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

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

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.

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

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