, but that misreads Bowie’s nature. Sue and ’Tis a Pity She Was a Whore were older pieces tied to another project. The return of Major Tom didn’t feel like a revelation; he had always been part of Bowie’s orbit, a ghost in the system. Bowie had already begun handling the legacy on his previous record, and the Nadsat of Girl Loves Me was simply another of his recurring fascinations. Even Dollar Days, written in the studio, struck me as playful rather than portentous. Bowie rarely said anything definitive, and he wasn’t about to start. Lazarus interests me far more. It was the title song from the musical he wrote with Enda Walsh, which closed its first run at almost the same moment my mother died - within a few hours. Of the four new songs he wrote for the show, it was the only one he carried across to Blackstar. I don’t know why. But it feels like the more searching piece, Bowie revisiting his own mythology through the figure of Thomas Newton and finding something unsettling there. Unlike Blackstar, the show received mixed reviews. Bowie had always been a flawed architect of concept albums anyway. His planned musical of 1984 was never produced. 1.Outside remains gloriously confusing. Even Ziggy Stardust abandons its narrative almost as quickly as Sgt. Pepper. And thank goodness: It Ain’t Easy does more for the record than any plot device could. These failures aren’t incidental: they’re intrinsic. Bowie’s form of invention was incompatible with totalities. His art emerged from excess, leakage, overspill - from the impossibility of containing all his personae within any stable frame. He was part of that generation of art-school musicians who treated popular music as the quickest route to a public imagination. He loved music, but also recognised it as the last mass-cultural space where experimental aesthetics could intervene in everyday life. It was a place to share ideas that could never have found a home in more formal disciplines. He wasn’t a novelist. His paintings were respectable. He was more a star than an actor. But in the interplay of albums, sleeves, performances and videos, he found a gallery for ideas that ranged from the profound to the ludicrous, sometimes in the space of a single track. It’s telling to compare his first and final on-screen appearances. His screen debut, in the 1967 student horror film The Image, shows an artist tormented by a painting come to life - played, of course, by Bowie. In the video for Lazarus, Bowie, dressed in the Kabbalistic imagery of his mid-70s persona, writes frantically. When he runs out of parchment, he writes on the table, then down the table leg, and on. There is never enough space to capture everything. The beginning and the end share the same insight: creation was both his torment and his great animating force. To imagine Blackstar as a final statement is to succumb to a fantasy of closure that Bowie’s entire career repudiates. He didn’t make final statements. Nothing he did was final. He revised himself constantly. He contradicted his own mythologies. He had a decade of silence before The Next Day, and it suited him, but even that felt provisional. Dying forced him into new shapes he might never have adopted otherwise. It was a meeting of compulsion and inevitability, and the work emerged from that tension. It was death, not intention, that made Blackstar the last word. Had he lived, Bowie might have dismissed it or replaced it, and the critics would have obliged. But he didn’t live, and the album became a vessel for our need to find meaning in endings. I struggle to hear it outside that context. And I cannot view it without personal history interjecting: for me, it contains moments of brilliance, moments of silliness, and a great deal of confusion. But I am no better equipped to face death from Blackstar’s insights than I am from the Labyrinth soundtrack - except that Blackstar is, on the whole, the better record. It is not Mozart’s Requiem. But it is the record by - possibly - my favourite artist that was released just as he and my mother died. And that means something. Perhaps too much. My mother’s choices to face down death - Starman, Sorrow, The Prettiest Star - brought her comfort simply by existing, not by offering instruction. Let all the children boogie: words to live by, surely. I’m unsure whether artists are answering a calling or nursing an affliction, but what they produce lets us feel things we might never access otherwise. So when I cried at Bowie’s death, I was crying for my mother. It hardly needs explanation. She died relatively young; he was respectably old. When I think about my own ending, I wonder which model I’ll follow: Bowie’s anxious compulsion or my mother’s remarkable ease. Bowie achieved more; my mother was content with less. I believe she would have liked Blackstar, though I doubt she would have replayed it. Blackstar is only seven tracks, and none of them are built to carry the weight we place on them. Yet Bowie’s achievement with this final album was to remind us that it is the spirit of creation, rather than any specific creation, that is the meaning of an artist’s life. 3.5 It is nearly impossible to listen to Blackstar and not think about death the whole time. And yet we know that for a couple of days after this album was released this feat was entirely possible. Like most people, I missed that window and by the time I sat down with the album every bar and syllable of it was slathered in one unifying ‘meaning’ imposed from up there, in Heaven. Blackstar had drama that couldn’t be stolen. Still, I have my suspicions that in those first two days I would have found less of a gulf in quality between Blackstar and, let’s say, Reality. Reality has both the (apparently ‘defiant’) energy of Blackstar and as much (possibly more) lyrical material that can support morbid close-readings. Yet Reality is more or less forgotten, while Blackstar is venerated - particularly by young people I have noticed in recent years. Listening again this weekend, I can’t help thinking that between the absorbingly odd title track and the lovely closer ‘I Can’t Give Everything Away’, Blackstar mostly gets by on supplying ‘vibes’ while the listener is unable to draw their critical attention from the limitlessly dramatic notion of Bowie’s confrontation with untimely death. There is neither much structure, nor lyrical heft to stuff like ‘Tis Pity or Sue or Girl Loves Me. Drums go round and round. Portentous riffs go round and round. Saxophones tootle. Surely this is not Bowie’s best work by a long shot. In any case, all was transmogrified by the near-simultaneous release of Bowie’s spirit along with his final music. The album begins and ends memorably (and with sublime poignancy in the musical recall of A New Career..). It has an identity. If it should happen to falter in the middle, well…how did I rate Young Americans? 3/5

Little Richard, in his wisdom, knew that the best way to smuggle filth into polite society was to tuck it neatly inside a homophone. Miss Molly liked to bawl and ball, and the joy was in pretending you didn’t notice the difference. Marvin Gaye, oddly enough, abandons such subtlety. On You Sure Love to Ball, the strings swirl around trying to convince you that the song is really about a woman who likes to attend elegant soirées. No one is fooled for even a bar. The coy euphemism of ‘getting it on’ is slightly embarrassing. But that’s the secret of a make-out record: the words are the formalwear, the tux and bow tie you shed the moment things get interesting. You’re not meant to listen; you’re meant to drift. And here the rhythms - slow, warm, slightly smug in their own effectiveness - do exactly what they’re meant to. And here they’re so unhurried, so insistently sensual, that the half-hour running time starts to feel positively tantric. 2.5 Marvin Gaye is such a terrific singer it almost doesn’t matter that a lot of this album feels barely composed. How many of those ‘Oooooo’s and ‘BaaaayBE’s and ‘Shuuugaaa’s were in the original script? It hardly matters when every one of them is delivered with such conviction. I really believed in the journey Marvin takes us on here. I was completely convinced that he wanted, keenly, for that girl on side A to stay and get It on. He was no less convincing on side B when he told us how he [checks notes] ‘ball[ed]’ her and then left her. What a magnificent voice. 2.5/5

You mentioned the other day that Blackstar gets by on vibes, and hip-hop generally works the same way - static harmony, repetitive loops, a grab bag of slang slurs and a rolling present tense that matters more than structure. It’s why rappers are praised for bars: isolated moments that flare up inside what is often a pretty vague haze of beats and borrowed gestures. A less romantic word for vibes is schtick. And I think that Wu-Tang Clan’s goofy kung fu, wonky piano schtick is a lot more interesting than those of their more straightforwardly thuggish contemporaries. Oriental swords have better vibes than glocks and pistols. I can’t pretend I followed much of it, and I’m not sure there’s that much to follow, but the atmosphere is odd enough to keep it from drifting into pure background thud. I found it more unsettling than offputting, which is closer to my wheelhouse. The vibes are bad, but that seems to be the point. 2.5 Most of what was rapped here I couldn’t make out. Most of the rest I had no idea what they were talking about. I recall that Miracle on 34th Street got a mention though - presumably the original rather than the remake which wouldn’t have been out yet, which is great. I think the original is better, although Richard Attenborough is an outstanding Santa Claus. I enjoyed the bit when they were all talking about the band and the specific talents of each member and one guy says something like ‘I think everyone will really like us because I really like us’. That was lovely. It got me on their side. But then a bit later there was a bit on ways to torture people, sewing bums shut and what not. I went back to neutral. Anyway those are spoken word bits and I suppose I should be mainly judging it by the rapping, which as I say, I couldn’t make out. The best rap album I’ve heard in a while. 2/5

Why is goth associated with the inverted cross of St Peter? Because every musician even adjacent to the genre disowns it. Siouxsie isn’t goth. Robert Smith isn’t goth. Bauhaus aren’t goth. They all say so. And they’re not entirely wrong: The Damned were punk; the Banshees drifted into psychedelia; Bauhaus were glam in the shadows; The Cure wrote pop as naturally as breathing. “Goth” in its pure form rarely exists. The bands that hew closest to the stereotype usually do so as fan-service: black boots, dry ice, cabinet-of-curiosities references, Weimar cabaret schtick. Goth becomes a vibe, a subcultural merchandising unit. Type O Negative’s Black No. 1, which my sister-in-law put on the car stereo the other day, distils this perfectly: cringing organ, obvious riff, subterranean vocals, a glossary of clichés. Goth as checklist. You could almost mistake it for something from Floodland were it not for an essential difference: Andrew Eldritch is the only pure goth. The Sisters of Mercy have no obvious lineage, no cultural cosplay, no horror-film shorthand. Just Eldritch, his drum machine, and his hermetically sealed vision. He calls it rock and roll - but rock and roll after Altamont, after the dream curdled. Late-seventies/early-eighties rock stripped to its bitter, internal monologue. It’s ridiculous, of course, and therefore perfectly matched to Jim Steinman. Given how Floodland is built from iterations of the same idea, Eldritch could easily churn out more. But he doesn’t. Three albums, then silence -his vow that he will never record again. The repetition is the point, but it’s also proof of how hard this stuff is for him to extract. You don’t complain that gold, once mined, looks the same; you’re just glad it’s gold. Contrast that with the musicians who passed through his orbit. The Mission, Ghost Dance, The Bolshoi - all operating within the same palette, but only in reference, only in imitation. They give the fans what they want. Eldritch, despite himself, emits something he can’t reproduce on command: the only goth worth calling goth. 3.5 I found these songs difficult to judge. The dramatic intensity of the production - particularly the reverb-drenched vocal - makes a Herculean task of drawing the mind’s eye from images of vampires riding motorbikes. Today, without the luxury of another few listens (which I suspect the album is well worth) I can only say that it was absorbingly silly. 2.5/5

Kirsten Hersh’s book, Paradoxical Undressing, is likely the best-written rock autobiography I’ve read. Lucid and poetical, evocative and eviscerating, it outlines some of the time running up to this first Throwing Muses collection. Her, a gifted child in a college town, running amok with arists, becoming a mother at nineteen, pinballing between ideas and in control of nothing. Her songs, at that point, were, she explained, channelled. She followed whatever what came and found some peace with them. Her strange guitar parts and strange melodies only making sense considered as a whole. She was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder. It would be pat psychology to recognise two polarities in her songs, but there are two very different styles that compete. Or coexist. You have the dreaminess of R.E.M. and the surrealist film intensity of Pixies Yet, from her, the transitions seem to fall naturally. Moreso, the band make them sound natural, like the sort of thing any band from that time would due. But neither R.E.M. nor Pixies could do so without sound willful or contrived. Much credit must be given here to David Narcizo’s marching band snarework, which keeps Hersh’s marching thoughts in line. Notoriously, on tour in the UK with Pixies in 1987 or so, Throwing Muses were demoted to opener, when Pixies proved too intense and exciting for the audience. That can be explained many ways, but plainly, I think, Pixies went full pelt down one path, while the Muses waves of awe and rage didn’t quite land. Meandering is the word. 2.5 There are so many good ideas here about how a band might make themselves sound interesting but Throwing Muses are less than the sum of their parts. I was never quite able to suspend disbelief and digest the songs themselves. Throughout I only heard the moving cogs of a band keen to be different - keen to be thought eccentric or inscrutable. There isn’t a bar of music in this album that didn’t smack of that kind of insincerity. 2/5

Kiwanuka? I hardly know her. This was perfectly nice. It would take an awful curmudgeon to take strongly against it. 2.5 I have never heard of Michael Kiwanuka before. That’s what I get for not caring who’s been nominated for the Mercury Music Prize for the last twenty years. You can see why Mr Kiwanuka has been nominated multiple times (winning for this). The arrangements are neat and the use of backing vocals and strings is very well judged - tasteful. Retro reverb filters on everything that will take them. Nice drums and bass. Nice singing. Nice extended chords. This album has as nicely dressed a window as your granny could have managed with all the lace in the shop and her pick of the roses. Sadly though, once you are in the house it’s beige wallpaper from bottom to top. Ah Granny. Kiwanuka’s shapeless lyrics about nothing much are best ignored altogether but unfortunately, not having taken the recommended amount of alcohol beforehand (‘As a Mercury Music Prize panel member’) I made the mistake of listening to them, then reading them. The melodies are sweet nothing. The hooks efficient but immediately forgettable. Kiwanuka isn’t untalented, but he has nothing to say. Anyway he has a Mercury Music Prize now, which tends to be the main thing for most Mercury Music Prize winners. 1.5/5

Honest disclosure: just before I got into music proper, I turned off a Pulp Saturday morning TV performance in disgust, because the pop performances took up time that could have gone to cartoons. This must have been 1993 or 94. Another honest disclosure: on the return leg of a fishing trip with my friends and their dad, I first heard Common People on the top 40. Having just started to get into guitar music, I didn’t really care for the synths. I don’t think I could then distinguish between this keyboard cycling basic chords and that of other lesser chart music of the time. 1995, obviously. By 1996, I liked it and the album, of course. Pulp are nothing, if not a lesson in waiting things out. Four albums that may be dreadful or just very poorly recorded. How this led to them recording three good albums in the 90s, well-recorded ones, where Jarvis sounds like an actual singer, I don’t know. Not only well-produced, but sonically consistent, each one sounding like a complete suite of songs, the albums distinct from each other, yet always sounding like the same band. These are not the qualities of the band in the 80s and there was no suggestion then that they would have a significant moment like Different Class. The band no longer shambolic, even if they’re workaday; the singer singing instead of croaking; the songwriting generally tight and coherent. And relevant. A lesson in waiting things out. I’m too old for most of it to be relevant now, but Jarvis Cocker was too old at the time anyway. A man in his 30s shouldn’t be getting on like that. And it is clear from recent performances that he is a little embarrassed by the sleaze of Pencil Skirt and Underwear. In the 80s output, such pervsion is occasional. On This is Hardcore, its corrosive qualities are recognised. On We Love Life, he has grown out of it, becoming a much more agreeable person, even if the music is no longer as good. However, on His and Hers and Different Class, this version of Jarvis is chronic and, with time, it has become a little shabby. Shabbiness is fine for your teens and twenties, but it loses its romance over time. Pulp’s is certainly a story of arrested development, of time, and of time passing. 3 Of those albums that I had any affection for in the first years of my discovering rock and pop music in earnest very few have aged badly for me. Be they verifiably terrible works of art, an apology will be made for them in my nostalgia. Pulp‘s Different Class is one of the exceptions to this rule. I positively revered this album when I was a teenager, and many of my friends still do. One just spent a hundred quid on the 30th Anniversary boxset. But for me the shine has long come off this record. I don’t know why that is exactly. I suppose part of it is that Jarvis‘ ‘look at me I’m a pervert’ shtick, edgy in the 90s, has become cringeworthy in the intervening decades. I think Jarvis himself probably winces listening to stuff like Underwear and I Spy and particularly Pencil Skirt. Part of it is that overplaying has told on some of these tracks, especially Disco 2000 which I liked well enough back in the day but after years of hearing the single mix on the radio I shudder to hear it begin in any of its versions. I dislike that nothing guitar riff. Which raises another issue. There are six members in Pulp and yet there is little musical identity once you set aside Jarvis’ voice and, perfectly matched to it, the Phoenix Nights chic of Candida Doyle’s keyboards. Disco 2000 is one of the only guitar parts it’s even possible to notice - and it is rubbish. The drums just blast along. The bass is subdued in the mix beneath the keys. It is telling that, of their later (famous) albums the album that best showcases the different musical identities of the instrumentalists in Pulp is We Love Life - the worst of those albums by quite a distance. Different Class is still not bad of course. It’s an album with some irresistibly catchy tunes. Common People remains not only iconic but an exciting listen. So much of the music on Different Class is a dull, clumsy, clutter though. I once thought this a brilliantly consistent album and now I can’t see how I ever made that mistake. 2.5/5

"I said 'That's nothing, you should hear me play piano.'" The Queen Is Dead, Morrissey In 1999, I saw R.E.M. on the Up tour, when Michael Stipe came out and ham-fistedly strummed his way through Why Not Smile. What could have been a moment of fragile sincerity - or even a brief shift in atmosphere - was simply awful. He could not do it. It was no good. The song was hardly essential, and the whole thing wasted my time, the band’s time, everyone’s time. They could have played Welcome to the Occupation. Peter Buck’s solo album where he barks unpleasantly is not half as bad, largely because nobody expected a good time from it. But Stipe’s performance revealed something striking: a man with such a good ear, who had spent twenty years as a professional musician alongside other professionals, had somehow absorbed no musicality through osmosis. A three-chord song should not be that hard to stumble through. But pop music has never relied solely on musicality. Stipe and Morrissey are both excellent melodicists in their own ways - one more limited than the other, perhaps - but each has always needed a co-writer to give them a harmonic shape, something on guitar or piano over which they can instinctively weave a melody. If they loved music so much - and clearly they did - they could have spent their teenage years learning chord shapes and lead runs. But if Morrissey had used that time learning New York Dolls riffs, when would he have read Elizabeth Smart and Shelagh Delaney? A front person needs personality, persona, passion. There are always other dorks available to play the instruments. You would not want young Johnny Marr wasting his youth on becoming well-read. Listening to Born Under a Bad Sign, I was struck by how much it sounded - with its low, purring melody circling a handful of notes - like Morrissey solo. Morrissey truly solo. As if he were more focused on the few acoustic guitar chords he might know than on being mercurial and erudite on top. With nobody to support him. A bit like now, really. Marr ultimately left the Smiths over Morrissey’s insistence on covering Work is a Four Letter Word, and then came the sticky final music-hall mess of I Keep Mine Hidden. Without Marr’s tempering instinct, the Smiths would have been nothing but sixties pop pastiche - and that is assuming Morrissey could even have played enough to manage that much. I do not know whether Richard Hawley realises that his music skirts parody of Roy Orbison and Tony Christie, that those strings are lifted almost directly from Van Morrison’s Have I Told You Lately. Or does he believe he arrived at all this himself, after long adolescent hours hunched over an acoustic guitar, rather than through the development of a personality? Of any inner life to share with us, rather than simple, uninspired generalisations. Perhaps Morrissey and Morrison fared badly in the personality stakes in the long run. But we listen to records, not late interviews. 2 I really appreciate the risk that Richard Hawley takes here. He is going for an old-timey timelessness in his songwriting without giving himself the protection of any sense of irony or pastiche. The music aims to be simply beautiful without show of cleverness. The lyrics are written as if no one has ever written a lyric before: _Darlin’ wait for me By your gate In the evening light, Ah I just can't wait For I have to go, In the morning too soon So honey don't you cry, I'll be back here soon._ (Darlin’ wait for me) And Richard hangs this sort of thing out there without nudge or wink. Forgets that he is mates with Jarvis Cocker. Ignores that he’s from Sheffield (‘The Ocean’) The whole thing is an unabashed shoot for the songwriting moon. Well that’s the way to do it. I wish there were a hundred Richard Hawleys. However, I don’t necessarily wish for their records to be released. This type of simplicity is actually really hard to do well. Bob Dylan is very good at it - I thought about Time Out of Mind at different times while listening to Coles Corner. That’s an unreasonable example of course, you don’t have to be the best songwriter there has ever been to write a good, sweet simple song. What Dylan in particular has in abundance though is exactly what Hawley is missing; lightness of touch. Hawley’s work is wholesome but a bit of a chore to get through; a sermon of songwriting rather than an illuminating anecdote. I dare say with a few more listens there are melodies on this album that would creep up on me and win Hawley’s efforts more affection. As it is, I listened to the last couple of tracks where Hawley makes a sort of musical claim that there is some sort of transcendence in this project and I was completely unconvinced. He didn’t earn the right to throw crawling, heavily reverbed piano stabs at me at the conclusion. But nice try. 2/5

I don’t know if the story happened quite like this, but some accounts claim Bob Dylan kicked Phil Ochs out of a limo with the line: you’re not a folk singer, you’re a journalist. It’s a low blow, because nobody likes a journalist, and who, now, even likes Phil Ochs. I’m not sure what Dylan meant by folk singer, but in the years after that 1965 spat he did far more than sing Froggie Went A Courtin. His supposedly non-journalistic style ricocheted between confessional, surreal, spiteful. On Highway 61 Revisited - which we’ve already talked about - he was frequently cruel about his circle, his fans, his lovers. Yet somewhere in all that meanness and evasiveness he occasionally found something universal. A kind of reporting on his own life that, paradoxically, spoke to many. Kanye West, here, is neither folk singer nor journalist. He is - very much of the time - a blogger: oversharing, ephemeral, convinced of his own significance, demanding to be read. The idea that time has treated him unfairly - that the present Kanye has somehow contaminated the legacy of the 2010 Kanye - is wrong. There is only ever the present for him, and the material on this album is now stranded in the past, cut off from the only temporal mode he understands. His enthusiasms were fleeting. His collaborators of the moment. Nothing here steps outside of that moment. If you weren’t plugged into Kanye’s world in 2010, the whole thing now feels oddly weightless. And who would dare to care about Kanye West in 2025. There is so little reflection that there is no possibility of insight. On Blame Game he recounts events but never interrogates them, as though admission were understanding. On Toast the closest he comes to analysis is that line about sending an unsolicited photo, followed by a shrugging acknowledgement of incompetence with women. But he doesn't know why. It’s not introspection. It’s barely a diary entry. It's certainly not meaningful. West ends up reminding me most of Trent Reznor. Both are strong technicians and producers - the maximalist music here, certainly isn't bad, but the vocals are often muddy and that sample of 21st Century Schizoid Man feels anaemic beside the original - who nevertheless have to say something, so they drag insecurities and boasts from their private diaries. Reznor at least mined his teenage notebooks, so vague and raw that Johnny Cash could recontextualise them later, they were something listeners could inhabit. We were all teenagers once. Many of us while be old and dying eventually. My Beautiful Dark Fantasy exists only for Kanye West, and only in 2010. Some listeners will pore over it - as Dylanologists pore over arcana and Swifties build taxonomies - but West’s combination of vast ego and minimal self-awareness makes for a shallow puddle to stare into. It is a long way from Public Enemy - the Black CNN - to this kind of self-involvement. But it isn’t folk singing. Folk singing is for ever. 2 I have never listened to a Kanye West album before. I am of course aware of his status as one of Western Civilisation’s leading manchildren, but the only music of his that I know is Gold Digger. ‘My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’ is entirely new to me, excepting POWER which I recognise from somewhere but had never really listened to before. My first impression is that it’s an indulgent mess although I can admit a little surprise that there is so much attempted music splattered everywhere. Of course I was bound to say something like that because as I learned from reading a few critics on this album MBDTF is a ‘Magnum Opus’. It’s Kanye West’s fifth album and represents a synthesis of unique ideas and styles that the previous four records had been building towards. One does not simply dander into a Magnum Opus and expect to have a good time. You shouldn’t start your journey in Richard Wagner, for example, with Tristan und Isolde; it’s even longer than MBDTF and very difficult to make sense of. You’ll probably come out at the end, if you make it that far, and say, as Clara Schumann did after her first time, ‘Wagner is shite, folks must be on crack if they think this is good music.’ The Magnum Opus thing will be completely lost on you. So what should I do to get into Richard Wagner, you may ask? Great question Kanye West fans. I would point you to the Preludes first and a good Ring Highlights - Karajan’s maybe. There is also the Tannhäuser Overture which some would call Wagner’s Gold Digger. Tannhäuser is also a good start for the first full album/opera. You Kanye fans think you know hoes but if you don’t know Venus… Anyway when you finally make it round to Tristan and find that y’all feeling that shit - you’re welcome. 1.5/5

All my romantic relationships have involved some form of artistic collaboration. Bands, theatre companies, shared drawings: micro-scenes built for two. These small creative circuits felt more intimate than anything else – not because the work was great, but because the act of making it briefly opened a portal. Beauty wasn’t the goal; the beauty was in the temporary suspension of subjectivity, the brief sense of being plugged into something beyond either of us. Indeed, I love all of my musical collaborators over the years, no matter what happened to them and where they are now. It is a special bond between people. Which is why I feel warm to the long collaboration between Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt, even when the results leave me cold. My problems with Walking Wounded stand, but perhaps my critique was insufficiently attuned to what the music represents: a fantasy of coupledom as a stable, frictionless production unit. Not Rumours, where the relationship collapses into song, nor the Waits-Brennan folie à deux where the work becomes a private mythos. Instead, Everything But The Girl offer a model of domestic creativity fully integrated into the smooth, IKEA warehouse landscape of the 90s. Idlewild makes this clearest. What you hear is Watt’s deference: an entire aesthetic architecture built to accommodate Thorn’s voice, her melancholy poise. There’s no tension, no triangulation, no attempt to rupture the form. The result is a kind of sonic interior design – everything in its place, nothing jutting out. A musical feng shui that soothes rather than unsettles. While Mark Hawley and Danny Macintosh get out of the way of Tori Amos and Kate Bush respectively, Watt creates the pedestal on which to admire Thorn and places her there. It is certainly the pedestal on which he admires her. For some, that’s a form of beauty. For me, it suggests a retreat from the kind of intensity that once made collaboration transformative. Beauty becomes mood-regulation. Other couples in indie understood the necessary dissonance. Harriet Wheeler and David Gavurin, whose output sounds very similar, let their sophistication brush against something sharper, more uncanny. Low stretched the domestic into a kind of devotional minimalism, slow enough to expose the cracks: when Mimi died, Alan cracked entirely. Against those, Thorn and Watt sound like a couple who have made peace with the world as it is – and produce music that asks us to do the same. It is only really only possible to admire from far, when Ben has put Tracey all the way up there. 2 Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt aren’t the worst pair of songwriters that we’ve encountered on this list, not by a long way. I want to root for them. I want to want to listen to any song of theirs a second time. 2/5