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

This 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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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