This band has always been baffling to me. Many of their songs seem like unfinished ideas. When does experimentation cross over into masturbation? This band seems like less than the sum of its parts. And yet I often find myself bopping along.
This was always my 2nd-favorite Dylan album after *Freewheeling*. My favorite track was always Tombstone Blues. PJ Harvey does a great cover of Highway 61. I always assumed that Mr. Jones from Ballad of a Thin Man is the same Mr. Jones from the Counting Crows song. I never cared for the first track.
i like Chubb Rock better
This band has always been baffling to me. Many of their songs seem like unfinished ideas. When does experimentation cross over into masturbation? This band seems like less than the sum of its parts. And yet I often find myself bopping along.
I think the avant-garde is the most important aspect of any artistic medium, so I can't completely dismiss this. But maybe I didn't take enough acid to fully appreciate it that day.
Many of the bands we love wouldn't exist without this album. "Judy is a Punk" was always my favorite track, ever since it was used in The Royal Tenenbaums.
Gimme Shelter is one of the best rock songs of all time. But I never could get into this band, okay?! I'M SORRY!!!
Reminds me of being a Houston hipster in the mid-2000s.
One of the best albums of the 80s and of all time. Break My Body, Something Against You, Broken Face, Cactus, Tony's Theme, Oh My Golly, Vamos, and Brick Is Red are basically running in loops thru my head at all times. (Along with half the songs from *Doolittle*.) Frank Black is one of the all-time great songwriters, along with Robert Johnson, Bob Dylan, Lennon & McCartney, Carole King, Tom Waits, and Prince. Surfer Rosa is like a brilliant whirlwind of jokey, avant-garde, cut-and-paste, art-rock, barely controlled madness. It's like a Jackson Pollack painting or a Donald Barthelme short story. Even today it still sounds like the future. This shit is fucking fire.