Randy Newman is like an iron fist in a velvet glove. Underneath all that chirpy vaudeville tunefulness is a deep sadness about the world and nostalgia for how it might have been. He applies his wistful, emotional voice to slavery, the threat of nuclear war, religion and fame.
There are two versions of Elastica here. There’s straightforward late 70s style punk and there’s post grunge. I don’t get why people call this art rock or compare them to the Stranglers. This is punk with pop sensibilities. Even calling it Britpop only makes sense retrospectively because you can hear what we’d now call a Blur-ish sound on it. But they have much more punk attitude than Blur or most of the Britpop bands. Most of the album is short, angry songs with blazing guitars and sledgehammer drums. The track Connection is the hooky song everyone knows. The slower songs like Hold Me Now have a more pop feel but the attitude is straight up punk. I was raised on punk so I like it to that extent. I’ve only given it three stars because what they’re doing here has basically been done; there’s nothing much original here really.
Lauper’s unique voice has an affecting mix of raw punk edge and emotional vulnerability and it gives her the ability to make a song almost anything she wants it to be. Girls Just Wanna Have Fun becomes a song of feminist empowerment; When You Were Mine addresses the continuum of human sexuality in a way which sounds unbelievably modern for 1983; and of course Time After Time is a haunting classic which she makes her own. Is it a pop record? Certainly. But she understands that pop is powerful when it’s well crafted - it can deliver a payload of meaning right where it’s needed and this album does exactly that. Pleasing fact: The musicians are mostly from Philadelphia band The Hooters.
Often touted as the ultimate American new wave/pop crossover, in reality The Cars are much more pop and less new wave than, for example, the CBGBs bands like Blondie or Talking Heads who hit it big about the same time. In reality they’re straight ahead rockers and any connection with new wave is oblique at best. It sounds a bit overproduced in retrospect and the occasional weak tracks really are weak. What they are very good at is knocking out bona fide hits. Best Friend’s Girl in particular is a top notch bit of chart-ready songwriting.
When Michael was happy he made wonderful beat-driven, positive music without the studied, tortuous pretension of his later output. He just did his thing, and he did it to a world-changing standard. Free from the shackles of Berry Gordy or the rest of the Jackson clan, he’s free to express himself and on Off The Wall he lets loose. It’s peak disco pretty much all the way through. The cover of Paul McCartney’s Girlfriend is a welcome diversion of style. Tom Bahler’s She’s Out Of My Life adds a Broadway tinged feel and adds a level of emotional depth otherwise in short supply. I Can’t Help It, the Stevie Wonder contribution has his characteristic jazzy/gospel chords and rhythmic complexity. Songwriting contributions from Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder are bound to help but Jackson is no mean writer himself by this point, albeit not yet a very stylistically or lyrically diverse one. Having Quincy Jones producing doesn’t exactly hamper an artist either. Highlight: I Can’t Help It.
Hands down the most overrated band of the 60s. Strip away the hyperbole and hormonal sweat surrounding Jim Morrison and you soon spot the emperor has no clothes. Dull.
This is one of the four golden Stones albums (Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street) which are hard to separate so that they are almost a single work. They’ve outgrown Brian Jones’ conception of a blues band with a gift for kooky pop songs and become the full-throated sex, drugs and rock and roll band they were to remain, by and large, for the rest of time. Despite the famously dissolute recording process, during which Keef held court in his French chateau and occasionally deigned to make music, the whole thing holds together. Even Mick Taylor’s smart but slightly over-clean style couldn’t stop this humdinger of an album hitting the mark. Unzip it and get it on!
I first bought this album when it came out and I thought it was mostly boring. 45 years’ distance has not improved my opinion of it. This album has a kind of black metal meets post punk thing going on and you can see how many bands subsequently have been influenced by it; Nirvana, My Bloody Valentine etc etc would all acknowledge a debt. Non of that makes it an intrinsically listenable album.
This is a good album but nowhere near as good as the critics say it is. The sonic landscape is reliably in shoegaze, dream pop neo-psychedelia territory but it doesn’t do any of it well enough to justify the extraordinary levels of hype which surround this album. It’s big on atmosphere but very low on bandwidth and virtually devoid of melody. Good but frankly not *that* good.
In many ways this is a classic first album, in that it sounds like the sum total of all their influences; Lynyrd Skynyrd country rock, Stones blues, Lou Reed sleaze, all with an indie twist. That said, there’s plenty of variety and originality all round - neither mere copyists nor one trick ponies these. A great debut with a strong indication of more to come.
With an excess of success under their belts Mott the Hoople bring out a near-concept album about rock n roll excess. The trademark Stones influenced loose sleaze is there, with Ian Hunter’s Dylan tribute vocal style. There’s also an audible influence of glam on this record, again a product of Hunter’s knowingly suggestive delivery. Like so many records of this era, there’s more than a touch of nostalgia for simpler times, not to say a dose of darkness, as if the young dudes have come awake the morning after and noticed they are in a nightmare. By the way, you’ve got to love Hunter for the track title, ‘I wish I was your mother’!
Two things combine in Garbage to make something unique - Shirley Manson’s semi-improvised lyrics and compelling personality-led performance, and Butch Vig and Steve Marker’s background in production and creative remixes for other artists. It’s a match made somewhere pretty close to heaven, if not quite in it. The eclecticism for which Garbage are justly famous might have made for a disjointed album but sonically it hangs together very coherently. My reservation is that it feels like they’re playing at the dark side; their natural home is cheery, cheesy pop and the apparent edginess is performance rather than conviction. I think this is the result of having a pair of producers on board who have a very strong view of what makes a record sell, which also explains the moments of rather clever-clever production gimmickry which litter this record. That said, you have to say it’s a very competent pop record.
She has made folktronica, this particular fusion of folk and electronica, all her own, though this particular record leans much more into to a pop folk sensibility. Her voice has strong shades of an English folk version of Joni Mitchell. So Much More feels like a tribute, which I mean as a compliment because it’s still totally Beth Orton. There’s a beautifully understated intimacy to the lyrics, kitchen sink poetry, though there’s nothing homespun about the production which is competent and occasionally rich without being obtrusive. Stars Seem To Weep is the track here which justifies the folktronica label. Credit for the ultimate songwriters’ lyric on Love Like Laughter: ‘Some of the worst wrongs get righted on three chords.’ How true!
The scale of the Beatles influence is very notable and I have to say it’s just as well they were known for the Dylan cover because their own compositions are not especially memorable in their own right. At this point the blend of folk with British Invasion sounds is mostly the latter. The other surprising thing for a modern listener is the inaccuracy of so much of the playing on this album. It’s amazing, even by the standards of the day, how many fluffed notes and just mediocre playing made it through the editing process, if there was one. No wonder The Wrecking Crew were wheeled in to make Mr Tambourine Man work. The cover of We’ll Meet Again is comically bad. The choice of the Rickenbacker 12 string adds that distinctive and famous Byrds jangle and the harmonies are good enough. Overall this sounds like an optimist demo tape and I can only assume they got signed on the strength of their take on Mr Tambourine Man.
So the theory is that you can mix metal and hip hop without it sounding crap. Turns out the theory’s wrong. If I could have given this no stars I would have.
Pleasing, positive West Coast blues psych rock. 8:05 makes a pleasant change of pace from the throw-everything-at-the-wall philosophy of the rest of the album. Come In The Morning is a good soul style jam and they sound pretty tight on it. Skip Spence had an amazing voice, such a shame we got to hear so little of it. In places the band’s enthusiasm triumphs over their art but it’s a fun, upbeat listen and kind of a one-off. Annoying fact: Most of the tracks are missing and streaming servers, a rights issue I guess. Had to listen on YouTube.
Broadcaster and John Peel collaborator John Walters once said he wanted to review a Yes album with the single word No. I feel pretty much the same. This right here is exactly where music went right off the rails in the early 1970s. You know what to expect and it delivers. Tight and musically competent but pretentious, though heaven knows the worst was yet to come. Most disturbingly you can hear in places where the execrable Rush got their sound from.
Recorded in a day and mixed the day after, The Fall begin as they intend to continue, by not meeting any expectations whatever. It is punk/new wave in its homemade, lo-fi three-chord ethos and it’s angry but the difference is the poetic reach of Mark E Smith’s lyrics. There’s no anthemic sing along chorus a la Love Song; this is uncompromisingly spiky. Smith very consciously channels Johnny Lydon at times. Best track: Probably Music Scene. Fun, if obvious, fact: it’s not a live album, despite the title.
Dull mainstream 80s synth pop from a glorified boy band. A waste of 37 minutes I’ll never get back.
What makes this album great? It’s a question still worth asking nearly half a century after its release, because it’s claim to greatness is by no means undisputed. It’s not the hype, not the brilliant guerrilla marketing by Malcolm McClaren, not the attempts by numerous broadcasters and record shops to kill it off with bans and by refusing to name it. It is a great sound. The sledgehammer impact of Steve Jones’ solid slabs of guitar John Lydon’s unique snarky snarling delivery. The way it captured the mood in a Britain which felt almost irredeemably smug and settled at the same time as it was declining and crumbling. It was like nothing else, before or since, though it’s subsequent influence has been profound. It won’t make you comfortable - it’s not intended to. But the raw power of it, as an artefact, as a musical event and as a statement of intent, are undeniable. An essential listen.
This is peak r&b Aretha, her third Atlantic soul album after her run of relatively unsuccessful Columbia jazz standards records. She’s really hit her stride now. Like so many soul singers before her, a train in the Pentecostal church proves an amazing academy in improvisation and melisma with spirit. Along with Aretha Now later the same year it’s a contender for her best album. She makes the Carole King/Gerry Goffin/Jerry Wexler song Natural Woman sound like it was written for her. There are a couple of songs on here she co-wrote and they’re very good. She was already on top form by this point in her career; now that she’s found her genre, she’s unstoppable. Lady Soul indeed!
An album about loss and disillusionment and a critique of the music business (which by this point has made them millionaires). It is as prog rock tends to be; ponderous, self-indulgent and self-importantly sententious. It is also beautiful in its way and very much of its time, in terms of the soundscape. It has the trademark atmospheric sound effects, overlong solos and some creative chord work from Rick Wright (always my favourite band member). It’s two shortest tracks, the title track and Have A Cigar with Roy Harper singing lead are the best tracks. As always with Floyd in this period I wonder what they thought would happen if they ever broke above their walking pace slow rock tempo. At least 50% of Nick Mason’s career is spent playing the same beat at the same speed! I also wish Rick Wright had played more piano and less plastic sounding synth. Overall the creative concepts are, well, creative, but they do sound a bit tired and lacking in energy and and commitment.
This is a massive album in every sense and one of the most important albums of my lifetime (I’m 61). It’s prescient in that although it belongs to the era before everything started falling apart, it prefigures post-millennial alienation and pessimism. It’s not prog; it’s not tortuously self-important or self-indulgent enough for that. The tempo changes and odd time signatures are used judiciously, off-kilter music for an off-kilter world. You need this album, especially if you don’t think you do.
Despite their forward looking reputation as pioneers of social media marketing this is good old fashioned pumped-up melodic punk, riffs and laden with attitude. It’s British working class culture set to music, much more so than the ponderous and repetitious band Oasis became. You can hear the Sheffield accent on Riot Van, which is pleasing. A top notch debut.
The effect is poppy grunge, with Courtney Love’s cutting lyrics slightly undermined by the major key upbeat mess of the music. In the end you just have to decide how much she really means it and how much this is a knowing pop product and the truth is I honestly don’t know. Musically I found it underwhelming, formulaic and derivative.
The album that catapulted the Swedish popsters from modest international success to worldwide superstardom. Andersson and Ulvaeus seem to have an almost supernatural gift for plucking perfectly formed pop songs out of the ether. Money, Money, Money and Knowing Me, Knowing You are both on here alongside their massive, almost defining hit Dancing Queen. This album is mercifully free of the plodding tracks which feature on a number of ABBA albums, rooted in the Swedish folk music they were raised on. Fernando, a hugely successful single, has often been added to subsequent releases but was an original inclusion only in Australia and New Zealand. The best deep track here is Tiger.
There are hints of really good here but the whole thing is unconvincing. She doesn’t convince me that she’s really behind the ideas and musically it’s rather pedestrian. I can believe she means the lyrics she writes and that they relate deeply to her works and experience but I she just doesn’t deliver them convincingly.
This is an odd album. Lyrically it’s deeply personal but musically it’s rather disconnected, like an atmospheric sound track album, and in all honesty once the novelty of the concept has worn off it’s a bit underwhelming. I think this album exemplifies the principle that it’s easy to overthink creativity, to have so many influences and ideas, to seek so hard for the outré, that whatever wood you once had gets lost in the trees. There’s just too much going on here sonically without anything quite landing. She tried to top Homogenic and that proved too much, for now.
This record has a lo-fi garage rock feel with oodles of energy, but it’s much more smart and knowing. This band knows how to tell stories. Lyrically the album is located firmly in teen relational angst territory. Kapranos’ voice has character and the songs have creative and often arrestingly original structure. In places I’m put in mind of Sparks though this band strike me as ambitious enough to reach beyond the art rock confines which that comparison implies. The singles are clear hits.
The Australian duo of Robbie Chater and Darren Seltzmann belong in the genre ludicrously named plunderphonics (Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative, a referential and self-conscious practice which interrogates notions of originality and identity, so you know). Basically like an artist making collage from cut up bits of magazines. I’m kind of sorry I know this because this album has a reasonable degree of artistic coherence even if the listener has no knowledge as to the source of the sounds. My problem with it as a listen is the problem I have with all edm which is the highly quantised, inhuman repetition. For me art is all about the human imperfections, the cracks where the light gets in.
This record was recorded quickly and, in the most positive way, it sounds like it. It’s Iggy sounding like his proto punk self, sometimes dark as in Passenger, sometimes brimming with the defiant energy of the survivor beyond the odds as on Lust for Life. It’s more an authentic Iggy Pop record than The Idiot, which was arguably as much Bowie’s project as his. You can hear his musical character and lyrical personality coming across with the kind of raw immediacy that made The Stooges such an important band in punk history. Add the way that Pop is so much more coherent and present than he was on the Stooge albums and you’ve got probably the best work of his career. It’s more an authentic Iggy Pop record than The Idiot, which was arguably as much Bowie’s project as his. You can hear his musical character and lyrical personality coming across with the kind of raw immediacy that made The Stooges such an important band in punk history. Add the way that Pop is so much more coherent and present than he was on the Stooge albums and you’ve got probably the best work of his career.
Being honest, I like this Goldfrapp album because it’s not much like a Goldfrapp album. The duo of Allison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory, known for electronica, strip it back and go acoustic on this dreamy, whimsical, lush and very beautiful album. There’s more than a hint of Kate Bush in Goldfrapp’s voice. The choice to make a record like this, in defiance of expectations, is brave and they have the skill and creativity to pull it off.
It would be hard for this album to match the hype, because the hype was off the scale. It’s good but only in places. Suede are at their best in introspective, difficult teenage mode than in cocky confident mode; Tracks like She’s Not Dead and Pantomime Horse confirm that misery makes for better songwriting than happiness. These are tracks where Anderson channels Morrissey. Bernard Butler ploughs his own much more overdriven furrow than Johnny Marr ever did with The Smiths. The track Breakdown sounds early Bowie, though otherwise I can’t see the much vaunted connection. Glam I can see clearly but Bowie was generally less direct and obvious than this. The real difficulty for me is that I don’t like Brett Anderson’s vocal delivery. It’s too stylised and unnatural. He’s a much better lyricist than singer. I’d say the deep tracks on this album are better than the big singles which heralded it’s release. My top track is the closer The Next Life which I found genuinely emotional. So all in all, a good album, but not quite a great album.
This album is sonically so different from their debut Psychocandy it must have come as a shock to fans and critics alike. Having lost their drummer, who went off to Primal Scream full time, they replaced him with an 808, leaving just the Reid brothers and Douglas ‘2-Strings’ Hart. They decide to shuffle off the hype and let their songs do the talking. Bad idea. What this album reveals more than anything else is that the Reid brothers are pretty mediocre songwriters. On the first album the whole thing was wrapped in an original and highly entertaining package, part Joy Division, part Ramones. Take that away and it’s just third division teen angst predictability.
This is an album of two halves, the first being an acoustic set to keep the die-folkies happy. The second, which famously didn’t please them, is electric. The moment Keith Butler speaks for them by shouting ‘traitor!’ is sadly not recorded here. In retrospect I’m with Keith. You’ve got to be a pretty diehard Dylan fan to love side two; it’s wantonly ramshackle, even by Bob’s not particularly high standards. Side one works better. Fun note: the reason ‘Royal Albert Hall’ is in inverted commas in the title is that none of this album was recorded there; it’s all from the Manchester Free Trade Hall.
The Boatman’s Call is stark, both in being stripped down musically and in stripping bare Cave’s response to a world which can produce both the wonder of love and the deceit of the human heart. The battle between love and cynicism is not resolved - Nick Cave is not by and large a resolver, rather he poses questions and invites you to live with the the tension and paradox at the heart of life. Sweetly disturbing, an album that leaves you nowhere to hide emotionally, but does not in the end get lost in cynicism. Sure, people ain’t no good, but there’s still love.
If you like glossy 70s power pop to the accompaniment of screaming girls you’ll love this. I don’t.
This was an important album for Robbie Williams, his first and best chance took define himself as more than the boy band background that made him famous. The sound overall identifies this as belonging till the Britpop era. Lyrically, he shows a lot of vulnerability and introspection. Angels is if course the standout. You can hear the desire to kick back against the media driven fame machine. It works, and for musical snobs, try to forget that Williams was in a boy band and just listen to, for example, the title track for the brilliant bit of pop songwriting that it is.
Henry’s Dream is one of those albums which embody the phrase flawed masterpiece. Cave might have been reacting to the way his previous album, The Good Son, was received. Perhaps he was told one too many times that he’d mellowed, and he wasn’t ready to mellow. If Good Son was his happy place, with it’s chilled, stripped back lyricism, this is - different. I keep being put in mind of Johnny Cash if you can imagine him at his lowest ebb, raging drunk and angry but still seeing twisted visions of heaven and hell. Musically it toys with country music and gospel but twists both to its own lyrically dark but oddly compelling place.
She has a unique contralto and the strong accent gives it a strangely bohemian quality, while the sparse arrangement, courtesy of various stalwarts of the Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol entourage gives the whole a chamber pop feel. Band mates and in one case Bob Dylan supply songs which are well suited to her. Apparently she hated the result, wanting more of a solid band feel than the quasi folk atmosphere producer Tom Wilson opted for. I think she was probably right. She seems emotionally quite apart from the accompaniment, as if she wasn’t in the same city let alone the same room. The arrangements and song selection create rather a monotonous effect tonally.
Virtuoso bass player Stephen Lee Bruner, aka Thundercat offers a particular kind of psychedelic jazz funk soul fusion with a lot of playful and arty elements to it. Amid the profusion of styles and influences it would be easy to miss the baroque humour, both lyrical and musical. Well worth a listen.
This is where Radiohead get out from under the long shadow of Creep and prove they’re than a grunge/shoegaze crossover band. They get their escape and more. It’s not that they’ve abandoned guitar focused rock entirely, just that they do so much more than that. Thom Yorker’s lyrics are truly inventive, by turns vulnerable and cynical. From now on this band is impossible to dismiss but a true force to be reckoned with.
Possibly the first proper Stones album, in that it consists entirely of Jagger/Richards originals. Less positively this record belongs to the period of experimentation with psychedelic and baroque pop, which became a bit of a dead end for them. Brian Jones would mutter about Appalachian dulcimers at press conferences. Lady Jane is the peak example. Mind you, he was a mean marimba player. It’s also the nadir of Stones misogyny (hearing Jagger, of all people, singing about female vanity is the death of irony). Biographers assert that the enigmatic and fiercely intelligent Anita Pallenberg was a huge influence on the band at this time and gave them much of their energy and confidence. Under My Thumb is, I’m sorry to say, the best track on the album, musically at least, and became a live favourite for years.