My 1001 Albums Journey

Album	You	Global	Diff
Nowhere Ride	5	3.01	+1.99
Pornography The Cure	5	3.31	+1.69
Blue Lines Massive Attack	5	3.38	+1.62
Odelay Beck	5	3.46	+1.54
Suicide Suicide	4	2.46	+1.54
A Love Supreme John Coltrane	5	3.63	+1.37
Kid A Radiohead	5	3.71	+1.29
Songs From The Big Chair Tears For Fears	5	3.74	+1.26
Off The Wall Michael Jackson	5	3.78	+1.22
Gris Gris Dr. John	4	2.88	+1.12

Album	You	Global	Diff
The Stranger Billy Joel	1	3.86	-2.86
Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not Arctic Monkeys	1	3.73	-2.73
Moondance Van Morrison	1	3.71	-2.71
The Gershwin Songbook Ella Fitzgerald	1	3.53	-2.53
Hybrid Theory Linkin Park	1	3.39	-2.39
Siembra Willie Colón & Rubén Blades	1	3.29	-2.29
Astral Weeks Van Morrison	1	3.27	-2.27
The Seldom Seen Kid Elbow	1	3.26	-2.26
Queen Of Denmark John Grant	1	3.13	-2.13
Everything Must Go Manic Street Preachers	1	3.11	-2.11

Neil Young

3/5

Early Days Very distinct memory of hearing the opening chords to Heart of Gold in the early 90s and thinking this is the real shit, like REM or Tom Petty. Today Man what on earth was the trend then with the orchestral whatnot? At least with Scott Walker he had an arranger/composer who was on his wavelength and could subvert the conventions of the format, but this shit, woof. Neil’s early solo work (so, up to Harvest) often has this adult-contemporary/singer-songwriter feel to it that creeps in (which apparently made him quite successful so hey!), but I mostly vibe to the Ditch Trilogy and CH stuff (although I like Harvest Moon a bunch?). His thin voice breaking through the cacophony - or situated against a single guitar - is the sweet spot for me, whereas carrying an entire orchestra feels pretty silly. Keepers: Heart of Gold, Words

Horses

Patti Smith

2/5

Old Days Patti will always be my early favourite bands’ favourite artist - huge for Michael Stipe and Bono and some guy from Manchester. Plus the influences on Siouxsie, PJ, Nick Cave, Kim Gordon and perhaps most audibly to me this go-around: Tom Verlaine (and I wonder how much of a back and forth that was for those crazy kids). Today There’s a kind of coddling that occurs with these formerly challenging upstarts. Take the wiki, no one would say the easy cure or bon savants “gave frequent live performances”. It situates Patti as a special artist, not just another populist rock n roller, which she professed to be over and over. Reading over the history with Cale some, Patti runs into a paradox of sorts about rock music, an originalism trap if you will. There’s this notion that the original thing - so, whatever you heard when you were a teenager - is somehow raw, unsullied by artifice, pure, unadorned, non-articulated, that that’s the real thing. And so she shows up at the recording studio and Cale asks the band to tune their instruments or do some arranging and she’s like THAT’S NOT REAL MAN but the original thing was, in this case, let’s say Van Morrison’s Them, rehearsed and rehearsed and honed their talents long before the adolescent Patti came across, uh, them. Moreover, Van Morrison’s whole schtick was an impersonation of Howlin’ Wolf, not remotely sui generis. But, there’s always something appealing about breaking things down to their perceived essence, be it of the 3 chords and the truth variety, something barely above a campus drum circle in AnCo, Nirvana and Pavement’s “punk” in the face of 80s cultural touchstones/hair metal, Run-DMC and NWA, Jack White’s whole aesthetic framework, etc. Keepers: Break it Up, Gloria

James Brown Live At The Apollo

James Brown

3/5

I can see why the medley was such a powerful thing and at a different time that would be my shit. Continuing the artifice concerns, Brown fronted the cost for this. Which is to say, this wasn’t some one-off happenstance capture of a band one night, but a deliberately staged, well-rehearsed performance. He and his manager knew they had something special and made sure to get it right. But the sense one has with so much time removed is capturing a glimpse through a keyhole, of, again “the real thing man” which was powerful enough in the years after to inspire entire bands and potentially a genre via the MC5, Stooges, early Who. Whereas now..? It’s not lost to time, at all, but... Keepers: I Don’t Mind, Try Me

Surfer Rosa

Pixies

4/5

Right from the jump things are off-kilter with Lovering’s tempo which in retrospect is a little funny: Charles and Joey really wanted this to be a huge band, just as much as the Gallaghers envisioned being rock n roll stars. Old Days: Hugely important album for me, along with the rest of the 87-91 period (and the first few solo/Breeders records). I got in right before they broke up, loved Trompe le Monde even more than Nevermind. A few years later I was starting to play in bands and had a memorex cassette tape that contained the entire discography front to back and hoo boy did I ever wear that out. I’d already purchased the Gigantic single/EP with its alternate version of Euphrates, which showcased Joey’s playing and that was the ultimate attraction for me with the Pixies: his guitar. I was already a “guitar guy” but like, a fan of the Edge, Robert Smith, Peter Buck: oh you use feedback and noise? I’m in! Joey was doing a masterclass with that. Like, “Vamos” was the clear album centerpiece for 16 year-old KPH. We later used one of the studios they recorded at (Albini hated it) and then with some of the same people at what Fort Apache turned into. So that was fun and for a normal person would’ve been meaningful but it was just another boring ass studio to me. Today: Hard to hear any of this fresh. “Where is my mind?” was my jam in 1993-94, but weirdly, I was alone with that. “Gigantic” and the subsequent albums highlights got all the attention, whereas for a while there, “Where is my mind?” was kinda forgotten. And now everyone has it. That’s the indie rocker dilemma I suppose, I have my special thing that means a lot to me and I want to share it with everyone and then it does get shared with everyone and becomes a commercial jingle, soundtrack staple/shorthand for “life is crazy eh?” Also, like a lot of “underground” music there’s a lot of patience here for experimental or offbeat lyrical approaches, which maybe worked at the time, but even Charles steered away from the dada/surrealist stuff the longer he stayed at it.

Black Sabbath

3/5

I’m actually in the middle of a pretty fruitful acid rock phase with an eye to how Sabbath represents the road taken towards hard rock/metal (whereas punk and hardcore cleaved off earlier thanks to the Stooges and MC5 and Velvets?). Anyhow, one of my favorite bands to occasionally listen to but I can never take it seriously thanks to Ozzy/Geezer’s black occult preoccupations. I’m more patient these days with the concept of Satan as (mostly) western culture’s way of handling temptations and everything else but, good grief. I could listen to Iommi, Geezer, and Ward do their thing all day, such a great capture of tone (even if it’s not “pro”).

Out Of The Blue

Electric Light Orchestra

3/5

Another “my favourite bands’ favourite band” thing. Hard not to hear entire templates for albums by Grandaddy and the Lips. Likewise, I’m curious how The Soft Bulletin and Sophtware Slump play for 25 year olds today the way ELO did for me when I was 25-26. Lots of thoughts about Jeff that I won’t go into detail about here, as they aren’t terribly unique. This is a pretty good break-up album as those things go and as with nearly every other double album does not justify its length. Jeff finding true brilliance as a producer/co-writer/arranger with other classic rock dudes says a lot to me about the challenge he set for himself being a huge Beatles fan: he just never had a Lennon (even if he eventually had George). I like a lot of ELO and am always charmed to come across another melody of his I’d forgotten, but the reason I tend to forget ELO is the lack of an edge, the actual rock part of RNR. Keepers: bsky, sweet talkin woman, turn to stone

The Message

Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five

2/5

Crazy how fast hip hop and rap evolved that this already sounded dated by the time I first came across it around Run-DMC’s peak but the parts that still work are timeless and...largely are devoid of any contribution from the actual group. Can’t overlook the Pretty Hate Machine connection. Keepers: Scorpio, The Message, Wheels of Steel

Brilliant Corners

Thelonious Monk

3/5

Couldn’t quite get there, but the melody that reprises is interesting. Feels winsome and then just a bit off with the final harmony so close. There’s a cinematic/storytelling shorthand that uses jazz or the jazz fan identity to signal that the (usually white, male) character is serious, consumed by dark thoughts, has seen the truth of the world and is shaken by it, usually cursed to have an occupation fighting for justice. Their solace is in vinyl, their intelligence demonstrated by knowing which sideman filled in for the session that one day, their taste by preferring that unknown and forgotten player to the bigger name. Meanwhile, like most, Monk was grinding away at making difficult (to play) music, but not for sombre audiences to stare into their drinks while their forgetting to ash a cigarette.

Hybrid Theory

Linkin Park

1/5

This is one of the first bands that came along where I felt my age (all of 23). I was a huge Helmet/RATM/Beasties guy in high school, with some regrettable rap-rock/“crossover” acts in my CD books, which were especially popular in the early 90s German alt-rock scene. This sounded soooo played out. And yet, LP was a big deal for a lot of nascent millennial music fans, much as the aforementioned was for me just a few years earlier. Or music by The Cure and the Pumpkins; this is just with the angst dial way in the red and delivered in a format more tangible to a generation that grew up with hip hop as a normal part of the music landscape. It scanned as overly simplistic to my late Gen X ears, way too reliant on the loud-quiet dynamics we had internalized, but with kinda goofy digital effects and hip-hop tropes shoehorned in. Clearly, I was and am not the target audience. More curiously, these dudes were also all roughly my age and from similar middle class backgrounds, especially Shinoda, but I’d moved away from the palm mute crunch by 1995, whereas this became a multimillionaire venture for these dudes (still going!). It’s the soundtrack to a fully carpeted stairs down to a basement rec room long taken over by the teenage sons, soda spills and unidentified smears abound, maybe a cigarette burn, a broken throwback lava lamp sits unplugged next to an ESPN The Magazine, no one else has been down in here in months because it’s better to leave the boys alone. “Papercut” is a handy template for the LP sound, but also instructive for where rap-metal landed in the late 90s: there’s a clear guitar solo set-up their heroes STP would’ve nailed, but instead it’s an extended bridge/coda (with turntables contra the guitar heroics). It’s as self-serious and melodramatic as the rest of their whole deal, but it is very much their own thing. Keepers: not ever hearing any of this again

The Seldom Seen Kid

Elbow

1/5

Another provincial list artifact. Elbow’s whole deal always struck me as a bit obvious: a very conventional rock band trying to make a big, anthemic sound in the wake of Radiohead and post-rock. Before this record I always liked a song per album, whereas this just fell flat, the natural outcome for a band that had become suited to tv soundtrack shorthand for dramatic character moments. Doves followed a much different trajectory but eventually arrived at the same point. DFW has this faux parable he did at a commencement address that came to mind thinking about Elbow’s mid-tempo existence: There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?” Would Garvey’s voice not work with a speedier pace? Do their arrangements fall apart with some pep? How many times have they even tried something about 130 bpm (and not to just set at half-tempo)? The big hit - er, prime time soap soundtrack filler - here merely makes their earlier huge choral success sound like it was a test-run (or more likely, they were devoid of ideas). I’m sure this all means a lot to more people than my favourite bands of the moment, so, I’m reluctant to knock anything this harmless but they’ve done better.

Stardust

Willie Nelson

3/5

Between “outlaw” country singer and a Stax organ player producing, this must’ve had quite the fish out of water feel when it arrived to the public in the late 1970s. It’d be like Chad Hugo or Dangermouse working with Beck or Dave Grohl in the 2010s to recast the feel of 80s music. The standards record is now something of a line on a singer’s resume, showcasing their interpretative skills and unique vocal talent, whereas Willie really threw folks a curveball. The trick is to not succumb to the style or sound of the old material and instead make it sound contemporary, maybe with a wink, but Willie is not interested in jokey asides: he’s completely earnest, but in his warm, casual, and relaxed approach. Unfortunately, as charming as this all is, the album still loses my attention and fades into the background pretty quickly. I like, but don’t love his minor key, stilted syntax spins on familiar material. It’s all very lovely - I can see and almost feel the neon lighting up a solitary couple swaying to any one of these cuts. Maybe one day it will have a place for me but today it’s all just a bit dull.

Eliminator

ZZ Top

3/5

Not entirely clear who actually played or wrote what on this record. Not quite a Milli Vanilli situation but history doesn’t reflect terribly well on the Texas 3 or maybe it does, stealing a bunch of ideas and calling them your own is a hallmark of the lone star state, let alone rock n roll (and in the case of ZZ Top, this wasn’t the first murky origin story). All that said, damn, what a great sound! It wears over the course of 10 songs and lurches to a halt with the few slower tempo numbers, but on the singles and a few album cuts, it’s a flawless execution. So much so, my band tried imitating the classic ZZ Top sound for some guitar tracks 20 years ago. We just hadn’t cracked the code on the whole wah pedal thing at that point, still associating it with the excesses of U2 and the Beastie Boys.

Smash

The Offspring

2/5

In the spring of 1994 the choice was between Dookie and Smash and well, Billie Joe reminded me too much of shitheads I knew and actually picked a fight with them outside a venue in Frankfurt, but more importantly, they didn’t play fast. The Offspring played faster, not NOFX or SNFU fast, but fast enough for me. That said, I don’t really think I ever clicked with this? I distinctly remember walking around Frankfurt with this on my discman thinking “do I even really like this?” Not in a Fugazi sense, where I’m being challenged by unorthodox sounds, more...does this suck? But, I still liked it enough to go see them do a free show at the university, bumping into Dexter housing a Big Mac a few blocks over. It was kinda good clean fun I guess and I never listened to it again until now. I completely forgot about that ska track lol, which I definitely defended back in 1994. It’s kind of a marvel Gurewitz could even supply distributors...11 million worldwide!!! If my dad ever gave me shit about pouring energy into music, I could always bring up these fools.

Ingenue

k.d. lang

2/5

Removed from the context of its release, Ingénue is kind of a weird collection if your entry point is “Constant Craving.” Had this lounge-y style had been tilted just a bit more in the kitsch direction, I could see it being a David Lynch co-production, but it retains a sincerity and conventional aim that keeps it from being that kind of interesting. But lang’s a Canadian through and through and my current countrymen aren’t big on irony. Speaking of, she’s a real deal national hero here treasured maybe as the Celine of the Prairies. The hit still hits, but what’s up with the accordion? Is it a signal to a kind of French pop or continental ennui to match the melody’s melancholy? Was it kicking around western Canada and the Pacific NW in general in the late 1980s (thinking of the Northern Exposure theme). The basics of “Constant Craving” carry on elsewhere, sometimes blatantly: once by a fellow Canuck with Sarah McLachlan’s superlative “Sweet Surender” which captures the general vibe, Somerville’s Guster’s “Satellite” (with a more Mac arrangement), and then the wholesale (supposedly unintentional, no really, honest, it was just a mistake!) theft by the Stones, which they willfully credited to lang and her songwriting partner Ben Mink before getting sued. But I can see why, it’s a pitch perfect tune, matching lyrical sentiment and melody, with a vocal performance that ties it all up. The rest of the album...is made really well?

Gunfighter Ballads And Trail Songs

Marty Robbins

2/5

what was going on in American culture that this became a thing? Cowboys and such were well done by the 1950s...nostalgia? Amazing voice, although I'd prefer hearing him harmonize with someone else than himself.

Highly Evolved

The Vines

1/5

What is this doing here? It’s not in the Dimery book? They probably didn't deserve all the scorn for coming along when the record business decided Rock Was Back and slotted this alongside the Strokes, White Stripes, and all the LES bands. But I mean...cmon.

Fuzzy

Grant Lee Buffalo

2/5

What to make of the singer-songwriter in the 1990s and beyond? Even if it was a solo project, the 90s and 00s largely maintained the fiction that a band was the equal sum of its parts, every group an REM or Pearl Jam. GLB has everything in place for this to work except the songs. Wonderfully expressive and distinct singing by G-LP, at times reminiscent of Jeff Buckley, but the result is something fixed in its era and as I’d half-expected them to show up at the Bronze or Stars Hollow, sure enough, G-LP was one of the Gilmore Girls troubadours. It’s fine but returns us to the ongoing question of who put this on the list and why. Grunge music really did not win over UK audiences, so much so resistance to it was part of the NME/MM push for a uniquely British 90s rock answer to the glum and angsty Americans, yielding a half decade’s worth of chart-topping britpop. But GLB broke through with some English audiences, becoming a favourite of an aforementioned britpopper, influencing the Oasis single Some Might Say.

good kid, m.A.A.d city

Kendrick Lamar

4/5

Still about as perfect a record as kdot has pulled together. If it suffers from anything it’s that, like a lot of hip hop albums, good kid is a collection of tracks produced by separate artists, obviously with Kendrick uniting them. Butterfly is a more cohesive instrumental piece, but lacks the range of his other “pop” records, which good kid nails. It’s a concept record, which I am mostly allergic to, alongside the skits, but this one has a lived-in, believable quality that works as a framing device/jokes (although there are jokes!). The indie rock samples made gkmc a bit of a curiosity in the months before the release - Dr Dre is rapping over Twin Sister? - but that was just one of the entry points for me. Ultimately this was a word of mouth thing, folks adding “ya bish” to whatever, speculating that Sing About Me could be its own movie, TNC being turned off by Backseat Freestyle and then later being like “oh whoops, I get it now,” and on a personal level it had a lot of the same sound of vaporwave that I associated with my time in California - melodic, catchy, uncanny new, old sounds but never feeling nostalgic. From Sherane to Sing About Me it’s a cinematic tour-de-force. On a relisten 13 years later, I’m *still* captivated by The Art of Peer Pressure even though I know how it will turn out. The Drake guest spot always got a skip and the Pharrell track stuck out as an odd duck, but fit just enough to work with whatever side quests Kendrick took. Drank could be a one-off novelty track (and at the Vandy show I saw spring of ’13, it definitely was for the frat kids), but there’s enough background colour about extended family difficulties that it’s part of the Duckworth mosaic, not just a curio. After the all-time triumph of Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst a simple coda would make it a perfect record, but we have a bit of a clunker in Real and a necessary, but weirdly ill-fitting Dr Dre track. The fadeout takes us back to the beginning of the record and then there a handful of bonus tracks which I hope get excised from streaming some day... There was an album out a year earlier by The Roots with a similar storytelling framing, starting at the end, ending at the beginning, with many of the same concerns about temptation leading the hero astray. Both characters meet a similar “end” and Undun is likewise a collection of imagery and side stories, populated by Black Thought’s musings and similarly, an indie rock nod or 2 (Sufjan to Kdot’s Beach House), just...one contains volumes and a first person’s account/believability and the other is merely really damn good, but more abstract in the execution.

Exit Planet Dust

The Chemical Brothers

3/5

This is a fun one. I desperately wanted to be back in a big city during college, but was instead in Colorado Springs. I missed going to clubs like I did in high school because Germany does not give a fuck about how old you are around alcohol. Fortunately I spent roughly half of my college years across Germany and no matter how small the town, you could find some abandoned factory site that had been repurposed for club nights almost entirely for the kids, crazy stuff. Big beat largely missed those spots, so I never heard the Chemical Brothers or their compatriots at FABRIK or whatever, but back in Colorado, this at least sounded like what I thought going to a club might be like circa 1996. But back in reality, this just ended up being really good music to study to. A lot of this kinda sounded dated by then, which is not inaccurate - a lot of the record had been kicking around clubs for a few years before Astralwerks pressed it up - and I mostly looked to the Bros for their collaborations with britpoppers and the occasional dispassionate female singer. My favourite track on this was always the least big beat, “One Too Many Mornings” the kinda sorta remix of a forgotten 4AD band - Swallow - who had released a set of dub remixes of their only album, which the Bros borrowed from liberally here, but in service of creating some new. It’s impressive to hear the original songs, the subsequent dub versions, and then how they pulled that together. I still checked in with the not Dust Bros over the next few records and I’m not sure they ever pulled together a single cohesive album, which feels like the product of how they worked, putting out singles and EPs which couldn’t all hang together as one. Strike while the iron’s hot and such.

Rum Sodomy & The Lash

The Pogues

4/5

For a while there in the 1990s this was one of the handful of albums I considered untouchable. Not perfect, but just special in a way that couldn’t be tarnished. You could slot this along side just about anything on a mixtape, With time, The Pogues, if not their records, and Celtic punk have indeed been ruined a bit by association: my fellow Irish-Americans adopted them and all that came along as an authentic music, the real deal, etc. The Clash, but when you’re throwing back Jameson and Guinness with your people. You see it all over media, but only in that completely fabricated McDonald’s franchise of the diaspora: the Irish pub. Of course this leaves aside that they were as Irish as I am, none actually native-born, just with Irish ancestors. But, however you convey authenticity, Shane and co. had no problems there. Just, ugh, if I have to see another Irish wake set in New England that features a Pogues sinaglong...Hollywood is convinced you could meet someone outside the Broadway T stop and they’d sing the entire Pogues catalog and dance a jig FOR FREE.

Blur

4/5

A thing that non-Britons miss about Blur is that they were considered by the British music press and beyond, even through the Life trilogy, a band for (gasp) the least-discerning music consumers of all time: teenage girls. Pin-ups. Not a boy band exactly, but certainly not Serious Rock Musicians. Even after Popscene, one of the songs credited with kicking off britpop, they were slagged off as a bit preposterous. I had no idea about any of this though I could always detect that the NME and Melody Maker, alongside late 90s music forum posters, were forever looking down on them. Suede and Pulp? Serious bands. Oasis? Ridiculous, but actual rock and rollers. Blur? Cmon, them? Too pretty, too upper class! My experience, otoh, was seeing Damon affect a hip hop or punk frontman posture during the Parklife tour, like, hey, he’s one of us! The songs were a bit too ensconced in provincial concerns and whatnot, but he wears the same clothes as I do, and they like the same bands I do. Gotta check back in on them someday. Well, that day came in the summer of 1997 in Texas, when I was perusing the lone CD store south of Austin and heard “Song 2”, asked a cashier wtf? this is Blur? the Country House guys? and he was like I KNOW! I didn’t quite embrace the whole record at first, this was the same summer as OK Computer, The Wrens’ Overnight Success, my deep Archers of Loaf dive, but over the next 2 years I memorized just about every bit of feedback and non-sequitor on there. Song 2 still had some life before 13 came around and was not yet the arena timeout fixture it became stateside, but the better parts of the record were the murky, noisy, delay-laden album cuts like Essex Dogs, Death of a Party, Strange News, plus the “I can’t believe this is britpop” charms of MOR and On Your Own, let alone the throwback feel of Look Inside America. And then there’s Coxo’s warbly slice of heartfelt perfection, You’re so Great, maybe the most lo-fi GBV thing on here, just with better guitar-playing (sorry Bob). This all set them up unfairly in my own mind as the band that could give Radiohead a run for Best Band heading into the 2000s, but oh well, things took a turn.

Astral Weeks

Van Morrison

1/5

This has always been king shit of the heap of Important Albums You Must Hear (that KPH hates). I can remember throwing it on expecting to have the same revelations as I did with Laughingstock. The roadmap there was from the celebrated post-rock acts of 99-02: Godspeed, Mogwai, Sigur Ros, which was an unreasonable expectation for Astral Weeks. Because it sucks.

Fragile

Yes

2/5

The only Yes album I can almost listen to. They’re still doing all the prog shit or at least an initial version of it while retaining *some* songwriting chops. Mostly, any patience I have for them is derived from a cool “Long Distance Runaround” cover Joggers, a Portland indie band, did in the 00s. But there’s still all the other wanker “putting the classic in classic rock” nonsense - this time it’s a classical guitar recital piece and a Brahms something or other. Could not give less of a shit about that blokes.

You've Come a Long Way Baby

Fatboy Slim

2/5

By some coincidence I had an early housemate in Roxbury in the late 1990s who was a huge Housemartins fan. Still not sure why this was the case, he was otherwise into American indie, britpop, but especially swing music. Like BIG TIME into the swing scene, went to dance nights in Manhattan during the week, was in videos and photo shoots for I can’t remember. Anyhow, speaking of 1990s trends, big beat, eh? I always find it peculiar what gets left out of the 90s post-mortems, like the whole decade ended in April 1994 or when Bush had their first hit or whatever. Meanwhile, “music” was moving forward on its own with and without the help of the business. 1997 was supposed to be The Year, if not summer of Electronica - Dig Your Own Hole and especially Fat of the Land - but the sound did not cross over, at least, not as was planned. Instead, the next and following years, this rando Brit DJ pulled together a set of novelty “techno” songs and kaboom. None of this really ever clicked for me, it’s so close to being sublime, next-level stuff, but Cook stays in his lane. Which apparently was a very profitable one, jeezus. The best example, aside from the general sense “Praise You” is missing that little something extra but keeps it safe for 1000s of ad breaks to come, is the breakdown of “Rockafeller Skank”: as the vocal sample speeds up and the (big) beat drops out it starts taking on a rhythm of its own which then just...folds back into surf rock basis of the song. A better artist would’ve seized that and gone off in a different direction - Daft Punk created an entire set around this idea - but Cook is ultimately very staid, very predictable, focused on colouring inside the lines.

Bad

Michael Jackson

2/5

I have to admit that I am not too up on MJ’s personal history. I basically turned off when the tabloids got a hold of him sometime around the making of this record. I have not watched the documentaries. Growing up in the 80s and 90s, it was impossible not to be inundated with Michael Jackson, especially if you had MTV on all the time like I did, whenever we had cable. Come to think of it, we did not have cable during Bad’s rollout, so I didn’t see the full Scorsese short film until years later, likewise the physics-defying Smooth Criminal video, etc. But, I remember the promotional materials for Bad being everywhere the summer we lived in NYC, a temporary stopover that lasted longer than expected because our new quarters weren’t ready yet. We were moving from smalltown upstate NY to Washington, DC, a concept I had some indifference to and in the background on the subway, at bus stops, on tv, the radio, etc, it was BAD. As a kid, a white kid at that, I had no idea about “bad” meaning “cool” or whatever, so it was like loveable Michael is this angry guy now? He’s in the NY subway - hey, that’s what we use now - and dealing with gangs? There are gangs here? Anyhow, what a crapshoot of a record. Is this where things started going off the rails for him? Thriller was one of the few boastful album titles to earn it - nothing but world-beating hits - after the charming, winsome dance party joy of Off The Wall, whereas this thing, sure, there are a few clear singles, but as much as I like Smooth Criminal, it’s still a sub-Thriller attempt at recapturing some of Billie Jean and Beat It’s spirit. It’s such an ugly-sounding record: the gated drum machines combined with the default urgency in his voice throughout, the minor key melodies, it’s just not a lot of fun, and ends with a groove that...tells you to leave him alone. A tough sell for his talents! Where Thriller had album cuts you’d want to go back to, these are a chore. Speed Demon (wtf?) through Another Part of Me is just...nope. Man in the Mirror is an interesting idea for a song and is the other good enough single here, but after the plodding, exhausting first side, this is more a reprieve than a standout, but it’s over 5 minutes! Followed by a forgetful duet and more bludgeoning. The only relief you get is when the record stops.

Peter Gabriel

2/5

It’s fitting for the first solo record by a very theatrical/dramatic prog rock guy to be a bit of a jumbled mess. He’s reeling in all kinds of impulses, not even remotely successfully, and probably was more comfortable letting things go from movement to movement to bridge to solo back to a verse and so on. Then it is no surprise that Car starts off on, well, a weird, overdone note and right after that you have his first bonafide pop hit. Recorded in Toronto! Which has been featured in so many ads and sporting arenas and films it’s now firmly cliche status. Then some sort of Who interrogation, but not content to rock out, throws in some theatrical bridges because of course. And then a barbershop quartet setting up another theatre piece. Jeezus Pete. This kind of scattershot “lemme try this one” vibe more or less dominates the record and is not my thing. When Björk did something similar on Post, you at least had a well-defined version of who she was at that time as a singer and singular personality and while Gabriel definitely had both, he doesn’t overwhelm and own a song with his vocals, at least not on the genre exercises. Instead, these kinda feel like larks? Which is odd, the whole story around the Lamb Lies Down tour is that he wanted to break out of the band trappings and put his mark on everything, but instead there are these very slight album cuts.

The Undertones

3/5

Great proto-pop-punk sound. Can definitely hear echoes across all kinds of bands: the Hives, Futureheads, and so on. Alas, the catch with The Undertones is they are deliberately singing about teenage concerns, half throwback to 1950s/early 60s bubblegum rock and doo wop, half Ramones impersonation. Which partly makes sense, they were 18 and 19 year-olds - which is pretty dope considering the guitar sound, rhythm bed playing, and vocals. But, even at the height of my own teenage punk phase I’d’ve been like guys, let’s grow up a bit eh?

Night Life

Ray Price

3/5

The Willie Nelson original that gives the album its title starts things off on a decidedly non-country set of notes. That thing could easily be confused with a jazz-inflected 12-bar blues. But, as the album (and night?) progress, in comes the fiddle and other telltale sounds of what was still country back in the early 1960s. Evidently the softer tones are a pitch for becoming part of the Nashville Sound, but there’s still too much Texas here. Thankfully.

Californication

Red Hot Chili Peppers

2/5

Hailed as the return of Frusciante, this also had, to my surprise in the summer of 1999, uh, singing? Not by Kiedis, a necessary evil that I can sometimes overlook here, but backing vocals from Flea and Frusciante that actually do something for the concept of the record. That is, if you are making a record about California, well, multi-part harmonies should come with the territory a la the Beach Boys, John and Michelle Phillips, the canyon, etc. This all works for a handful of songs but this is still a peak CD era release and the Peppers never turned in a short and sweet effort. It’s easy for me to say cutting back some of the funk rock meets folky melodies cuts would’ve made a better record, but as some of the retrospective histories point out you could NOT escape the singles throughout 1999-03. I worked at a Harvard bar around then and ooof. Kiedis really does have a solid voice for this material and while his goofy raps largely work on BSSM and the earlier funk material, hoo boy, so much of the album feels like an attempt by Frusciante and Flea to make a serious, melodic effort and AK’s lyrics are so hamfisted and awkward...at least we have Scar Tissue.

La Revancha Del Tango

Gotan Project

2/5

I have the faintest memories of encountering this album, or at least Gotan, sometime in my early 20s maybe, when I would still hang out with folks who didn’t all have a shared musical vocabulary. Or to put it more specifically: with people who weren’t Music Fans. I occasionally envy these folks or at least whatever image I have constructed of them. It’s me and art museums: sure, I like some paintings, even love a few, but I could only pick out a Degas from a Manet or an early Picasso sketch from a Dali if I really tried and it’d probably be a coin toss. A life where you maybe have a few playlists saved or in the old days, a CD wallet with 12 out of 20 slots filled, largely going unlistened. La Revancha del Tango surely makes up a healthy minority of these collections.

Suede

3/5

Suede was a bit of a tough sell in my group of friends. The book on Suede even before this came out (and we were confusingly told they were called the London Suede back in the States), was that they were into fucking. Everything. The androgynous cover of two people kissing betrayed a friendliness with bisexuality or homosexuality, still a bit of a shocker for early 1990s sensibilities, but then there’s a song called Animal Lover? You can imagine how this went over with a bunch of adolescent dudes (true to form, I shrugged, maybe we should listen to the tunes first eh?). As to the music and presentation, the angst felt performative in a way grunge and punk did not, very much the heirs to Morrissey and Marr right down to an overly dramatic singer with a gift for saying “outrageous things” and a mercurial, but kind-hearted guitar virtuoso. I didn’t go back to Suede for a few years until the release of Sci-Fi Lullabies, a rightly celebrated feature of British rock: the singles/b-sides collection. Largely due to cost - the albums carrying an inflated price - the singles market in the UK was viable and catered to in a way the US was not: great songs by The Smiths, Morrissey, Belle & Sebastian, Oasis, Pulp, etc were initially or only released as singles. The Beatles even had this written into their contract at first: 4 singles/2 albums per year. Add Suede to this tradition (although curiously Blur stayed away from this practise?). Sci-Fi got written up, at least in the American music press, as a way to catch up on a UK band that was more than a flash in the pan glam act. After that I made my way back through Coming Up and the s/t. The debut is still, to my ears, a bit short on quality past the singles. This is true for all of the Suede catalog - couple good tunes and then a great deal of vamping by Brett and whoever constitutes his songwriting compadres at the time. I imagine this same criticism can be levelled at any number of my favs - either you buy the whole schtick or you don’t. The Drowners and Animal Nitrate, plus b-side My Insatiable One (how was this a b-side?), all tremendous.

Everything Must Go

Manic Street Preachers

1/5

As mentioned elsewhere, I wrongly assumed anything deemed britpop or from the UK in the 1990s would have a certain quality to it. Not entirely anti-mainstream or against convention, but unique in a way that separated itself from the grunge hangover and slew of Next Seattle and one hit wonders of the mid-late 90s. The more the second wave continued on, the more lifers from other fine, but not really britpop bands got sorted into the genre by the NME editors always looking to keep the show going. The Manics - more punk, political in their concerns and lyrics, less overtly anti-American rock or provincial - a UK rock band during britpop should’ve been a knockout for me. And everything I’ve ever heard, including this album, is just incredibly dull. Their backstory is incredible and incredibly sad around this time - lyricist and guitarist up and disappears! Forever!

All Things Must Pass

George Harrison

2/5

As big of a Beatles fan as I am, the solo careers largely miss me except for John’s wanderings. I mean, they defined and stood above an entire decade, a bridge between early rock’n’roll and what it turned into in its various strands. What else is there to do when you reach that kind of artistic and societal, global success? Mostly it’s: bitch about each other and also return to the well and sing about love. Throw in a whole mess of spiritual concerns and you have the entirety of All Things Must Pass. I dunno, I’ve tried with this multiple times over the years, focusing in on a few tracks at points, doing the entire thing (jams included), seeing what GH liked enough to keep in live sets, etc. And the result is almost always the same: I want to listen to Abbey Road. George gets a lot of love for being the quiet one, which allows you to project anything you want onto him: deep, passionate, cute, hurt, wise, heartfelt, wide-eyed, gregarious. To me he just seems like a dude and as a musician one who benefitted tremendously from having collaborators either at or above his level. Preston and Voorman aside, they are not present here. I do admire the “wall of sound” approach revisited here by George and Spector and one can make a case it set things in motion like shoegaze. There are interesting songs and some melodies here and there are also several attempts at internalizing the drones of raga into the conventions of rock music - guitar, drums, bass, maybe some keys, vocals - yielding songs that don’t have many changes, if any. The lyrics, not unlike John’s, grow more and more basic, simple, to the point, but hanging over all of this is...he’s a freakin’ Beatle! It’s George! The band just broke up! He also really does not like Paul! As such, it’s hard to hear these songs separate from that, nor from the trends of the late 60s that his heroes/friends Dylan, The Band, and Clapton started or were in the middle of continuing. I dunno, one day I might find something here to go back to, but it really wasn’t until he hooked up with Lynne and co. that I heard something that best used his talents (to what end, well...).

Rock 'N Soul

Solomon Burke

4/5

I feel like you can throw a rock at any Burke album and find one just as good as the other. That’s not an insult. He wasn’t a singular genius or anything, but he was awfully damn good. I think of Solomon as a mostly unheard giant of 60s soul music, who kept getting career revivals over the following decades (eventually catching my ear in the early 00s). He’s neither Otis nor Sam, didn’t have a string of Motown classics, wasn’t part of the Stax stable, never had a signature hit. But when you throw a Sol record on, I mean, you’re not reaching for those other guys. And he was omnivorous - there’s a Woodie Guthrie cover here, CCR later in the decade, Maggie’s Farm even! Can’t Love ‘Em All? Bullshit.

Kid A

Radiohead

5/5

Not the ideal time to be considering Radiohead, alas. From Pablo Honey on, but especially on Kid A and OKC there is ample material expressing alienation. Socially, environmentally, personally. Lyrically, Yorke could be vague enough that he is speaking in koans, sometimes leaving the music to provide context, other times so specific that just about anyone anywhere at any moment could easily find relatable this guy so openly discontented with his station, job, society, etc. Plus, the rest of the guys could come off as gracious, shy, but mostly kind and supportive (especially of their frontman). If you, too, were faced with a kind of general unease and anxiety about life in the late 20th/early 21st century, well, here was a support group. And if not explicitly, implicitly associating your band identity with progressive causes and anti-capitalist figures and thinking, this gave fans another sense that these Oxfordshire lads were on your side. This is important stuff! You are responsible for fucking around with peoples’ emotions! It’s both a privilege and a burden to take this role on in peoples’ lives. Very few artists are fortunate enough to capture a zeitgeist and tower above their field, even if only for a handful of years. Casting that responsibility aside because...well, no one really knows (and Yorke and compatriots Nick Cave and Dylan would say they don’t owe you reasons), it retroactively hollows out and undoes all of the work you did. It’s a damn shame.

The College Dropout

Kanye West

2/5

Lol the day after Kid A, this shit? Kanye was always an odd fit. Great producer - so, either purchaser or creator of samples, beats, entire songs - with a few tricks that caught a moment with Jay Z. And also a producer who wanted to be an MC. The DJ who wanted to rap. The drummer or lead guitarist who wanted to be the frontman. And he simply fucking could not rap. Not awkward as say, me, a white guy with some rhythm, but just...as rappers and their critics became consumed with the art of the flow, here stumbles in a guy who literally had his jaw rebuilt. Which he made integral to his whole appeal as this album came together! But he had jokes and a fake it til you make it bravado that was annoying, but not disqualifying. Dropout was fun in parts, a bit overbearing and clumsy elsewhere (this would only increase), but mostly seemed perfunctory. I did it Jay! I made my record! What now? Where will my story go next? To what amazing heights will I soar? And oh how I will crash.

A Little Deeper

Ms. Dynamite

2/5

Refracting American r&b and hip hop back through foreign countries is always a weird listening experience. Hardly a new concept - the British Invasion would’ve been sued out of releasing music if a Marvin Gaye-type estate had been around. And at a more intra-country level, Elvis: a “foreigner” takes and makes a style their own. So, hearing an English singer doing an imitation of Lauryn Hill’s whole deal, well, it feels a bit fake. Which is silly. There’s also En Vogue. This is fine, but feels like another provincial entry (and sure enough, she became something of a c list Brit celeb, hosting, appearing on competition shows, etc). The beats and artificial synths are tilted enough in the direction of 2-step to remove it from the more live band/acoustic aesthetic Hill embraced. But the lyrical concerns are not dissimilar: what’s going on in my life, how I grew up, etc. There’s a bit of a curveball at the end with the garage/2-step (curiously US only?) tracks Danger and Ramp that have nothing to do with the Lauryn Hill vibe. Those sound confident and unique in a way that is far more compelling, revealing a Minaj-range talent.

Something/Anything?

Todd Rundgren

3/5

I’ve had this for over 20 years and still never listened to it in one sitting. I dunno, there’s something a little smug or indifferent about Rundgren and his relation to his own music that is maybe intended come off as self-deprecating or bashful but instead diminishes his own stuff, implicating the listener for even enjoying it. It’s hard not to hear this as a kind of proto-soft rock/70s gold/yacht rock forefather - all fine things - but 90+ minutes?

Pink Moon

Nick Drake

3/5

An album I wish I had been introduced to much earlier on if only for Place To Be and learning CGCFCE tunings. It’s a bit too minor chord spare or austere in parts, a thing English folk in particular did in the late 60/early 70s, but Drake’s fastball (eephus pitch?) is perfect. As I go on about a bit in my Bryter Later notes, for better or worse, the VW ad plays a big role in the title track for my generation. As such, I lean Place To Be (esp. an alternate recording he did released on the A Day Gone By collection).

Blood Sugar Sex Magik

Red Hot Chili Peppers

3/5

If not the birth of rap rock, surely the most successful initial foray aside from Rubin’s own more hands-on production work. I was never much of a Peppers guy. They seemed largely harmless, but with one foot in the “be in a band to get chicks” world. Subsequent revelations that don’t seem to bother the wider world showed there was occasionally something actually harmful lurking about but I guess they’ve all grown up so who care? As with any other RHCP release, your tolerance for Kiedis will determine how effective the songs are. This is hailed as Frusciante’s breakout record, which makes sense: Mother’s Milk and the earlier records had some variety, but largely stuck to the funk-rock formula. BSSM has some of the latter, but the pull of Jane’s Addiction and alt-rock is the noteworthy turn here, largely the result of Frusciante’s playing and writing. Wasn’t really my thing back then and still isn’t, but, lyrics and CD bloat era length aside, it’s hard to fault anything here.

Behaviour

Pet Shop Boys

3/5

Tough to separate my affection for a lot of music from this specific era from how I respond to it (having not listening to it in over 30 years maybe). For me, the first electronic album looms large here: PSB’s own contributions to it and even having Marr present. Also helps having Mr Axel-F himself producing. And Angelo! They continue to pull from r&b; previously Motown, now contemporary soul hits and, in one unfortunate moment, New Jack Swing. That aside, it’s a pretty well-executed set for the duo. I like, but tend to tire of Tennant’s voice over the course of an entire collection, but that’s a me problem.

Os Mutantes

3/5

This had 2-3 strikes against it for me back when it was reissued and became a cause célèbre: • The hipsters were all over it • Cmon, the cape? • An allergy to anything foreign prized despite it kinda sounding like mostly local takes on the prevailing trends of the day I’ve still been more a Jorge Ben and Gal Costa kinda guy when it comes to tropicalia but I could see finally changing that up a bit and now that I’ve spent the past year immersed in French at the very least I have a slightly better read on the lyrics. Like, barely, but still.

Illinois

Sufjan Stevens

2/5

I was pulling for Sufjan around the time this came out. Gimmicks weren’t an entirely foreign concept - 69 Love Songs still felt recent - so coming up with an album for every US state, sure, why not? That and indie rock was in what would turn out to be several year rut, so having anyone with ambition and talent to match come along with a novel project was worth celebrating. Alas. While Michigan tipped his hand as being a bit on the twee/precious side of the spectrum, Illinois felt like a Wes Anderson score, Vincent Garibaldi and high school orchestras its guiding aesthetic lights. Even the song titles could be taken straight from a Max Fischer notebook. Which is fine, but what does that have to do with a state with as much musical variety as Illinois? There are moments of beauty and awe here, perhaps befitting a film score, but throughout the marriage of this musical aesthetic with smart liberal arts kid lyrics (hey I’m on one of those) becomes cloying. Sufjan did find a few modes here - acoustic singer-songwriter, chiefly - that found favour later in his career, but both any interest I had in him and he in this project ended with Illinois.

Heartbreaker

Ryan Adams

4/5

Still don’t have an answer to what there is to be done with these records. They meant something at one time and then the artist did something to ruin any connection you’d want to have with them and more importantly, their music. I have a fond memory of listening to a Ryan Adams live show driving across Kentucky one summer. I wasn’t a big RA fan, but liked Heartbreaker pretty much from the jump, yet never took a big plunge because, well, he seemed like a bit of a jackass (even though I knew him through friends and while yes, drunk jackass was an apt characterization, you’d be leaving out the loveable part). So, I was making my way through this long live set and bluegrass country and was absolutely floored by the version of Come Pick Me Up on there, enough I went back and devoured all of the Whiskeytown records even gave some of his many later solo records a try. And then, well, maintaining any association with his music became untenable. Nearly a decade on from metoo and canceling folks, my current feeling is DAMN WHAT A SHAME. But that’s a better place than “I cannot even stomach listening to this creep.” I don’t know what there is to be done about this in the long run, if he makes proper amends, how warranted they *all* were to begin with, and so on. There are lots of genuine assholes who make music we love, but we never got to learn about the genuine asshole part - that’s the ignorance is bliss argument. I believe in forgiveness and redemption, but it’s not up to me to grant So Many Men entree back into our good graces. But jeezus, what a talent. And damn, what a shame.

Brothers

The Black Keys

3/5

I was in pretty early with the Black Keys and as these things tend to go, this meant I was pulling for them to have success. I also kinda lost interest just as fast: their genre exercises, committed and believable, never broke out of being imitation. After thickfreakness long faded from memory I remember giving the one-off BlakRoc collaboration a go, mostly because of the sample material from which the project’s name half originated. It’s not the greatest rap-rock pairing, but hinted at a malleability the earlier classic r&b sound never did. That sets up Brothers, a wide-eyed rock and soul record that lets in hooks and melody. Maybe too many hooks and particular melodies for some, as their reliance on advert placements grew to make them an inescapable sound on tv for the better part of the early 2010s. As with most BK records, there’s a handful of memorable songs and a lot of filler, but the melding of old blues sounds and contemporary production, if cheapened some by the subsequent advert exposure, sits well and sustains a particular tone.

The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter

The Incredible String Band

2/5

Hmm. More UK folk. Just not my thing. I appreciate the melding of forms and traditions and tend to favour the Williamson songs (Waltz of the New Moon pops), but a great deal of this is like having a joke explained to you. That I found the history of SoTec’s creation and their mixing board manufacturing a more interesting history kinda says it all for me and the soon to be scientologists.

All That You Can't Leave Behind

U2

2/5

There’s a couple angles I can take on this one: • What’s the album where you stop being a fan? • What does a band do when its creative phase is ended because of reasons unrelated to the music? • Or: how does an older band keep the momentum going by selectively cribbing from their earlier sounds? I was a holdout for U2 well after Zooropa, which seems to be the agreed upon end date for their relevance as a forward-thinking artistic unit (that still created stadium-ready rock). Passengers, while more of a grab bag of Eno and Edge, still had some sublime, exciting moments. As such, I was actually looking forward to POP and took seriously the whole Discotheque and PopMART rollout. But, it really was a failure and not one I’ve enjoyed going back to, try as I do every few years hoping something in that middle section of slogs finally hits. If there’s anything ironic or even fun about All That, it’s that they turned back to Eno and instead of asking him to make them sound less like themselves, instead did the opposite. All across the album there are signature Edge sounds from across the 1980s run, very conventional song structures and progressions from late 1990s alt rock/pop radio, deliberate calling card echos of the golden era. If Achtung Baby was the sound of 4 men cutting down the Joshua Tree, this is them time-traveling to before the Berlin Wall fell. There are still hints of the 1990s flirtations with dance production - even punching in LMJ’s snare tone from Zooropa for Elevation - but gone are the electronic trappings and tone pieces of 93-97. Bono the singer is in exceptional form vocally throughout and the entire record is something of showcase for his range and performances. Bono the lyricist, meanwhile, returns to full messiah mode, the irony and long dark nights of the soul replaced by aphorisms. Which, whatever, spreading the gospel via more relatable, generic language is perhaps the most honest part of All That, with the rest an assembly of cynical calculation by the rock bloc (and Edge, at least according to the making-of histories). There’s worthwhile material here and in the intervening years, the attempt at a classic song (In a Little While) fits that billing. There are tracks that might’ve fit on Zooropa or enhanced POP, such as the moody back half 1-2 of When I Look at the World and New York. Alas, the bulk of the record wants to remind the world that U2 is back, accessible, sounding like their old selves. No high concepts here aside from His lord and saviour (Jesus or Bono?). Aside from a mostly failed attempt at regaining their artistic footing in 2009, this would be the template for U2 in the 21st century, no longer the band charting the sounds of the future, but instead looking to the past.

Smile

Brian Wilson

2/5

Have basically never come around on these recordings and much prefer the older ones. For BW's sake I'm glad it happened at all, but...

Heaven Or Las Vegas

Cocteau Twins

3/5

This came out right as I was starting to get my head around being a music fan. I knew I liked hip hop and the Cure a whole bunch and was suspicious of anything that sounded too slick. The 1980s were very much the era of too slick and I was running away from that. So, a year later or so when I latched on pretty hard to Lush, Ride, and MBV, I had an inkling I should be checking out the Cocteaus, probably because of Guthrie’s production work and their clear influence on these bands. But, this was their most recent release and had the patina of “too produced” so aside from Lorelei, I mostly steered clear of them. Silly stuff, being a young music fan (and also, as was the case for Gen X and early Millennials, affording music was not as simple as firing up a streaming service or file-sharing). Much like other Twins albums, there are a few genre-defining/creating standout tracks here - singles even eh? - but the palette is fairly limited to their specific blend of dream pop throughout the remainder. Basically just not a lot of range, Fraser’s vocal aside.

The Infotainment Scan

The Fall

2/5

Love a lot of the music MES inspired but aside from a song or 2 here and there, have never latched onto an entire album. There’s a distinctly artless(?) or amateurish quality to a lot of the actual music, like it’s all presets. Which, if that is all in place as a backdrop to Smith’s voice and lyrics, is OK I suppose, but also doesn’t do a lot for me as *songs*. I’ve read that on other albums he had actual amateur musicians who didn’t really know how to play be his band and that tracks. Further, I’m just not one for obsessively deciphering lyrics be it Destroyer or ATDI, so spending a great deal of time with MES and his affectations isn’t too likely.

Eternally Yours

The Saints

3/5

Horns and punk rock? What a concept.

Violent Femmes

4/5

I hope every young music fan still has a Violent Femmes phase. And grows right out of it.

Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not

Arctic Monkeys

1/5

Ahh the feeding frenzy that comes from youth culture latching onto something they all like, even if it blows. No tunes, a sound derived from maybe the basest 90s American punk and indie...English music fans/publications were waiting and waiting for an answer to the Strokes, the Libertines went from having potential to tabloid tedium in months, and so the first thing the kids went mental over got celebrated as the next big thing and well, was this it? My britpop fandom died out around the same time the final run of Pulp and Blur albums were released (before hiatuses interrupted, reunion tour cash-ins greenlit). The clubs I went to still had the same folks in 2003 as 2001, but spending every weekend there wasn’t my thing and I was focused on my own thing, which could be exhausting. Yet, I still had it in my head that England, the source of so many of my favourite groups for 20 years or more, was a special place that would inevitably yield forth bands worth celebrating again. The AMs, after the post-punk revival fizzled, were the anointed ones, but from the first note all I could hear was, well, boring. This marked my first generational taste shift and from that point forward, whatever compass I had for syncing up with the tastes of the new was lost to time. Somehow worse than the Manic Street Preachers? Tough to say.

Be

Common

3/5

It’s hard not to hear this as part of Kanye’s greater history. At the time one of the big strikes against Ye was that he couldn’t rap (source: me) and needed better ghostwriters or maybe just a mouthpiece to present his productions, lyrical concerns, etc. Enter Common, fka Common Sense. I always liked Common and felt he was maybe the sole credible link between the Native Tongues crews of the early 90s and where hip hop was going in the 00s. He had a believable left-of-center perspective and actual flow, charisma, etc. Hooking up with post-Blueprint and Dropout Kanye, becoming part of the pre-GOOD Music troupe alongside John Legend, et al, well, it was a nice moment there leading up to MBDTF. “The Food” was so great I made an mp3 from the Chappelle Show live performance a year before, which is more or less what they did for Be. It’s a great capsule of time well lost - Kanye the underdog producer backing up Common, Chappelle putting his fist up in a Black Power salute, the Sam Cooke sample, Common and Ye telling somewhat relatable stories of poverty. Today, Common is perhaps better known as a reliable supporting actor and everyone else...

Graceland

Paul Simon

3/5

Probably a good record to contemplate what we think of when we think about solo musicians and authorship. I’m guessing most people hear Paul Simon doing his folky thing with non-Western musicians and just...that’s as far as the thought process goes. Maybe it evokes some sense of wonder or mystery, what’s this maybe the most white guy ever doing here? Or a fish out of water relatability? I’d say, like other singer-songwriter types, Simon has an incredibly approachable, personable voice. There’s nothing virtuosic when you hear him sing. Do we care about the other musicians present beyond their ability to perform? “Oh man did you hear that the Beatles got Billy Preston or Eric Clapton? Those guys can play!” My parents, my mom, weirdly, is a huge fan of James Taylor to the extent she knows the names of his touring band and really celebrates what they do when they play, whereas I’m like “cool, steady gig” for several pro musicians; they are sidemen. I’ve spent the past day instead thinking about authorship. Simon probably wrote the genesis of a few songs here, but he’s squirrelly about it all, no one can say for sure (except for the few folks who could afford to say). He (and Roy Halee) definitely took them to finish, which is no small thing, but who came up with the basics for Call Me Al? Doesn’t seem like it was Paul Simon, guitarist. Graceland’s various riffs and bass runs? Probably not Paul Simon. At least 3 of the songs are definitely works other groups brought up during “jamming with Paul” sessions, be that in South Africa or the States. Entire. Songs. My initial crack at writing about this was to compare it to the loose licence-ship hip hop had/has with samples. Take a song an audience will know well enough to recognize on some level, but not so much that all they can think about is the original work. Rhyme over it well enough and no one cares about the source. Is that what Simon did when he went to Africa and later, to Brazil? Or is this more like what Aretha Franklin (and countless others) did in the 60s, rewriting others’ material (usually by changing the words, maybe a slight emphasis or deemphasis of elements in the music) to fit their own thing? There’s a song she did called Save Me, which was a rewrite of a song her session sax player did a year earlier, which was *itself* a wholesale rewrite of a Them song. Led Zep and the Stones maybe aren’t household names without doing the same over and over. I can’t decide if any of that is wrong per se. I love listening to the song Graceland. It’s deeply moving. Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes - the change to the horn section? It just doesn’t feel right. And much like with Vampire Weekend, at the centre of it we have a white guy, wealthy, privileged beyond comprehension. Maybe at best just a tourist. At worst, something else. But maybe this is how someone discovers this music and nearly 40 years later with music itself cheaper than since recorded or sheet music copyright became a thing, you can spend years only enjoying music by artists from countries you’ll never chance to visit. I want to say it's a sublime miracle of a record. Could be 5 stars. Or 1.

Post Orgasmic Chill

Skunk Anansie

1/5

lol cmon man

Bone Machine

Tom Waits

3/5

Pretty good but one time my ex called him the dancing bears guy and I can never unsee/unhear that. I have some more complicated thoughts on Waits and Af-Am-coded music, but not in the mood for that. Moreover his basis in cloying nostalgic melody is simply never going to work for me. It's fun that some music director working for Fincher was like "come up with the scuzziest, coolest, aggro, MALE music ever for this one Fight Club scene" and immediately thought oh I know, Tom Waits.

Tidal

Fiona Apple

2/5

This is fine, but I found back then and still now (having read subsequent retrospectives) that there’s a kind of kid gloves treatment Apple gets in this early phase. “Can you believe such a sound comes from such a young thing?” Too much of a gimmick, in other words. But, gimmicks get you in the door, and for that, I thank Tidal. In general, there’s a soul/jazz monotone vocal that Apple returns to throughout Tidal, which she abandoned just a few years later. I mean, she was 18 when this was being recorded, kinda tough to level any substantial critiques. Probably 17 when she wrote half the material. The leaps she would make only a few years later far outshine the crutches she relies on here.

Queen Of Denmark

John Grant

1/5

Had to do a double-check to see if this was another entry snuck in by our fearless random site host, but nope, this is in the book. The story behind its creation is interesting enough, as is Grant’s life story, but this is not my thing.

Logical Progression

LTJ Bukem

2/5

Nothing was inevitable about drum and bass, least of all its misnomer of a genre name: there’s a pervasive synth tone throughout a lot of this, not a whole lot of bass. Plenty of drums though, so many sped-up amen breaks. I wish I liked LTJ’s curation and his own treatments more, but there was always something a bit dull to this *outside of clubs*. At the clubs in the mid-late 90s, dnb was a trip and I miss that.

Paul's Boutique

Beastie Boys

3/5

It’s fun, a bit too loose and silly at times, but the celebration of the Dust Bros’ work - while warranted, just at a technical level, jeezus that must’ve been painstaking to do - can’t help but feel a bit overblown compared to subsequent sampledelia, their own included. Not because they aren’t incredible, it’s just all a little goofy. The experience is a little like revisiting old episodes of The Simpsons - you marvel at how overstuffed it all is and...also feel distanced from the humour and references.

Kollaps

Einstürzende Neubauten

1/5

First (and only?) club show I ever played in Germany was opening for some Neubauten acolytes. Entirely found percussion, mic’d up with lavalier mics connected, wires strewn everywhere, total chaos. We were paid an absurd amount (plus a Kiste of bier, very important) and ducked out maybe a song into their set (not very punk rock of us). This was in 1995, so the idea of nontrad percussion and industrial melodic sensibilities was on the wane, but still maybe presented an idea of what the future could look like for live music. Ha, sure thing kid. Despite having more than an average familiarity with German, I never spent much time with Neubaten. Their logo seemed like a badge for badasses and I figured I would have my time with them at some point, but it never came to pass. Einfach zu hässlich für mich.

Future Days

Can

2/5

I’ve always been resistant to Can’s charms. Some of Vitamin C and Tago Mago do the trick, but largely reminds me of being in jam sessions that never quite hit for me. Apparently folks love this one though and while Moonshake is my thing, as a whole...sigh.

I Should Coco

Supergrass

2/5

A britpop DJ friend recommended this to me as she knew I was an indie rock fan with punk roots. The thinking was, I imagine, lots of hooks, even more energy, not afraid to rock the fuck out, still British. But hoo boy, even when I was 21, this was a bit of a tough sell, just too much of a sugar rush.

New York Dolls

3/5

One of those records I wish I’d had earlier. Finally came across it sometime in the 10s and was like maaaan where was this when I was younger, this kills! And David was from Staten, so it’s entirely possible he was kicking around the ferry terminal freaking my parents out in the early 70s, perfect.

Kimono My House

Sparks

1/5

Nope

Lust For Life

Iggy Pop

3/5

Very briefly my favourite album when I was maybe 15? Had no idea who Iggy was nor Bowie’s involvement. All I knew was the dj at the Batschkapp in Frankfurt, Germany, played The Passenger every Friday and that was my jam. That’s basically where I’m still at with Lust for Life: I dig the title track and am aware there are other songs, but The Passenger stands well above the rest. I am told it was in a commercial.

Green

R.E.M.

4/5

Not my first REM record - that was Document thanks to the ubiquity of The One I Love on the radio in 1987 - but probably the first one that left a real imprint on me. Stand was *everywhere* so much so I still can’t, uh, stand it, but looking back on the video and general vibes of late 80s/early 90s REM, what happened to that world? It was a little queer, a little multi-racial, obviously very white guy-centric, but the general spirit was inviting and fun, not cool, etc. Green’s an odd record and one they somewhat replicated with Out of Time. You have standout, accessible radio-ready songs - it’s right there in the lead-off track’s title - and then mixed in a set of acoustic/mandolin-forward cuts that are, well, pretty dark! It didn’t seem like it at the time, but after they narrowed in on World Leader Pretend and Hairshirt’s baroque, morose sound, a lot of Green seems like a bridge or transition record. And yet this was very much the Big Major Label Rock Record. You could not escape these guys throughout 1989.

Apocalypse 91… The Enemy Strikes Black

Public Enemy

3/5

The last PE record I cared about, which is probably how most folks experienced it (despite the single from He Got Game being swell and all). The two singles, Arizona, and Lost at Birth still stand out above the rest, but the general sense I took from it at the time and today is...man between Chuck’s voice and the Bomb Squad (peace be upon them) and coming so quickly after Fear of a Black Planet, the sound of PE was overwhelming. Fatiguing. I know they don’t do “light” very well and it’s silly expecting that from them, but I could see myself running for Summertime. Can’t Truss It and Shut Em Down are great case studies: perfect grooves, hooks, beats...and both 5 minutes loooooooong. The record as a whole, especially minus the Anthrax crossover, is well short of the run time of Fear, but damn.

Ctrl

SZA

2/5

I was following the TDE crew pretty closely leading up to this and remember hearing Prom and felt like another Channel Orange might be upon us and then...well...[insert Principal Skinner meme] It’s fine, but I’m about as pulled into this as some of the random late 60s English folk and psychedelia. Just not for me. Judging by its success and her later feature on Luther - which is also...OK? - clearly, I am in the wrong here.

In Utero

Nirvana

4/5

Cannot stress enough how much I was not a Nirvana fan back in the day. More of a hey good for those like-minded guys but holy shit, calm down everyone can’t you see this guy legit needs help? I wasn’t clued in to Bleach, but preferred Trompe le Monde of the albums that came out when Nevermind hit. The whole rollout felt very how do you do fellow kids, which I know they fought against, etc, but still it was like, if you were into alternative, then you had to be a Nirvana fan and the whole thing about being into alternative is not liking being told what to like! Especially as a 14 year-old. I got Nevermind at xmas along with a bunch of Cure and Smiths CDs, which were much more my thing, so Something in the Way fit and the rest...were great, duh, but not my exact deal at the time. Anyhow, In Utero rolled around. In the interim we all got to know too much about Kurt and co and for his health I wish he’d just retired to his house for a decade after getting help, maybe become a Bob Pollard type and just record nonstop and surface in 2003 with a batch of unreleased stuff while Grohl went out and became a Rock Star. But instead, gotta keep the show going... All I could hear when I first played In Utero was someone expressing their deep pain and that just wasn’t something I felt comfortable supporting? Took me maybe 15 years until I could hear it was still 3 guys having a ball making some very incisive rock music. Alongside the whole pain thing. The cynic in me thought Kurt was at times trying too hard to sound like Jesus Lizard and Melvins, but even the clearest attempt at that - Milk It - is still blessed with whatever it is KC had and brought to the world.

Shaft

Isaac Hayes

3/5

I don’t know what all there is to be said about a movie soundtrack. Of course Shaft has become more than that, a shorthand for cool or an ironic, satirical nod to bravado. Really love Black Moses.

Inspiration Information

Shuggie Otis

2/5

Huh, for as influential a record as this is not much is hitting for me. It's impressive being a one-man band and all and his virtuosity (instrumental, less so vocally) is admirable but a lot of musicians are admirable. Have to revisit.

Buffalo Springfield Again

Buffalo Springfield

2/5

I’m a fan of the multiple songwriter bands - Beatles, Sloan, Sebadoh, The NPs - who seem content to combine efforts and create something distinct they would be unable to do solo. Sure, there’s some papering over just who plays what (or plays at all) in those groups, and the individual songs are often “band” efforts all in name only. But, there’s enough participation and give-and-take from the others that the final songs are group efforts. This doesn’t always feel to be the case with Again, most obviously in Neil Young’s flown-in solo production Expecting to Fly. But elsewhere, even when a song sounds ill-fitting alongside the other material - most of Furay’s contributions - the record shows that everyone showed up to the studio. Mostly though, this plays like what it is: a collection of 21-22 year-olds quickly writing and recording material after the success of a smash hit. It’s fine, but largely forgettable.

This Is Fats Domino

Fats Domino

3/5

Love his voice, most of the material is a bit too repetitive for me.

MTV Unplugged In New York

Nirvana

4/5

My primary recollection of Nirvana as a live act was, well, they were kind of half-assed. Not bad, just usually in a rush to get the fuck out of there and/or destroy instruments. Kurt would opt for a just in-tune enough guitar, like he had just added new strings - so, lots of twang and rattle - none of Vig’s compression and smoothed-out distortion. Dave, as ever, was locked-in and Krist kept pace, but rarely stood out in the mix. The idea of them doing an all-acoustic set seemed like a poor fit - rockin’ drummer, muted bassist, haphazard rhythm guitarist - and by 1993-94 the MTV Unplugged show had taken on, if not a sophisticated posture, something very rehearsed, despite its appeal as a stripped-down, humanizing venue. Nirvana shied away from neither, delivering something almost ornate, but also very raw, putting Kurt’s voice front and center. At the time it felt like a crude cash-in so soon after Kurt’s death and I had no interest in listening to nor supporting it, but over the years a few of the covers made their way through and - especially the Lead Belly - really showed the power in Kurt’s singing. Likewise shifting song keys to make his voice strain even more was a good trick and hopefully demonstrates that this was not a diary entry, but a performance. It may sound like the former, but he was very much in control of this aspect of his life. Speaking of, as this is the last we’d ever hear from Kurt, it’ll always be hard not to play a guessing game of where he’d have gone based on this document. There are many hypotheticals one can draw up: band splits, he does solo work with Rick Rubin going further into the spareness of Unplugged, etc. The rest of the 90s were a total grab bag of trends and permutations of grunge (divided equally between the classic rock and angst-ridden branches), so imagining Kurt coming and going throughout the next 6 years with the likes of swing music, ska, electronica, Radiohead, pop punk, one hit wonder alt rock bands like Third Eye Blind, Everclear, Lit, and Sugar Ray, the rise of nu-metal, and the splintering of hip hop...well, it’s an awfully weird fit. It’s no wonder that in the depths of that I was always happy to see Everlong or My Hero pop up on MTV. Dave and the Foos didn’t make it into the next decade and beyond as something to keep checking out, but at least in 1998 it was always a relief to have that mix of not half bad rock and a goofy sense of humour. He could never carry Kurt’s legacy on and didn’t want to, but at the very least his quirky, generous spirit could still be felt whenever Grohl popped up.

Maverick A Strike

Finley Quaye

1/5

Initially I thought this was another random admin fav, but nope, it’s right there in the original book. I could see myself having liked a few of these had I heard them back in 97 and mostly being indifferent to the rest. Maybe I would’ve thought it bought me some cred for being into a reggae-influenced soul singer from Scotland? Maybe I’m hoping for too much from music sometimes.

Station To Station

David Bowie

3/5

Still have the same reaction this as whenever I first heard it years ago: incredible title track and then nothing really grabs me. I guess I can hear the roots of a War/Killing Joke/LCD Soundsystem riff in there on Stay, but that might just be coincidence.

Get Rich Or Die Tryin'

50 Cent

3/5

There was a spell there starting in the mid-1990s when rap kinda fell out of mainstream/alt-rock favour unless you were Wu Tang, the Beasties, or one of the more glamorous and successful stars like Biggie, Pac, and whatever Puffy was up to. Later in the decade Jay-Z and Eminem showed up, for better or worse, but Missy Elliott and Outkast aside, there wasn’t a whole lot happening that you’d see on MTV or hear on the radio and the music journalism coverage shifted sharply to underground hip-hop, backpack, things that didn’t have a gangsta or glam-hop vibe but also went way long on word count and a kind of atonal/nasal vocal style that grated. With indie rock breaking through a bit to mainstream audiences in 2001-03 with the NY bands and more or less putting a halt to all progress in that arena be it fashion or song craft, having a rap artist come seemingly out of nowhere who wasn’t simultaneously flirting with rock audience acceptance felt like a throwback or something novel. People were as excited about or even relieved to be putting In da Club on repeat as they had early leaks of Is This It. It really felt like a grand exhale having rap back in the mix again. What to ultimately make of Curtis Jackson and his lucky to be alive story? Kind of a big shrug. Was he just a right place right time guy Dre and Em put in place and moved on?

Maggot Brain

Funkadelic

2/5

Eddie Hazel should probably be more celebrated. And I only say probably because I don’t do it enough. Effortless tone, pierces through the mix without being awkward, just gets it all right. There’s a bit too much Hendrix worship going on, but I mean, sure. My main gripe with Funkadelic is they sound like a terrific time live, but it isn’t until Parliament that there are a lot of memorable tunes (maybe more memorable for the samples, tough to say).

Nowhere

Ride

5/5

Hey a shoegaze record and maybe the first album in this random generator after Surfer Rosa that was and still is a big deal to me. A funny story about Nowhere is that in high school for a good year, maybe longer, I thought this was a Morrissey album, specifically part of Bona Drag. A friend of mine’s brother had made a tape of the latter, which somehow ended up in my tapedeck. I enjoyed it well enough, but was REALLY into the songs on the second side that had a much rougher, melodic edge to them. Specifically Taste, Vapour Trail, and Here and Now. Seriously, for quite a while I thought these were Moz songs so much so I went and bought the CD of Bona Drag only to find the songs were missing. So I thought maybe it was Kill Uncle? Nope. As is clear now, John, my friend’s brother, had reused a tape of Nowhere and recorded over it with Bona Drag, a bit of a travesty, but even though I’d already had Going Blank Again for years at that point, I may not have come to these songs so easily. Later in the 90s Nowhere was one of those CDs/tapes I took with me wherever I moved to next. I have a clear of a multiday hiking trip through Alsace-Lorraine, coming down the hills above Colmar through a series of vineyards with Nowhere fixed to my ears on my Walkman. If the band had ever taken off enough that I’d have money for a private studio, I considered rerecording the album in its entirety. I don’t listen to it as much these days, but what strikes me the most now is just how young they were when they bashed these out. The lyrics aren’t the greatest, but those are always secondary in this genre, deservedly taking a backseat to melody, noise, and the beat.

One Nation Under A Groove

Funkadelic

3/5

Feel like this is the Funkadelic record I would’ve liked had I had easier access to it back in the day (1990s). More melody and hooks, but still the same basic set-up. Still can’t shake the sense I’m listening to other people having a good time instead of it transporting me, but I get the sense that’s on me.

Daydream Nation

Sonic Youth

2/5

In something of a huge bit of heresy, this is not my favourite Sonic Youth album and in fact, I find it a bit of a chore pretty much right after Teen Age Riot concludes. I’ve had phases where this and Sister fight it out for top SY but those days are well in the past now. I admire what these happy go lucky kids accomplished in this era, but I very much prefer the later O’Rourke period that kicks off with my actual favourite Sonic Youth album, Murray St. (Goo is a close second and tomorrow will be my fav, etc). In general I have a like/disinterest relationship with SY and as my tastes largely seem to be consolidating around songs with less fat, well, the shorter, concise focus or calculated, rehearsed sprawl of the later years suits me better. I could go on at length about how boring they were live in their ostensible heyday but that would also be dull.

Marquee Moon

Television

3/5

Haha, I just wrote a thing about being a bit bored by an album that stretches and stretches instead of narrowing its focus as the group would do later in their career and what do I get next (actually this could be a series that started off with a Funkadelic album, also no stranger to long run times) but fucking Marquee Moon. The challenge for me and Television is that they were sold as one of the CBGBs bands: Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads, all bands indebted to punk in one way or another, with its stripped-down, back-to-basics formulas. Instead of 3 chords and cut the shit at 2:30, we get magisterial guitar epics clocking in at over 10 minutes. Guitar work that could be confused with the Allman Brothers or Skynyrd. Choruses that scan as fairly rote 70s rock, if sung with a distinctly different voice. Everyone should have a good connection with the title track at some point or another, maybe give their other albums a listen.

Odelay

Beck

5/5

A masterpiece or something of a blip? For a few years there it sure felt like the former, but I’m not sure how kind time has been to it. To some extent that is Beck’s fault, revealing he has a few default modes - white boy leftfield hiphop, sad sack, pop star, sometimes all at once - which he has returned to over the years, although never quite recapturing the “whatever works” melange on Odelay. Beck’s succeeded in large part because of taste: his and wherever the public is. He applies this taste via a classic pop/rock formula: take this one genre and pair it with an unrelated one and see what happens. Odelay is maybe his most singular statement in this regard, thanks in large part to the Dust Brothers’ sampledelia, but the ethos is present throughout a number (all?) of the songs here: just about every one is up-tempo, light, catchy, etc and the lyrics are about abandoning the past, leaving people, the world not measuring up to a standard, etc. Maybe calling this record Mutations would’ve been too on the nose, but change and transition is all over the place. I can’t quite make sense of whether the sampling/genre mix and match scans as metaphor or if this was just in the ether in the 90s from Tarantino to the Dust Bros to Wu-Tang to Pavement. Reusing old, “dead” art to create something new and have a rebirth, that functions as part of the mutations metaphor. Odelay’s one of the few CDs I had with me wherever I went in the second half of the 90s. You could just sense that this was about as airtight and uncompromising a statement as Beck could make. Some of it feels a little dated in its white boy rap schtick but it’s a classic.

Songs From The Big Chair

Tears For Fears

5/5

Maybe my favourite album of the 80s

Bongo Rock

Incredible Bongo Band

2/5

Interesting listen to see where the breaks are, but otherwise something of a curio. The story behind Winer, however, is a far more interesting slice of random west coast career paths.

The Next Day

David Bowie

3/5

Easily the first new Bowie album I cared about maybe ever? I was aware of his 90s attempts at either leading or glomming onto a sense of the zeitgeist. Those all felt very presumptuous at the time and largely have not held up, if they ever stood in the first place the main exceptions being Black Tie White Noise and the NIN collab. Most of the 90s felt like Bowie butting his head in, not unlike the Buscemi meme. The Next Day, conversely, felt like it was flown in from some secret Bowie lab (not too far from the truth!), but had very little if anything to do with the contemporary music landscape of 2013. A la the Berlin years, I got the sense that The Next Day and Blackstar came from periods of pure creation, just following some muse or another. It’s a little dense and tough to get your head around at points, but I’ll take Bowie randomly popping up with whatever’s been on his mind than some attempt at a late period reinvention to define the culture.

The Dark Side Of The Moon

Pink Floyd

4/5

Another heavy hitter here this week and maybe the best album of all time? Hard not to come to this anytime after, say, 1980-and-something and find it incredibly overrated, dated, a bit cheesy, etc. My path to it featured the usual late Gen X hurdles: more into punk and hardcore so allergic to this shit, ever present musos insisting this is the greatest album ever made so why bother trying to top it, and my own personal history where I was in a German play and the director - a huge Floyd fan - set a Brecht/Weil scene to (instead of a Weil composition!!!)...Money. Rehearsing that scene over and over and over to get the blocking right has left me a bit knee-jerk cringe to every second of that song from the cash register sounds to the bass line to the off kilter timing. It’s probably a great song, I’ll never know. That aside, this became one of my favourite albums much later in life, but maybe appropriately given the thematic/lyrical content. I can probably skip On the Run and Money forever and have a splendid just over a half hour listening experience. It wasn’t the motivation to try becoming a big time Floyd head - that was The Wall when I was 13 or so - but I’m pretty sure they never got it this right again, despite protestations from the Floyd faithful. I’d go so far as to say trying to elevate Wish You Were Here or the later albums does DSotM a disservice, it’s simply that much better than anything else they ever did let alone any other album ever made.

Imagine

John Lennon

3/5

What an odd collection. In some respects, it feels a bit skin deep, the exposing of every last little thing that was happening in Lennon’s private and public life at the time. But, like most great art, it’s finding universality from personal stories that elevates most of these songs (oh and having some of the best musicianship of the 20th century at your disposal). It’ll always be a bit tough for me, a fan who just wants to see a band get along in some impossible ideal of sharing/creation/performance, watching the Beatles hash it out over several records in the early 1970s. I can’t imagine how petty that must’ve looked at the time - not as ridiculous as the Gallagher brothers but not far from it. Pusha subtweeting or outright (reasonably) hating on Kanye, etc. But today and when I first heard How Do You Sleep? I just find it so cheap and it will always be lingering in the back of my subconscious every New Year’s Eve when they fire up Imagine as some sort of world-uniting song of peace from the guy who (at least on paper) was as vicious as they come. And that spineless sap George throwing in. I’m not even that big a Paul fan but if the stories are even half true, he was carrying a junkie and a malcontent (and also Ringo) for several years there after the 1-2 of Rubber Soul and Revolver. Meanwhile in John and Yoko land there’s Oh Yoko! one of the best slices of love ever committed to music. And then the flip of that elsewhere with John meditating on his jealous streak, something I definitely related to at one point. The rest of the album, like a lot of Lennon solo work, is unfortunately full of filler, from Crippled Inside and It’s So Hard’s rote blues band backing his acidic commentary to an interesting, but mostly half-assed John the society crier man back burner I Don’t Wanna Be a Soldier Mama and Gimme Some Truth. Right on man.

Cheap Thrills

Big Brother & The Holding Company

2/5

I’m extremely allergic to Janis and the rest of this side of the psychedelia/hippie spectrum. I can’t stand this shit. But, it’s an interesting record for its conceit: the fake live album. Evidently this was the product of failed attempts at capturing their live set - as with most crap like this, that becomes a celebrated part of the legend, they were SO GOOD LIVE but...problems arose... - so instead they recorded in a studio and tried to make it sound like a live document of an incredible live act. And that aspect of this otherwise long-playing stack of garbage is recreated profoundly well. Not a second of what I heard of this could be confused for being a studio recording (which does in fact beg the question, why not just cut a record like a 1000000 other bands before and since?).

Court And Spark

Joni Mitchell

3/5

Channel Orange

Frank Ocean

3/5

I’ve been doing some music archiving the past week and was struck by how much the 2011-12 set still hit. Hard not to notice the presence of Frank Ocean and the rest of the Odd Future folks back then. I’m in the minority here, but he’s never topped Pyramids or Lost and Thinkin Bout You.

Machine Head

Deep Purple

2/5

I wrote in a review of their first album that there’s a kind of goody absurdity that enters hard rock the more “hard” it became in 1970 and Machine Head sees no sign of that letting up. Big signature single aside, this one’s more of the same 12-bar format and outsized vocal delivery, but the whole package comes together in Space Truckin’ a barely serious ode to space trucking.

Vivid

Living Colour

2/5

Hearing Cult of Personality for the first time in 1988 was such an incredible breath of fresh air, I still can hear Reid’s riff as something like “the future”. Alas, the bulk of Vivid never did much for me then and still does not today. CoP lyrically is a bit of a mess, but my sense is they had something hot with that riff and worked the song into shape super fast to get it out, so its political valence might not be as profound as the music makes it sound.

Synchronicity

The Police

3/5

Being in a band is tough enough already, but being in a band with an insufferable narcissist - who is also really, really, really good at what he does - must’ve been incredibly difficult. No wonder Copeland and Sumner came to blows. Anyhow, Synchronicity is an odd duck of a record, famously so. The first side/half is mostly dreck, including the paint by numbers Sting compositions that lead it off. Whereas the second side is possibly the finest hour of any band. Wrapped and Breath are 2 of the songs I most associate with the first things I can remember ever hearing (thanks MTV) back in 1983. I can still see the room where I was, feeling weirdly frightened by both videos, but also kinda into this music thing. Minus Synchronicity II, the first side is abysmal, total 1. Second side? Maybe a 4 or a 5. The book on Synchronicity is that this is when Sting decided it was time to be Sting, solo artist, which is understandable, but he never topped the second side run. His solo career has its moments, but it’s largely background soft rock, playing to an audience perhaps more infatuated with Sting the heartthrob rock star who is also an intellectual or vice versa. What would Copeland and Summers do with the jazz/world music-leanings of solo Sting? They’re both incredibly accomplished, maybe even more so, but probably not as cheap. Would Sting have written material more in line with the Police hits instead of gravitating to adult contemporary? Dude could write a perfect pop song and has several in his Police catalog, but once freed from having to make compromises...

Buena Vista Social Club

4/5

Oddly my deepest memories of this album are associated with spring and summer time in southern Germany. Perhaps not so odd, as the documentary film was created by Wim Wenders. Boy was it ever a hit there, you couldn’t have a bbq or garden party without this on the boombox. Which fits, not all music is best suited for all spaces, and yet, I can never grok if this goes misunderstood (the lyrics, the musical references) or if the general understanding is that this is a kind of nostalgia for a specific, lost period of time in Cuban history, but that these (mostly) men got their day in the sun late in life and isn’t that great and also isn’t this so pleasing to listen to? The politics of this are maybe complicated: the era being celebrated is Batista and the imperial power of the USA, but the specific music BSC played was largely an afro-cuban concern and while part of the melange of Havana Nights in the 40s and 50s, was segregated. The communists didn’t outright condemn their clubs, but also did little to assist their continuance and with the arrival of newer music forms, the son music fell out of favour. That the film (at least) is all occurring through the lens of Ry Cooder and his creative partner Wenders has always sat a little awkwardly with me, particularly the addition of Cooder’s slide guitar and his son playing percussion (I guess well enough?), but hey, it worked to bring this collection to the world and that’s what we’re ultimately interested in here right? If the dynamics were changed it’d be like if some rich African fond of white American rock music discovered the GBV catalog or something “wow another hit eh?” Anyhow, I’ll always enjoy listening to this right up until I lose interest - the repetition inherent to a lot of Afro-Cuban music (or traditional Irish folk song) runs up against my western pop ears’ yearning for a change.

Scum

Napalm Death

2/5

What if the drummer was the band? Well...

There's A Riot Goin' On

Sly & The Family Stone

3/5

Seems like Sly could be a tough hang at the time and what he surfaced wasn’t always an easy listen, but then there are the gems that only he could do.

The Gershwin Songbook

Ella Fitzgerald

1/5

Honestly not my thing

...Baby One More Time

Britney Spears

1/5

I was around for the rollout of this as an early 20-something indie/hardcore dude and it felt so thoroughly shoehorned-in. Spice Girls and Backstreet was the same vibe: "electronica," trip hop, and myriad one-hit wonders were on the come-up and then all of the sudden, manufactured pop groups? The sense I got was the industry had no clue what to do with (broadly defined) rock and hip hop and just reverted back to a prior formula. So hackneyed and in Britney's case, not a little queasy-making. It's wild reading reviews here where folks claim this ushered in an era for girl pop singers and I'm like, Debbie Gibson? Tiffany? Janet? Madge herself? The music itself mostly ticked off a lot of boxes that made it an easy fit for pop radio, especially the europop blend of the late 90s: just enough (but not too much) hip hop and past sell-by-date r&b flourishes with a white girl up front. Very safe. And apparently the stuff of worldwide success.

Fear Of A Black Planet

Public Enemy

4/5

Maybe the first album I was actually waiting for? And then somewhat disappointed by. That’s the way the ball bounces G! To this day, “Contract on the World Love Jam” through “Terrordome” is unimpeachable. And then...well, it’s not bad, but it all pales next to “Fight The Power.” Which I was already a fan of, from the Do The Right Thing soundtrack (one of my first CDs!). I even got the tape of that antisemitic dipshit Professor Griff in the weeks before Black Planet came out. I was all in. “Terrordome’s” dense sound design is still as incredible to me as a My Bloody Valentine record or one of the Very Expensive Studio Productions by Depeche Mode, etc. The Bomb Squad here was an assault, an all-encompassing, overwhelming sound, especially compared to the more spare Nation of Millions or Bum Rush. There’s so much in there! Meanwhile Chuck D never lets up, surpassed only by Andre and Big Boi on B.O.B. Alas, after that, I get the sense they were spread a little thin between working on other albums, touring, the usual record business ridiculousness. The truism about how you have your whole life to make your first record and then a few months for your second doesn’t just apply to every rock band that comes along. In this instance, it falls on PE’s third outing. They still had enough going to put out 2 more singles on Apocalypse, but the light was just about out by then. The title track and thus the album title has some ideas about ethnicity/genealogy that surely made only a little bit of sense to my dumb ass in 1990 but, as with a lot of PE tracks, the scope is limited to that basic matter of biology. Today, I’d love to hear its critique/observations extend to cultural appropriation, multiculturalism, diversity concerns, but it’s fairly pat. The very next song is, one would think, a necessary part of the future black planet, two Black men’s appreciation of Black women. Of course, this being PE and the Bomb Squad, well, it’s more like reading a Marxist’s chapter on relationships in a book about constructing the ideal society. Not quite a love jam. And then a Flavor track, that...I can’t parse if it’s entirely autobiographical or Flav sending up some better off man bitching about having to loan a few dollars to hangers-on. Or both. Coming right after a song for the sisters, it’s curious. “Fight the Power” has lost not one bit of its power. Just a pure piece of agitprop. And thanks to James Brown, is still danceable and immediately gets your attention. You don’t have this on in the background just kinda passing the time and not notice it. Chuck’s even aware of this in one of the verses: As the rhythm designed to bounce What counts is that the rhymes Designed to fill your mind It felt like something important even to me in (the fall of) 1989 and getting to see Do the Right Thing in the theatres only drove that home. So, they may’ve peaked with this and Terrordome, but damn, those are some incredible peaks.

Live At Leeds

The Who

4/5

It's a little weird hearing the show grind to a halt for Daltrey to introduce a song. My sense of a Who concert is bombast, not a lot of dynamics, just big and loud and long. It's something of a marvel that this essential quality of a concert never really existed prior to this decade. Sure, early rock n roll, big bands, opera, jazz, orchestras, Greek oration, the Homeric tradition, humans have been watching humans perform music since before historical record, but 3 instrumentalist and 1 dude swinging a microphone, all amplified, basically doing a "lower" art form...that never happened before. Is this the best version of it? Seems that way.

Dear Science

TV On The Radio

3/5

TVOTR’s first 2 LPs didn’t really do that much for me aside from a few incredible standout points (Wolf, Lover, Wrong Way). Basically I just kept returning to Young Liars, the only thing I’ve ever enjoyed front-to-back by Adebimpe and Sitek. So, it was with some surprise that Dear Science was one of my favourite albums of 2008, ever present in the disc changer/iPod. I’m not sure it has stood up well over time, but the highlights for me - Crying, Golden Age, DLZ - still grab me. Whatever they had here didn’t extend to subsequent efforts, but this pop-tilt really suited them well.

3 Feet High and Rising

De La Soul

3/5

Ahh the hip hop skit. Apparently it worked for people! My guess is the extended length afforded by the CD and increasing the number of songwriting credits per album did a lot of the heavy lifting there. But, it fits in with Prince Paul’s whole sensibility even if I still find myself skipping ahead. What to make of early De La? They were always just a little too cartoonish and childish for me to enjoy back whenever, which is too bad. I blame the Beasties’ image joking around as a way of life for this to some extent but also trying to reconcile “serious music” like PE and NWA with the adolescent focuses of these 3 (4) goofs. Their flow’s always comfortable and easygoing, the samples criminally good and catchy, the lyrics always relatable and clever, but yooooo the skits can fuck off.

Superunknown

Soundgarden

2/5

As much as I was comfortable with the Seattle Sound, I always found myself hesitant to embrace Soundgarden. I liked the singles from Badmotorfinger and some of Temple, but the general sense I had - not dissimilar from AiC and early PJ - was that this was a hard rock band that would be just as happy touring with hair metal trash as Jane’s, but not the Cure or other alternative music standard-bearers. I just couldn’t decide which guise Chris and co ultimately were and with the time having passed, so much of their riffs and general vibe was adopted and crept into the nu-metal and later wave grunge rock of far lesser bands. Even in high school, the dudes who were way into guitar histrionics worshipped Soundgarden and kinda shrugged at punk or post-hardcore. Not in a dismissive sense, but more...Soundgarden were the natural inheritors of Zeppelin and were pushing things forward in their way, whereas punk was off doing its own thing. Which maybe came together later as stoner rock, depending on how you trace the lineage, in large part thanks to Cornell and esp. Thayil’s guitar work. Anyhow, like every Soundgarden album I find Superunknown incredibly overlong and redundant. Fell on Black Days is an all timer, but I prefer Rusty Cage, Jesus Christ Pose, Pretty Noose, Blow Up the Outside, Outshined, Birth Ritual, etc. That’s my sweet spot, but I can listen to Limo Wreck for its guitar tones and be pretty happy, but the sense I come away with is one more of admiration than love. Whereas around the same time this was released I was head over heels for Siamese Dream (but also Helmet...). The narcissism of small differences I suppose.

Honky Tonk Masquerade

Joe Ely

3/5

Always interesting to see which country artist gets in with Music Row and who stays on the outside looking in (with some deliberately positioning themselves there). Anytime someone records in Murfreesboro or really anywhere outside Davidson County, my eyebrows raise a touch. And in the case of Ely, a West Texan, I was a bit quizzical but quickly charmed. The combined sound of the steel guitar and accordion immediately took me back to my summers in south-central Texas (although that usually had a Tejano or German tilt). It’s a personally pleasing sound but at the time of this recording it was, if not quite a throwback, a declaration that this is not Music Row country music. Which I can respect. Moreover, there’s a guitar or synthesizer (moog?) lead at one point that would not have been out of place on a Wire or Eno-helmed record and probably makes about as much sense as that sounds hanging around a bunch of fellas from Lubbock and Austin. Evidently this was a much celebrated record by Joe Strummer and co., so much so they toured together and Ely ended up doing backing vocals on Combat Rock, which leads me to suspect its inclusion here is less a celebration of late-1970s country rock and more because they were, somehow or another, down with The Clash.

xx

The xx

2/5

One of the first records I can remember understanding completely what they were doing and feeling like I was too old for their deal and their audience. I like a lot of Jamie XX’s solo club records and whatnot but I have rarely vibed to Romy and Oliver’s close mic emoting.

Germfree Adolescents

X-Ray Spex

2/5

UK punk has always been a tough sell for me. Once they learned to play their instruments and - if they hadn’t already broken up - write slightly different songs, that keeps my attention. But the appeal of Spex, the Pistols, Sham, etc...just not my deal.

Frank

Amy Winehouse

2/5

The persistence of r&b as a pop or rock platform is something that hasn’t made a lot of sense to me. It’s often if not always a showcase for nearly perfect musicianship and performances. And it’s nearly always a nostalgia exercise: outstanding vocalist (male or female), backing instrumentation that is updated just enough to be “modern”, but the basics of the songs are still the same basics. On the more rock side of the r&b spectrum you have the Black Keys/Jack White and the endless iterations of this - I just heard a recent Goo Goo Dolls - a GOO GOO DOLLS SONG - that was working this angle. Frank is all believable, impeccably executed, that’s not my issue, it just feels like a limited space for Winehouse, one that she was only starting to break out of on her worldwide phenom follow-up (but still kept within the cookie cutter confines of “soul singer”). Reading up on the history of its production, it was so deliberate in its creation and management of the artist so much so Winehouse was kept a secret. This is not the product of Winehouse coming up with a set of songs on her own and committing them to acetate, but instead a lengthy, laborious bit of music factory work, the end goal putting plastic discs in the homes of as many customers as possible.

Let's Get Killed

David Holmes

1/5

Well what sort of UK specific bullshit is it this time? Ahh, the Ocean’s soundtrack guy. I remember this sound feeling played out by 1994 after US3 had their moment, even more so once Soderbergh set scenes to his work. It’s not bad, his technical skills and sourcing are impressive, but the end result is, well, hotel lobby music.

Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea

PJ Harvey

3/5

This is a perfectly OK album, but feels like an attempt at something radio-friendly or even late 90s adult-contempo by PJ. The gloss isn’t unwelcome nor ill-fitting (as was part of the critique at its release, which I didn’t share), but that she never returned to something in this guise makes it feel like a dalliance. It *was* financially successful and she could’ve continued mining this format, but works like Let England Shake or the preceding Is This Desire? show an artist with much more complex aesthetic concerns. She tried this one on, it more or less worked, and she moved on.

Water From An Ancient Well

Abdullah Ibrahim

3/5

There’s a gentle, easygoing quality to this that is quite lovely, but also not terribly profound? Basing this on the handful of tracks I could find.

Moss Side Story

Barry Adamson

2/5

Ahh one of those soundtrack to an imaginary film deals. This one from a bass player no less! But an important (to some) bass player, as he backed up Devoto in Magazine a band that is forever in my blind spot.

Speakerboxxx/The Love Below

OutKast

2/5

I think I made it through one entire listen of both in 2003. There's material here for less than one album, but the hits are phenomenal. Sloan tried a comparable album - Commonwealth - and it largely works the same. You just need everyone contributing to each track, even if it's just a guitar part or backing vocal, otherwise the spark you have come to associate with the band/duo is missing.

They Were Wrong, So We Drowned

Liars

3/5

I stopped going to Liars shows around 2007 or so - still loved the records through Mess - but the audience yelling out WE’RE DOOMED! WE’RE DOOMED! was always a highlight. My contempt for folks who call this “pretentious” is undefeated. So what if you don’t like something? I hate a lot of stuff and try to suss out why that is the case without relying on that silly bro intellectual shorthand.

Definitely Maybe

Oasis

2/5

Funny what time can do. When I first heard Live Forever the summer of 1994, Oasis seemed like a bunch of shy, maybe even politely charming sorts. Their album was called *definitely maybe*, hardly the stuff that would launch an entire lad identity. Obviously, the roots were there - Cigarettes & Alcohol, Rock ’n’ Roll Star - but even those could seem wryly aspirational and ironic with the sound itself rooted in the atmosphere of late 80s/early 90s British rock - baggy, shoegaze, various alternative rock iterations, but not glam or metal or anything that would necessarily call attention to being party music. Noel pulled a couple singles together here and padded the album out with a bunch of filler, something that would later become a default. The lesser songs are simply that, some so underbaked they lifted a Coke jingle for the vocal melody. I mean, that’s just embarrassing. Live Forever does just that and despite whatever the Gallaghers eventually became, I’ll always kinda pull for potato and co.

Hail To the Thief

Radiohead

2/5

Maybe my least favourite post-Pablo Honey album (depending on the day; it’s in competition with Limbs and AMSP). Now it’s even harder to stomach. As recently as the fall of 2024, 2+2=5 was in my head as the soundtrack for American collapse. And then Yorke’s real personality - always present and hinted at in the music, both in Radiohead and solo - became unavoidably public. It’s a tough pill to swallow, seeing someone you trusted, celebrated, defended, etc turn out to be just another asshole. Bands, artists, etc do take on a particular responsibility when their artwork concerns social strife, actual political issues - you are playing with a kind of power and hold over people. The run from OKC to HTTT saw Radiohead specifically courting and aligning themselves with leftist political concerns and branding, introducing ideas from Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, culminating in an album title critical of the western allies - primarily the USA and UK - Iraq invasion. On the tour they leaned into this, playing No Surprises with its “bring down the government, they don’t speak for us” lyrics particular resonant amongst left-leaning Americans and others. There was no mystery about the object of their ire and political alignment: Bush and Blair. The album itself? Not that great unfortunately. Was the Bush and Blair criticism just a handy sales line to hang around a jumbled mess of More Radiohead? I could never tell at the time and today it just plays like a failure. It felt like a series of attempts at moving on from the dissonant, alienating music of Kid A and Amnesiac (which reflected thematic content, that’s not a knock) and incorporating what they had achieved earlier as a rock band and their subsequent “experimental” electronic music group revelations. But, there was no there, there. Whatever spark Yorke and Greenwood had was lost or whatever material was left around from 1997-2000 just could not live up to the expectations of fans who had seen these one hit wonders blossom into The Best Band in the World from the Bends through Amnesiac. Instead it’s an angry, angsty set of songs, somehow more dour and dark than Pyramid Song, but just not as interesting. This is the sound of a very talented band stuck in a rut. Fortunately, they moved on, recalibrating for their follow-up, taking their time to get it right and rediscovering the melodic spark. Alas, that same righteous contempt they once had for power is nowhere to be found when it concerns Israel’s war against the Palestinians. Then, it’s a mealy-mouthed two sides story, having to defend JG and his wife either directly or via obfuscation. There is no room for Free Palestine on their stage, a concept that would’ve been a given during their late 90s and early 00s heyday. What do we do when artists fail us as people? I still don’t know. I deeply love many Radiohead songs still and my own singing voice is in part based on Yorke’s range as a model, let alone my early guitar-playing aspiring to be as pristine and violent as Greenwood/O’Brien/Yorke.

Fifth Dimension

The Byrds

3/5

One of my favourite Byrds albums, maybe in large part because of how large the title track looms (alongside Eight Miles High). Definitely my first Byrds album where I started taking them seriously as something other than a glorified cover band.

Chirping Crickets

Buddy Holly & The Crickets

3/5

Buddy Holly’s appeal has always confused me, locked in a time and place, celebrated perhaps more for what was lost than what he achieved. otoh geeky white guy who rocks is more or less the objective for indie rock. Holy shit a minor chord! E 7th! And then there’s the Beatles. So, massively influential for a variety of bands to come in this list, forever preserved in rock n roll amber. Which I mispelled as ember first.

Survivor

Destiny's Child

2/5

Still not entirely clear what albums are being added retroactively coordinated with Dimery or at the whim of admin. Anyhow, this is fine but captures some of the difficulty I have with where soul and r&b went in the late 90s through roughly the mid-00s. First, there’s the perfectionism. Beyonce and co are nothing if not top notch vocalists and performers, but there’s such little life imbued in these takes either due to the treatment or genuinely impressive singing. It feels “air-brushed” within an inch of its life, not for any artistic statement, but to meet a certain market-ready standard. Second, the songs themselves, when they are audible beneath the production, prove to be little more than platforms for the above vocal mastery. I know, it’s a vocal trio, what do you want here, a GBV record? The Nicks/Eye of the Tiger rip stands out as a precursor to similar, but better austere tracks like Single Ladies, just the vocal hook and beat juxtaposed with the minimalist sample don’t do a whole lot for me.

The Yes Album

Yes

3/5

I actually have some tolerance and patience for prog rock and find it the natural progression for a lot of melodic verse-chorus-verse songwriting because let’s face it, you do tire of the structure’s limitations. You can find yourself with a plenty good half a song and just want to head off in some other direction and see where else things go instead of a simple bridge/return...it’s just that a lot of prog rockers didn’t have a great gift for melody, let alone have a damn thing of interest to say, but they sure could play a lot of very conventional music very well. Built to Spill, Fugazi, Radiohead, Pile, even prog contemporaries like The Who and Zep all can or could do multi-part epic songs, fusing together bits they’d long abandoned, yet neither their/their audience’s attention wavers. All that said, the individual parts of “I’ve Seen All Good People” are still pretty appealing, so when the prog structure works for one of the ne plus ultra prog groups, it’s successful thanks to the components...still can’t help but feel cheesy as hell when the bluesy B. section starts off, but whaddyado. Otoh I just gave this album’s follow-up a cursory listen and exhaled “God this suuuuuuucks” after 8 long ass minutes.

Groovin'

The Young Rascals

3/5

One of the handful of bands whose name just immediately sends me in the opposite direction. Which is too bad for me, Brigati and Cavaliere really had something. Groovin’ is a bit more a collection of singles TYR released throughout 1966-67 than a standalone effort, typical for the time. Two things relearned: Groovin’ was not sung by a couple of Black guys The lyric is not “you and me and Leslie” Groovin’ really is impeccable. I first heard it to my knowledge on the Platoon soundtrack, which I for some reason had and adored (alongside Good Morning Vietnam...which says maybe too much about US foreign policy blowback). There was a whole industry of 1960s nostalgia throughout the 1980s, which curdled by the 1990s such that this all became shorthand for boomers always being obsessed with themselves. Which is unfair for a few reasons: on a practical level, a lot of these songs weren’t super available in modern, portable formats - my parents’ own scattered music collection is testament to this, random 45s and the occasional LP, which would be a hassle to throw on except on the record player. So, thanks to the Big Chill soundtrack, you could now go out and buy your favourites in one collection on tape or CD. Moreover, these are all classics for a reason! (Not sure how streaming has changed that for subsequent generations - Gen X is hardly in need of a jukebox CD collection of all the hits from 1993.)

Hunky Dory

David Bowie

4/5

Not quite the parallel to The Bends or Revolver, a mastery of form by a mostly good, but not yet great band, if only because the glam rock pursuits Bowie went on doesn’t have an equal to OK Computer or Sgt Pepper's, etc. Anyhow, by far my favourite Bowie album, it’s just amazing to think of how this came out after his previous efforts, which were good, and then oh look, here’s a master.

Crooked Rain Crooked Rain

Pavement

3/5

This was, what, the 2nd or 3rd Pavement reset, which largely continued until Terror or possibly BtC depending on where you stop the clock. It’s simply not the same band nor vibe as Slanted and the earlier EPs. The songwriting started to change with Frontwards, but the sound and production value was still rooted in Stockton and Gary Young. CR, CR not only lost Gary’s unique drumming with Steve West’s introduction, but this version of the band had a wider mix, a range of guitar sounds, a much fuller drum sound, actual bass guitars, etc. And Malkmus started writing, well, different songs, the wacky or noisy moments became more deliberate or obligatory, even rehearsed sounding, but gone were the Fall-inspired tangents and in were Pavement The Rock Band Songs. Which is roughly the sound that Pavement and Malkmus fans have known ever since. Is that a bad thing? Would we give up CR, CR through Terror Twilight and the various Malkmus solo projects if it meant staying with the Stockton sound? I became a fan via the Trigger Cut EP, finding it sometime shortly before CR, CR’s release and whenever S&E got big distribution. As such, my Pavement fandom has always skewed just a bit towards what came before 1994. But, that’s when I first saw them live, weeks before I even had this album, and that was a transformative experience for a young KPH. I vaguely knew you could get away with playing guitar “non-traditionally” but watching SM shamble his way through a set was very much having a lightbulb go off: a ha, I can do that, and I can probably not care about how I like doing it. This works! Sidebar, man that dude grew up so fast in the next 6(!) years. I went from seeing what still looks like a boyish figure (there’s a video of the concert at the Batschkapp in Frankfurt on youtube) to An Adult by the time he was playing solo at the Middle East. 6 years! Anyhow, the parts that worked for me as a teenager still largely do the trick, but there’s a bit missing from this now and that’s not because of my own problems with SM. I still loved Pavement’s music into the early 00s but I dunno, it’s...blocked off or something.

Goo

Sonic Youth

3/5

Goo’s reputation as the ultimate sellout is a little ridiculous in light of what they delivered to DGC...just not on this album. There’s a whole thesis that could be written on the white person cool affect, its intersection with and borrowing of Black culture, what it achieves for inspiring/devaluing subsequent art, how much of a cynical con it can be, etc. Ultimately, Sonic Youth the band just has never been that interesting to me aside from feeling like I instinctively knew what Moore and Ranaldo were up to with noise. It’s like meeting a twin you never knew you had, seeing they have the same back of their hands as you, and...well, what more is there? I saw them a few times in the early 90s, usually by accident, and if you asked me where I got my early guitar ideas from, I could probably reference them in a general sense, but I was not spending a lot of time listening to Goo, Daydream, EVOL, and Dirty. It just kinda happened that way. Goo has one of my favourite SY songs, which is Ranaldo’s Mote. I like a lot of later Moore and Gordon tunes (especially as she began singing with more melody), but Mote’s still the one. But also gets undercut by the noise denouement. On that note, Daydream and maybe Schizophrenia aside, what cultural purchase does SY have in the mid 2020s? As people, Kim’s status seems like the fair-minded truth teller, wise elder, emboldened post-divorce, but her solo effort only went so far. Thurston has been up his own ass since at least his first solo record and the other two show up from time to time guesting on tracks, sometimes keeping on good terms with canceled types long after that was in any way a fashionable conceit. Trail of Dead could rightly be criticized as a Daydream rip-off band, but they found their own way by Source Tags. That “Kool Thing” is...well, a bit confused makes a lot of sense from the intersectional perspective but maybe these folks weren’t all that smart? It’s a very white feminist take and deserves respect but also...gets some power dynamics and broader understanding not only wrong, but just doesn’t seem to care and that’s maybe the SY story in miniature, or at least the Kim story. And a personal sidenote, Chuck D providing the “Black man voice” happens only because he was in the same studio recording Fear of a Black Planet (I guess the feature spot door did not swing both ways), an album I knew about long before giving SY the time of day.

Appetite For Destruction

Guns N' Roses

2/5

Ahh 80s music! I routinely have a GnR phase that basically goes like: listen to It’s So Easy, You Could Be Mine, maybe Don’t Cry and November Rain, marvel at the singles from Appetite and remember being young enough to not entirely get their whole deal, but get enough of it to kinda know I’m not a GnR fan. Mostly because of how ubiquitous they were for about 4 years there. If it wasn’t the songs on the radio/mtv, it was Axl doing something cOntROvErSial (writing songs in character but in a way that seemed more a permission structure to have the n word in a song or spread some misogynist drivel), kicking people from the stage, blah blah blah. By the time they did their co-headlining tour with Metallica it was easy to root for those guys even if I’d soon move on from their music and Hetfield's sudden “actually the US military is cool” thing. Appetite itself, the singles are undeniable and if we were judging albums entirely by their singles, well, this is a 5/5...but there is quite a lot of filler here that exposes how thin the GnR repertoire was (and would only increase via the exhausting detail of UYI I/II).

Street Life

The Crusaders

2/5

That's The Way Of The World

Earth, Wind & Fire

3/5

A lot more legible as a piece of pop music than Parliament or Funkadelic, but there’s still the sense I am listening to some other folks having fun. I am invited, for sure, but it’s still documentation of a party...elsewhere.

Bridge Over Troubled Water

Simon & Garfunkel

3/5

Did Simon ever write for another voice regularly again after parting ways with Art? I like some of his solo work but it’s probably no small coincidence that a lot of the best material he subsequently created is in partnership (or “partnership”) with other musicians. That’s not to take away from his considerable achievements (well, I guess it kinda is, I’m sure he’ll be fine), but it does get back to a recurring concern of mine about what constitutes a “solo work” and what is actually a front for a project involving many. He seems to benefit greatly from that give and take and it opens up his creativity - that’s a good thing! Case in point: this album! I’ll probably never vibe completely to his melodramatic twee affect but there’s a lot to enjoy here, from the Spector-worship to Art’s lead vocal showcase to off kilter inclusions and of course the immensely pleasant guitar fingerpicking throughout. Good stuff. (Although I am always immediately reaching for DJ Shadow after the first bit of track 2)

The Man Machine

Kraftwerk

2/5

Another in a series of bands my favourites are indebted to or love but I just...have never found a way into. Und ich kann Deutsch! A lot of Kraftwerk plays like the factory settings, waiting for someone with actual inspiration or emotion to come along and do something with it. And sure enough, look at all the samples folks turned Kraftwerk into!

Porcupine

Echo And The Bunnymen

2/5

Another in a series of bands my favourites are indebted to or love but I just...have never found a way into. Not my first go around with Echo’s earlier work, but my sense is the same as in the past: whole lotta sound and fury signifying...something? I like this one a bit more than other Echo efforts, there are some commonalities with their post-punk contemporaries - U2, Joy Division, The Smiths, The Cure - but where those bands are also often mired in melancholy, they have songs, whereas a lot of Echo comes across as little more than a step removed from jam sessions. It’s a pose, a vibe, and it’s a very legible one, but they didn’t arrive at matching that pose with fleshed-out songs for at least another record. It’s fun to imagine an alternate timeline where Echo took off in the US the way U2 did, saving us from world saviour Bono, maybe keeping them upstart underdogs instead of what they inevitably became.

Document

R.E.M.

2/5

Not exactly my first REM record, I think that was Fables, but the first one I actually heard. I have incredibly distinct sense memories of hearing The One I Love on the radio in 1987, but didn’t hear End of the World until sometime in the early 90s, maybe part of a video collection or MTV revue around the release of Out of Time; the ramshackle video made them seem all the more underground/poor/relatable. On balance, however, I’ve never enjoyed Document as much as I always thought I would, at least based on their earlier and later material. It very much sounds like their first big reach to the rafters, not dissimilar from their contemporaries The Smiths and U2 or even INXS and Depeche Mode doing roughly the same either that year or just a few prior. That’s not a criticism, it’s fun to hear big sounding records and songs, just, Finest Worksong is not as compelling as what they would arrive at only a year or so later on Green. My sense is they were still trying to bridge their quieter or subdued material (even the upbeat stuff) to arena rock and just hadn’t put it together yet. Moreover, it’s still a question to me if that was ever the right guise for their talents, given the superlative efforts on Out of Time and Automatic vs the good, but not great material produced for Monster and Hi-Fi (which I love).

A Love Supreme

John Coltrane

5/5

Somewhere along the way I have repeatedly tried giving Coltrane a go and I found myself very resistant except when he was more or less a sideman. But for whatever reason, A Love Supreme totally hit for me this time. I was expecting the be bop and modal workouts to turn me off or sound atonal, but I was all in from the jump. It’s a singular work, not a note out of place, etc.

Melodrama

Lorde

3/5

Probably the kind of thing I would’ve really liked as an early teenager, but as a late Gen Xer this was one of the first albums I can remember being praised to the rafters and being pretty certain this is music for folks half my age, what am I doing here...

Country Life

Roxy Music

2/5

What’s the appeal of sophistication? A striving for an unattainable lifestyle of the idle rich? A perfection of the form, enabled by years of study and mastery? I don’t dislike later Roxy Music, Avalon is a legit triumph, but the glam rock era just...it’s like a James Bond film, all glitz and cheeky action in service of what exactly? The vibe and feel, I can see how that all must’ve been exciting for a brief window, but even then, was it all that outside of the UK? Listening to these records, which I am clamouring to find catchy songs or hooky melodies anywhere, it’s again that phenomenon of being told about a really crazy party someone went to that defined their entire personality. That Ferry, a working class-born striver himself would eventually become a lite-Tory really completes the picture of sophistication’s empty promise.

Off The Wall

Michael Jackson

5/5

How much of this is that I’m actually a huge Rod Temperton and Quincy Jones fan? For obvious reasons, I might want to reach for that in addition to appreciating a younger, pre-whatever he became MJ. Anyhow, love this front to back, 5 stars. I didn’t actually become a fan until later in life in my early 30s, but jeez.

Purple Rain

Prince

4/5

Prince is one of those guys I admire and respect more than love. Maybe that’s my initial exposure being his “sexy” side as a child and so I don’t have the nostalgia for some of his earlier material the way I do with the other big 80s pop stars (MJ, Madonna, et al.) who had songs that were mostly about dancing the night away, maybe with a wink here and there, whereas Prince is like baby we are FUCKING and also what’s up with domestic abuse? Purple Rain is just a bit too heavy for my tastes maybe, everything is at 10 from the jump, super loud and never lets up. That’s roughly the same problem I had with Bad, come to think of it, which is not a good record for the most part, whereas this has songs and hooks for days, not to mention Prince inventing entire sound palettes that defined an entire decade as an afterthought.

It's A Shame About Ray

The Lemonheads

3/5

A lot of 1990s alt rock radio is contained in this album’s sound: a little melancholy (or a lot), acoustic guitar as rhythm guitar, jangly electric lead that sometimes rocked out a bit (but not too much), straightforward rhythm section with some occasional tunefulness in the bass guitar lines, and a singer who can carry a tune, but isn’t some vocal marvel. Plus an ease with novelty songs. I should bracket most popular alt music released between 1992 and 1999 as a lot of that time I did not have access to American media, due to being in Germany off and on, alongside the usual poor college semesters without cable. MTV was such a big deal for US music fans, especially during the Alternative Nation “let’s turn band members into tv hosts” moment, which I largely missed. I didn’t know much about Evan and co. before the Mrs. Robinson cover (vaguely recall Blake Babies being something I should track down if I was ever back stateside) and honestly didn’t care too much aside from the novelty of an uptempo “punk” cover of a Boomer staple. Over time the title track and My Drug Buddy became favs, but the arrival of Come On Feel was met with my indifference (also some preference for Juliana Hatfield had crept in). But, for my Boston friends, the Lemonheads were as vital as the Pixies, Dinosaur, or Sebadoh. And when he’s cooking, Evan could write a wicked killer song! There’s a cinematic, moving quality to his pairing of lyrics and melody, most successful on My Drug Buddy’s first verse - you can picture them heading out in whatever car, stopping at the pay phone to call their dealer, etc. The Lemonheads sound really only takes you so far and the result is always just a bit slight, never too deep. Which is fine, more bands should have a scattering of really good singles and perfectly solid album cuts. Again though: why this list? Did they have more of an impact in the UK and commonwealth nations than stateside? What did the average Brit see when they heard this band? I have all of my New England and Boston-specific imagery to rely on but this conjures up less of that and more anonymous, suburban ennui or possibly something more Southern Californian thanks to Evan’s movie star looks and the craft that went into their videos. Couple great songs, but as a statement across an entire album I don’t get how this pairs with The Greatest Albums of All Time.

Franz Ferdinand

2/5

I mean, it’s interesting as a footnote in 00s indie/dancepunk culture and there is the single, of course, but aside from wishing I was a size 28 and had a great tailor this had no impact on me whatsoever.

Oracular Spectacular

MGMT

2/5

Hard to separate my own contemporary experience in the music business from these guys. We would’ve loved to have worked with Fridmann and actually did with one of his engineers, with good results. But how did these 2 put this together? Family money? They had some talent based on the initial EPs so this isn’t a case of Fridmann molding them into something, but still, what..? It’s a distinct enough aesthetic that I can see it being reclaimed down the line, but atm (2025) this feels like something best forgotten.

Low

David Bowie

3/5

Maybe a touch overrated? To my continued surprise it’s just never clicked for me. I admire and appreciate its influence and what he (and to a lesser extent, Visconti and Eno) were up to but the songs alone never quite do land the way a lot of his catalog does.

Roots

Sepultura

2/5

A much younger me - before this record even came out - would’ve been all in on this. But wow, that’s a long album. And also has dudes from Korn. Anyhow, as with most anything in this genre, I dig the music a bit and can’t take the guttural scream seriously. It just takes me out of the song every time, whether it’s this or Deafheaven.

Figure 8

Elliott Smith

2/5

Figure 8’s never really worked for me. After XO’s studio pop revelations and the lo-fi, late night darkness of Either/Or, Figure 8 feels a whole lot like a series of formalist, ill-fitting rock band exercises (which would continue in some respect on the unfinished follow-up). Which, to me, says Smith was running low on inspiration and was relying on standards for support. Of course, someone with his talent could do a great deal with that! It’s such a rock record after the quieter, chamber pop leanings of XO, which feels like a deliberate choice, exemplified by an early Figure 8 song, Stupidity Tries, which eschews XO’s warm acoustic guitar and piano for electric guitar, drums, Lennon-style nods, etc...it’s not a template exactly, but once it opens up it certainly provide a bridge. Even the song that feels closest to older Elliott, Somebody That I Used to Know, has a bright, rehearsed quality that contrasts with the muted, even muddled acoustics from the 90s.

Lost Souls

Doves

3/5

I’ve been a Doves fan since the jump - OK, maybe not since Sub Sub, but definitely before Lost Souls came out - and did a close listen of Lost Souls several years ago. My takeaway then was that it’s a collection of attempts at different sounding bands and possibly just opening songs. Less a band confident in its aesthetic such that they could cover a variety of sounds or genres - which they don’t - more a band not yet sure of what it was. It wasn’t Sub Sub, it wasn’t Oasis, it wasn’t Radiohead. But it could be its own thing, whenever they figured out what that thing was. There’s some connective tissue linking the songs, but it’s not until Last Broadcast that they had this self-definition sorted out. Handful of good singles here though and a few impressive mood pieces.

Henry's Dream

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

2/5

This is, what, 1 of 6 Nick Cave entries in this list? Cmon y’all. That said, I read through about 50 user reviews to see if I could find a way into Henry’s Dream (I like some other Cave records quite a lot) and find myself defending it for “being annoying” and so on, even if it does little for me. But that’s ultimately taking issue with a kind of default critic-speak, less concerned with the album in question.

Kind Of Blue

Miles Davis

5/5

All time classic, amazing it's a record from the 1950s, that's how fresh and forward-thinking it still feels

Siembra

Willie Colón & Rubén Blades

1/5

Sounds like generic salsa and basically means nothing to me unfortunately due to the language barrier.

Led Zeppelin II

Led Zeppelin

3/5

Definitely more hard rock reinterpretations of older blues music, but it’s done with such skill and confidence, none of this plays like plagiarism. However, like a lot of records of this era, some of this is just the live set which maybe was a satisfying listen back in the day hearing Page rip, etc, but today it’s just album filler. And then there’s the English folk stuff, which I just have never had an interest in. Also lol that pick noise in the pick-ups on Moby Dick...irritating! I'd give it a 2.5 but that's not available here.

Reign In Blood

Slayer

3/5

In the late 1980s owning this or Abyss was more hardcore than Straight Outta Compton, like you really had access to something evil. Even the covers, like they might actually spontaneously combust or provide a gateway for a demon to crossover. It’s good! But like everything in the genre, there’s a suspension of disbelief element required for me to really take this seriously or find it enjoyable and, well, it’s just kinda goofy. I admire the economy and focus and at another age, this might’ve been my jam but in middle age I just don’t have the patience to sift through the repetition.

Morrison Hotel

The Doors

2/5

My general sense of The Doors is they didn’t have much else going for them aside from their stalwart blues rock. Any other ideas feel rooted in the psychedelia, minor key, harpsichord dead end of the 60s. Which may be all that some folks want! The blues rock really is exceptional, highlighted here by Roadhouse Blues. But when that’s about all you have, it’s no wonder they were incredibly played out by the time of Oliver Stone’s movie. They are probably due for some kind of revival or another in our fractured post-monoculture, but wow, they have been the first name in boomer cheese for so long...

Electric Ladyland

Jimi Hendrix

4/5

Getting this right after a Doors record (and Slayer!) sure has me back in middle school lol Ultimately I’m not a fan of Hendrix records, but love the singles. They’re just very long. And the Hendrix trio largely plays at a particular volume and style that can be overwhelming over the course of a half hour let alone over one. But, giving the full Voodoo Chile a listen is a must. And perhaps the definitive Dylan cover by any artist. And I still get chills at the start of Slight Return, just incredible.

Music For The Jilted Generation

The Prodigy

2/5

Even at the time of its release I remember this felt a little too aggro, techno music for mosh pits. Like if you had it on in the car, you’d be 20% more likely to get in an accident or road rage incident. :D Earlier I liked “Out of Space” a bunch - peppy, but fun. This is just A LOT of the same tone. Which might’ve worked for me a few years earlier but I had aged out of this vibe. I see Fat of the Land is also on here and cmon guys.

Ready To Die

The Notorious B.I.G.

2/5

Biggie is so damn convincing and charismatic, if I have one qualm it’s having met impressionable young men who took this as license to be thugs. They were gonna find that green light somewhere, that ain’t Biggie’s fault, but much like Scorsese’s gangsterland films, there’s the trade-off of depicting the highs as SO HIGH and the lows kinda tucked away - the parts you come back for over and over are not the lows. Somehow Biggie’s fate makes this even more appealing for a certain sort. Anyhow I’d kinda been done with the gangsta rap several years before Ready to Die hit the zeitgeist, so I’ve always appreciated Biggie from a remove. Undeniable storytelling chops, delivery, flow, timing, etc. But wow, what a long album! I get the financial incentive here probably demanded packing this to the 70+ minute max CDs could afford but daaaamn. So many skips! And that jackass Combs popping up here and there to do what, guest vocal? Miss me with that shit. Cut this down to a 35 minute collection and it’s a classic 5 stars, but with the bloat and Combs, I just can’t get there.

I See You

The xx

2/5

Huh, did not expect to see something this lightweight included on this list but I should not be by this point. I like Jamie xx a great deal, especially his singles/club tracks, as well as a lot of In Colour, so I had some hope for this one when it came out. The xx, however, were always a tough sell for me given the melodrama/so sad vocal affect. I admire the technique - close mic’d, quiet - but as a listener I’m just like stop talking to me. “On Hold,” the track most reminiscent of In Colour and a big, real deal mid-10s pop single probably should work for me, but it just feels forced. I’ll always stick up for these kids, I guess, but it’s just...not my thing.

Welcome to the Afterfuture

Mike Ladd

2/5

It’s hard to remember now given that rap/hip hop basically IS what people think music is today, but for a stretch there in the late 90s rap was kinda...wack. You had some older heavyweights still doing work (Beastie Boys), newly arrived virtuosos (Em, Jay), but the median group/MC pushed had more in common with late 80s hair metal artists: girls, cars, houses, fleeting displays of ostentatious wealth (everything rented for the video shoot). Nice surprises like Stankonia were around the corner, but as a forward-looking genre, hip hop was feeling if not dead, certainly on life support. I personally was consumed with trip hop, the downbeat or instrumental sampling music adjacent to hip hop, mostly without MCs. As a DJ, I was an outlier in my appreciation of hip hop, happy to drop in golden era favs, but contemporaries seldom made it through - backpack and whatnot was fine, but lacked vibrancy, focusing on unique (often offputtingly nasal) deliveries. Lots to admire, but hard to find a lot to love. Like some instrumental hip hop, Mike Ladd had atmosphere going for him - there’s something mysterious, threatening out there, but we can’t put our finger on quite what it is. Pynchon as producer. The beats are fine and range from 4/4 boom bap to a more acoustic, live feel. I’m not sure I would’ve loved this at the time, such was my resistance to MCs then, but there’s a spare quality to his work that lets a sample fill the bars, instead of the turntablist need to always move on. The Gorecki flip would’ve almost certainly made many a mixtape. But...there’s a casting about here, a lot of songs without lyrical hooks, just...incidental ruminating that seems obviously important to Ladd, less so to the listener. I see he later got into soundtrack work and that tracks.

Chocolate Starfish And The Hot Dog Flavored Water

Limp Bizkit

1/5

Ten

Pearl Jam

3/5

Not my favourite Pearl Jam production-wise, but the songs here really captured something special. I’m usually all in favour of getting the “largest” sound out of something, more atmosphere always trumps a well-executed performance, etc, but the cavernous sound of Ten really is bonkers. This was driven home at the time by the single mix of Even Flow that featured heavily on MTV, which had more of a “live feel”, none of the production treatments on Vedder’s vocals, guitars and drums much more close mic’d, which would be the norm for PJ production going forward. PJ was one of my favourite bands for that whole decade - lost me with Binaural - but I never once thought their thing was worth imitating (unlike some other folks lol). I could play some of their songs, but similar to U2, they were the culmination of a style, not the inspiration to start something new. I haven’t had very much interest in Ten since 1992 and even then, I was hoping for something new, evidenced by bootlegs, b-sides, and the superior live performances of tracks like Porch. Vs didn’t quite do it for me, neither did anything that came after, but I still kept up until I didn’t. (The intro/outro pieces are pretty silly and of the time - could be the soundtrack to a 10 pm crime show)

Safe As Milk

Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band

1/5

A challenge I will always have with this genre is that I’m not in on the joke. Every song is a piss take of some sort, which is really not what I’m into music for, especially when it’s an ostensibly heartfelt tune like I’m Glad which does a soul song just well enough it could pass as legit, but the soul singer impersonations start to scan as racist the more it goes on. A couple Gen X weirdos had their minds kicked open by Beefheart and that’s not a bad thing. Without CB maybe you don’t get the Pixies or Tom Waits’ change in direction. But with even further remove thanks to my late Gen X age, this all feels like it’s a closed circuit and worse, the white outcast male finding voice by affecting a slightly ironic, alienated impersonation of a black soul singer is just...it doesn’t sit well.

Deja Vu

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

2/5

As a Neil fan, the mystery with the “Y” part of this supergroup has always been, uh, why? I get having his voice and set of hands live, but he’s barely on the record vocally except on his own two tracks, otherwise adding sporadic guitar and other instrumentation throughout. That this is the best-selling release for any of them in any of their projects sure is a testament to that moment in post-60s boomer culture. This is all a bit too hippie dippie canyon bullshit for me, especially the Croz tracks RIP, but the harmonies are incredible throughout.

Joan Armatrading

2/5

It’s fine? Can’t tell if this is just another provincial curio. But, of interest to The Wire fans - and I coincidentally happen to be doing a s2 rewatch this week - is Clarke Peters showing up adding his quite sonorous baritone (Lester Smooth!) to one tune. Alas, that’s about all that pops for me. Somebody Who Loves You has a pretty stellar melody and I feel like someone ripped it off, but I can’t place who or when.

Tracy Chapman

3/5

Kinda hard to write about this without the recent reboot of Fast Car thanks to [checks notes] white male country singer Luke Combs? But, my memory as a kid was “yay this is good” and felt meaningful in a way that a lot of music at the time did not. It’s not that popular music in the 1980s didn’t have heart or spirit or whatever it is that Chapman has in surplus, but from sophistipop to hair metal, the surface image mattered the most. The tail end of the 80s and then early 90s instead rejected that strongly in favour of material from the heart, be it grunge and its adjacent rock music genres or hip hop. There’s some for better or worse elements built into that, as folks pretty quickly had enough of all that and 80s-themed music parties were de rigeur on college campuses at night clubs even before 1995. Which maybe tracks with my sense of enjoying Chapman’s music: a little goes a long way. Otoh maybe if every song she wrote was as good as Fast Car, this would be a different discussion.

Don't Come Home A Drinkin' (With Lovin' On Your Mind)

Loretta Lynn

3/5

My big country music connection from living in Nashville is we were neighbours with one of Loretta’s granddaughters. Her dog and ours would play together running around in a small stream bordering her land. Real exciting stuff. Anyhow, aside from Jack White championing her, I didn’t hear much about Loretta until I moved to TN and even then, as with most older country acts, it was pure legacy. Honestly this isn’t really my bag, but I wonder if she entertained doing soul or contemporary non-country music as her vocal really pops in the mix - a more authoritative, stronger vocal than something like Nancy Sinatra or even Dusty. The song selection is a bit heavy on a limited set of subjects, but that’s par for the course with country then and today. The overall sound though is just thisside of cloying or hokey and it reminds me in a good way of nights at Robert’s.

Let's Get It On

Marvin Gaye

3/5

Alas, this one’s been ruined for me by the ubiquity and overexposure of the title track licensed to become the go-to soundtrack for commercials, tv, and film as shorthand for “these 2 people are in love.” It's so overexposed what might've been a hot, sensual track years ago is now as vanilla and wholesome as a cialis commercial's beige palette. Thanks Marvin Gaye Estate for another incredible winning contribution to the culture! That aside, purely as a technical achievement LGIO, much like What’s Going On, is a sustained feeling across the instrumentation, melodies, and Gaye’s performances. It’s a vivid, if single note colour.

Meat Is Murder

The Smiths

2/5

Albums by The Smiths are always a bit tricky. Such an incomparably good singles band, but your tolerance for Moz will determine how well the albums play. Which is odd for me - I like several solo albums a great deal more than any Smiths album, but when Marr was locked into a sound, he was redefining or creating genres, sometimes several within the same song, such as The Headmaster Ritual. Unremarked upon by and large, the seeds of Morrissey’s future rockabilly fascination are already blooming here, although the way they function on Meat is Murder is more as filler. Meat is Murder also suffers (or triumphs) with 2 long songs, alongside 2 others that nearly crest 5 minutes. This is the Smiths albums challenge in a nutshell - their singles largely clock in at less than 3 minutes, get in, get out. Contemporaries - foes? - The Cure could crank out 70 minute albums and I wouldn’t want a second cut from any of those, likewise New Order’s remixes, but here...

Band On The Run

Paul McCartney and Wings

2/5

For one small period of time Paul was my favourite Beatle. This was a pretty brief period where I was impressed with, like, Martha My Dear and his zany pop melodies. In general though, the best Paul songs are the ones John tweaked and the best solo Beatle songs, invariably, are by John, even if there’s a whole lot of iffy material strewn throughout. Paul’s fake band answer to John’s fake band gives you pretty much what you’d expect: catchy, cloying, sometimes nonsensical, always sentimental, briefly rockin'. Sometime in the 2010s or so, I feel like elder Millennials seized on Wings and Band on the Run in particular as an under-appreciated work of genius, but, try as I might, it’s just never overcome the cloying catchiness Paul seems capable of doing anytime he hits the studio. A lot of its best moments are structural reprisals of better work he did a few years prior with Abbey Road and there simply aren’t any complete songs here that best his solo contributions to the Beatles (album and band).

Here's Little Richard

Little Richard

4/5

A bit repetitive but so much fun. What a great band and his delivery on every song is like it’s the last he’ll ever give. Can see how the Brits were like holy shit this rules.

Scott 2

Scott Walker

2/5

Entertaining, but I lean more Scott 3 and 4.

Treasure

Cocteau Twins

3/5

Guthrie was still tinkering with the sound he was aiming for, but Fraser was already dialed into her own thing. Lorelei justifiably looms large, at least for me, so much so I’d guess the bulk of Domino was created the same day or from the same tracks.

Paris 1919

John Cale

4/5

Lovely.

Live At The Harlem Square Club

Sam Cooke

3/5

Much imitated, for better or worse

A Girl Called Dusty

Dusty Springfield

3/5

A stone cold classic from the jump

Histoire De Melody Nelson

Serge Gainsbourg

2/5

I remember this being popular with the art school girls which always scanned as kinda odd. Really can’t deny Serge’s ear for arrangements and atmosphere and then there’s the content of the songs themselves.

Pornography

The Cure

5/5

Possibly my favourite Cure record depending on the mood.

Nevermind

Nirvana

3/5

It’s a little hard to remember 35 years on, that despite the ubiquity of half this album on MTV in the fall of 1991 through 1992, it’s really not 12 classics, but is like a lot of records from then, before, and since, a collection of what the band had at the time: several singles, a few album cuts, and...filler. As in, I can’t even remember listening to a lot of the back half, probably just skipping from Territorial Pissings to Something in the Way. That’s fine! Most bands would be happy to have a generation-defending lead track and a bunch of forgotten album cuts, but Nevermind has the reputation of being The Album of the 90s. Instead, it sounds like a group that was ably assisted by their producer, using a particular aesthetic for constructing a radio/tv-ready rock record, turning several songs into audience-friendly, palatable material, but also several songs that just sound like they were part of the live set at the time instead of The Album of the 90s. In short, it’s understandable why they were as confused as anyone else that this pretty good, but also fairly rote punk-adjacent album would rival Michael Jackson in sales. Again though, the ubiquity. It wasn’t like I didn’t like having In Bloom or Lithium show up on MTV after school. Just a year prior this would’ve been some hair metal ballad from Poison, every hour on the hour. Yet, by February of 1992 - mere months after its release! - I was exhausted with these songs and rarely just threw Nevermind on. To this day, it’s In Utero that I’ll listen to, as much of a difficult experience as that was in 1993.

Sign 'O' The Times

Prince

3/5

I basically lean towards the Prince is an all time great innovator of sounds and singles artist, but a whole album - a double album even - is asking a lot. The critics clearly have settled on this as one of his two triumphs, perhaps even his greatest work. I otoh just don’t need this much Prince and the same goes for nearly every other double album ever made, unless the songs are short, which these are not. Who knows, maybe if I had come to this at a different age I’d have a different read on things - The Cure’s Kiss Me, The Wrens Silver and Secaucus, maybe Frank Black’s Teenager of the Year are all doubles and I love them despite their length. Throw in London Calling? Sign has at least 5 all timers and then a bunch of other material that, if you are a huge Prince fan, must be incredibly satisfying. Alas, I’m just not THAT much of a fan.

Songs For Swingin' Lovers!

Frank Sinatra

3/5

This is more my speed with Frank. Kinda goofy bravado, selling bad lines, doing his best with his kinda limited range/affect (breathing a problem? on Marvelous for Words at the end - a modern recording would surely punch in rather than leave that performance intact).

Bookends

Simon & Garfunkel

3/5

Despite some of the forced thematic concept record element, it’s incredible that this is in part a collection of unused or discarded material from previous records! An odds and ends cash-in that also has some of the defining songs of Simon’s career, alongside the decade.

Palo Congo

Sabu

3/5

Can see returning to this one a bit. No surprise, Arsenio Rodríguez’ octave chord guitar work is an immediate attraction for me, slight Wes Montgomery vibe. As usual my immediate reaction with rhythm-forward music is that it’s very primal, trancelike stuff, which feels demeaning in some way, because it’s not sophisticated or something, but it’s not sophisticated to *my* dumbass.

The Contino Sessions

Death In Vegas

2/5

Another of the brit electronic groups? duos? DJs? that stayed just barely on my radar in the late 90s. They seemed to be selling a kind of studied, manufactured cool, all surface, no depth. Which doesn’t seem far off the mark, but they are one of the few acts from that wasteland period in UK music after britpop crashed out and the next thing hadn’t entirely happened yet in the Isles (did it ever?) that tried bringing the psychedelia of, say, Spiritualized into some kind of marriage with drum machines, samples, downtempo, etc. Not electronica does brit rock, but something similar. Alas, this period also mistook not having a regular singer as a desirable idea, with the occasional fill-ins from a lot of surprisingly heavy hitters, but Doves figured this one out.

Bitches Brew

Miles Davis

2/5

For the fusion era, In a Silent Way is a bit more my thing. But only slightly. They all feel similar to me and I just don’t find much, if anything distinct about the melodies. Oh but they are stitched together in innovative, novel ways! Sure, I guess? It’s interesting reading through some of the reviews here, how often “dreamlike” comes up and then someone else points out this isn’t the kind of jazz music you’d expect to hear in an Olive Garden, which tracks, but gets at something I find unapproachable about BB: these are minor key, discordant dreams y’all are having!

Devil Without A Cause

Kid Rock

1/5

It sold over 15 million copies what the fuck

The Man Who

Travis

2/5

Britpop’s slow decline and eventual end left a huge vacuum for music fans of a certain kind. Meanwhile, Radiohead fans were so desperate for new material we would take seriously anything Nigel Godrich recorded, especially if it was a UK band. Enter these 4 well-meaning Glaswegians. With a sound that ranged from High and Dry to Fake Plastic Trees, Travis were one of several bands ready to be The Bends version of Radiohead. Melancholy, but not alienated, accessible, but not a cover band, they could even kinda rock live, briefly picking up the britpop banner Oasis turned into a mountain of cocaine. Anyone hoping to hear less about the internal workings of Thom Yorke’s mind, let alone the IMF, were richly rewarded with universal slice of life observations about how tough life can be when things don’t seem to go your way for a little bit. Exit the materialist angst and pre-millenium anxiety of neoliberal Great Britain drawn in the form of a natural facsimile, enter how when I feel sad, really sad, it’s like I’m a piece of wood washed up on a shore innit?

Moondance

Van Morrison

1/5

Maybe sometime I’ll get into Van Morrison but I’m pushing 50 and it hasn’t happened yet. Just can’t stand this shit.

Another Music In A Different Kitchen

Buzzcocks

2/5

The longest 35:48

Ritual De Lo Habitual

Jane's Addiction

4/5

Ritual has at times been a Top 5 All Time Record for me, others a sign of my early taste (I bought a cassette tape of the 1A edition at the base exchange), then later a source for mixtapes-in-need-of-uptempo-tracks (Stop, Ain’t No Right). As a Serious Music Fan, Stop+side B is still about as far as this kind of music goes for me and nothing will ever top it. Alas, we have to consider the entire album and the filler material is indeed just that, showing the thin limits of PF’s lyrical schtick (which would become even more threadbare in his follow-up project). 3-4 of the best rock songs ever made and then some other stuff... Part of the fun going through the 1001 is reacquainting myself with Jane’s influence on early 90s “alternative music” culture. Soooo many bands wanted to be Jane’s, for better or worse, but they were the real deal and the imitators and bandwagoners just...well it was kinda silly. But those that stuck with it (or at least quickly shed the alt-funk trappings with Nevermind’s arrival) eventually created some great music on their own. But hoo boy.

White Blood Cells

The White Stripes

2/5

A curiously timely entry (the Stripes were inducted into the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame over the weekend). WBC, like every Jack White release, suffers from being very committed to traditional blues and rock ’n roll. I enjoyed the more minimalist, economical approach to this on De Stijl, but even with that I rarely made it through a handful of tracks. Obviously this embrace and distillation of classic rock roots is well done and has served him well; dude really knew his stuff even in the late 90s. Unfortunately, the attention to sonic aesthetic - stripped-down, minimalist, lots of space - wasn’t the only thing Americana and roots music took from their success and so, at least in Nashville, this gifted an entire revival of blues rock to a generation of kinda OK rock and folk types, whereas whatever lackluster trends were being pursued at the time of WBC in indie rock died out and have largely been forgotten. Sidenote: impressed that this has such a high rating here and several reviews calling it perfect. It's not my thing, but cool for y'all.

Kenza

Khaled

2/5

Khaled!!! I’m sure no one has made that joke. Great voice, but the production is like the equivalent of a late period Elton John album. Very safe, sentimental, kinda corny.

Heaux Tales

Jazmine Sullivan

3/5

Initial memory was this was All Songs Considered Core, laser-targeted at a specific kind of NPR listener who might even still buy physical media (this is me). But, it’s not that bad. The actual songs/atmosphere feel like an echo of early 2010s pop/hip hop with a series of interludes/commentaries inserted for thematic cohesion or time-specific relevance. Yet it’s another curio in this list and its inclusion feels weirdly rushed. I like it fine, I also like nearly every Samiam record or Dischord release, so my taste is pretty whatever. Is this list now just a shadow sociopolitical history as it adds entries or merely a continued reflection of the fleeting tastes of music critics? There are comparable inclusions from the 1980s on, so it’s nothing new having something that plausibly had a moment and then just disappeared, which this most certainly has. Which returns to the question: why is this here if it has had little if any staying power? Jazmine hasn’t even hinted at releasing a follow-up and largely faded from view after the promotion cycle concluded. It’s a fine record (as she says, EP, indeed) and I’d like to hear more from her in this vein, but uh, what are we doing here?

Snivilisation

Orbital

2/5

Maybe it’s good all the Orbital CDs were only available on import (and were thus too expensive). My main train stop in Frankfurt also had a world famous techno club in it. At times it felt like you could throw a rock and hit a rave just about anywhere around Central Europe in the early-mid 90s. As such, actually buying music that you mostly spend time dancing to seemed a bit counterintuitive. When I eventually did start giving Astralwerks and co some dollars, this was in large part because of nostalgic reasons and/or wishing I was back in a big city instead of, well, Colorado Springs. But Orbital remained priced out, only Halcyon being available on some cheapo compilations. I dunno, this just feels like music you had to be there for, whereas “2” at least has some melodic conceits.

Guero

Beck

2/5

It’s not a bad record exactly (well...) but the expectations for this were high coming off a stellar run AND reuniting with the Odelay production duo. Alas, where Beck previously succeeded using vintage sounds and older styles, but skewed through his own unique prism, this just sounded kinda tired and played out. The sister album/follow-up The Information at the very least has a more compelling aesthetic, likewise the thrifty Modern Guilt, but Guero was confirmation that Beck had lost whatever made him special.

Rust In Peace

Megadeth

2/5

There’s something academic about Mustaine’s approach to thrash or maybe it’s metal for nerds? It keeps it apart from Slayer’s speed at all costs and Metallica’s classic rock leanings. Yet the halftime changes and whatnot did feel like they overlapped with where hardcore was going around the same time. It’s Rush or Maiden but for X-Files fans. Anyhow I thought this was great fun, even a little scary when I was a preteen, and while I admire the changes and performances it’s pretty silly stuff.

Kick Out The Jams (Live)

MC5

2/5

I kinda feel like releasing a live album instead of getting it right in the studio is a bit cheap. But, as their contemporaries the Stooges were finding out, that could be a frustrating process.

So

Peter Gabriel

3/5

It’s not entirely Pete’s fault that some of this sounds like the ubiquitous soundtrack of roughly any 80s movie - I can see young strivers going up staircases to the tune of That Voice Again on some important task from Gotcha to Secret of My Success to The Manhattan Project’s myriad montages juxtaposing soccer practice and atomic bomb creation. I like So and might even love it if I could get past some of the more sappy moments, although Sledgehammer and Big Time are maybe the first memories I have of coming to dislike songs simply because they were played on MTV or the radio too much - you could not escape this album in throughout 1986 and 87! But it’s fun to go back to...almost 40...years later. Excellent Birds is further evidence I don’t care too much for Laurie Anderson, but that’s me and performance artists and along with the somewhat misunderstood Milgram’s 37 both feel like odd-fitting add-ons (or cast-offs as the case was) from different projects to keep So from being too, too commercial. Which is kinda silly.

There's No Place Like America Today

Curtis Mayfield

3/5

“So in Love” makes all of my Best Of All Time songs lists whenever I make one. It doesn’t really play any different in context and I wonder how much of this album was a bit of a grab bag for him? The rest of No Place, like a lot of Curtis, feels contemporary in its lyrical focus (although removed just enough to make it universal), didactic even. He employs both recent and older soul music sounds - either a master at work or again, filling out an album with material he had been working on for a minute. As on other records, he uses a bare bones, confessional vocal technique and that kinda gets to the challenge I have with a lot of Curtis records: sometimes I go to soul to chill out, sometimes for uplift, sometimes as the soundtrack to my day, and I don’t need someone in my ear preaching things so plainly. So it goes...

The Stranger

Billy Joel

1/5

Sentient schmaltz

Suicide

4/5

Some people love Billy Joel, some people love Suicide. I love Suicide.

Garbage

2/5

In some respects the formula for this was ideal for some part of me: combine loud guitars/dynamics with drum machines (and live playing) + a female voice. One of my personal musician combo ideas is in the same ballpark: New Jack Swing + shoegaze. But if the drums and guitars sound a particular kind of artificial and the lyrics are thrown together, boilerplate alt-rock, well, you get Garbage. I remember this feeling analogous to something like an early talk show with a personality you like (say, early Colbert), but whose writers don’t really have a grip on what differentiates their show yet, or, maybe more helpfully, your trad super group: hey we have all these folks together without their other bandmates and songwriters, surely this will work! Garbage also had a few things going against it with me: the artificial quality of the music wasn’t just limited to a drum sound or whatever, but the entire concept: hot producer wants his own band. Moreover, I had heard a lot of these sounds before because I loved the Vig remix of Depeche Mode’s “In Your Room” not to mention Siamese Dream, all of Curve’s output, etc. I also knew some of Shirley Manson, as a goth-adjacent friend kept up on her (and seemingly ever other female singer in an obsessive way that was kinda weird even at the time, later when he became super anti-feminist, well...), so her presence felt pitched to a certain kind of commercially friendly voice. But hey, I don’t hate all the expensive-sounding stuff from the 90s entirely, so a single like “Only Happy When it Rains” worked, especially for a moody guy like myself. Mostly though, this just struck me as something intended to be “cutting edge” for younger audiences or folks unaccustomed to hearing, I dunno, some crappy RevCo sideproject. Garbage is also a curious sound for this list - mid-90s alt-rock, but Americans (mostly) creating music that takes inspiration from Brits maybe more than their fellow Americans at the time, when this was the height of britpop! Music consumers contain multitudes I suppose.

The Predator

Ice Cube

3/5

Cube was always a bit more complicated than his fabricated gang banger image allowed, bringing in a somewhat paranoid and skewed political view that overlapped with (and guested on) Public Enemy records, alongside an incredible sense of just older than juvenile sense of humour. On his debut and the follow-up, this was loud and clear, but by the release of The Predator he was just coming off Lollapalooza ’92 - the one with grunge all-stars Pearl Jam and Soundgarden (and very of the moment headliners RHCP) - basically as white an audience as you could find. This gangsta rapper guise had always been a part of his identity throughout NWA, but here it takes centre stage. I’m not sure he threads the needle of the movie character predator acting as symbol or metaphor for South Central rioters rising up or if it’s just a really bad-ass, largely unkillable creature standing in as rapper taking out his rivals as his lyrical focus is kinda all over the place, but the real import, as had been the case dating back to Compton, is getting white teenagers to buy his albums as adolescent rebellion. But the move to something like a kinder, friendlier gang banger is already in the works with It Was a Good Day - he’s only a few years away from Friday at this point, after all.

Peggy Suicide

Julian Cope

1/5

That’s a lot of Cope.

The ArchAndroid

Janelle Monáe

2/5

I had high hopes for Janelle when she debuted. The pitch was a Millennial Prince, but ultimately this landed with a thud for me: it’s packed to the brim with ideas and energy, but never delivering novel, forward-thinking sounds, let alone songs. It’s all imitative of better music.

Darkness on the Edge of Town

Bruce Springsteen

3/5

Springsteen’s penchant for nostalgic melodies and arrangements has always been a tough sell for me, but Darkness is one of the few albums that regularly features if not melodies, instrumentation that pushes against the E-Street trappings. It’s also maybe the first album where he is Springsteen, story teller, bard of the common man. It was there before, but still had the sense of autobiography, like he was playing the character in the songs and vice versa. Here, as with the rest of his career (plus or minus a Tunnel of Love), it’s song as short story, the drama heightened, portrayed, and *felt* by Springsteen and the band. It’s a bit of a toss-up between this and Born to Run for me an pre-megastardom Boss, but I’ll always favour the quieter material over the bombast and melodrama.

Live And Dangerous

Thin Lizzy

3/5

Another double album! Lol. I like Thin Lizzy plenty and don’t have time or patience for this (just play the hits!). My sense is this is here as a placeholder because the critics never liked Lizzy albums, but respected them as a live act, and probably celebrated their hits, not to mention Lynott as personality and performer. What L&D gets across, maybe better than the studio albums, is that despite the metal-adjacent trappings - album artwork, even this release’s name - TL was here to entertain and have a good time. Maybe the cuddlier version of Sabbath?

The Real Thing

Faith No More

3/5

Maybe my first introduction to the idea that a band did not need a set lead singer from the jump. At least with Van Halen and DLR/Hagar, I had a sense that the personalities involved produced some strife. But FNM promotional interviews and such always highlighted that the lead singer, Mike Patton, was from some other band. Like he was on loan and this might just be a one time deal, so enjoy it today! To me, in 1989-90, Patton looked like a compatriot: maybe a skater bro, but also into music. Plus, by contrast, the rest of FNM looked like out of central casting for late 80s metal band guys. The music also had that same jumble, which I found relatable as any other kid who liked rock but also rap. They also seemed kinda fun or even harmless? Not as overwrought and scary as Metallica and the rest of late 80s metal, with all the satanic panic shit still hanging in the air. No, this was intelligent enough (because they had keyboards?) not to be confused with cock rock, aggressive enough to fit with metal and its sub-genres, but didn’t entirely take itself seriously (even when it sounded serious). Surprise! You’re Dead! Slap bass! Symphonic synths! Wacky vocals! Alas, fun as the singles were, The Real Thing had several long songs I’ve still never heard all the way through. I’m glad FNM was around for 12 year-old me, but aside from giving Angel Dust a few spins, I didn’t think much about this crew after 1990.

Parachutes

Coldplay

2/5

I had a dj friend whose boyfriend was from the same town as these guys and knew them as your average try-hard trend-hoppers who would do anything for a gig anywhere. I presumed most of that was the unending contempt English people have for anyone trying to better themselves, but the sense Coldplay was just good enough at the whole Radiohead-lite thing to make it work yet not really committed to anything other than inhabiting the look and feel of meaningful artists was tough to shake. Basically a bunch of phonies. And yet! Right out of the gate, I was impressed with Don’t Panic and still return to it from time to time, Yellow, while as dumb as a rock song this side of Oasis could be, still had a guitar hook that couldn’t be denied, and a pretty good britpop/Bends/Grace facsimile in Shiver for the Grey’s Anatomy set. Coldplay retain this challenge for me - Chris has a beautiful voice, which can be approachable, even conversational when he’s not going for Buckley/Yorke, the music is evocative and moving, if never dark/alienating, and yet the rote sanctimony and lyrical stumbles - which are part of the appeal for many, many, many others - stop me dead in my tracks. Even on Don’t Panic, whose music is appealing to me, the lyrics feel like first draft placeholders “bones sinking like stones” in search of something with universal meaning “we live in a beautiful world” - scratch the surface and what do you get? Vibes? Something more cynical and calculating?

Now I Got Worry

The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion

3/5

The JSBX had a couple things going for them: crazy live shows and a sound that was familiar, but not dated. This helped tremendously, especially in the “experimental” tracks, to overcome the sense these were novelty songs and/or more of the same. Anyhow this was great fun for an overcaffeinated early 20something.

Gris Gris

Dr. John

4/5

Was deeply skeptical of this whole thing, but damn it really sustains a mood and atmosphere. Maybe works best when he’s not singing...

Blue Lines

Massive Attack

5/5

Some groups would just call it a day after releasing a debut this confident and contained (not counting their earlier Wild Bunch stuff). In some respects it wasn’t until Mezzanine that their sound successfully evolved and that was basically the end of the group, despite occasional attempts at continuing. Remarkable stuff.

In It For The Money

Supergrass

2/5

This is the one folks described as evidence they were in it for the long haul, capable of making serious rock, still retaining some of that Coco spark, etc. The next Kinks maybe. A thing I find charming about the Supergrass fellas is that they were in some ways the younger brothers to fellow Oxford residents Ride and Swervedriver. Like, it’s not that big a place, and you have that many quality bands, not to mention nearby in Abingdon with a quintet of so and sos. Later in life, Ride’s drummer and the Abingdon bassist would play on Gaz's solo albums, Mick joining Swervedriver. Alas, that’s about all I found interesting in this go around with In It.

Strangeways, Here We Come

The Smiths

2/5

The break-up album. Can you hear the unraveling (the classic banishment of other songwriting talent, separating them by album sides, material simply not working)? Did they put their best effort in despite it all and leave a lasting document (Abbey Road)? Do we hear this and wish it could’ve never ended? Mostly, what an odd duck of a record. There’s the atmospherics and imperial critique of A Rush and a Push. The extremely hokey, cloying Girlfriend in a Coma, which even at 13 I thought was silly. Followed immediately by a straight-up classic. And then a clunker and another goofy ass novelty song. Paint a Vulgar Picture starts off on an all-time footing and then reveals itself as an unworkable mess. All Smiths albums were short and this is no exception which may be its best quality as a parting statement, later dorks.

Here Come The Warm Jets

Brian Eno

3/5

Here’s where I reveal myself as a bit of a (solo) Eno skeptic. I love about 2 songs on here, but so much of this and his subsequent, beloved solo albums, share a common challenge for me: his voice. Add to that a particular disinterest in melody or even anything interesting at all and I have to wonder if people enjoying this is a received wisdom, peer pressure kinda deal. Of course, it and his influence can’t be denied, and I won’t, but that’s further evidence to me that his true worth as a musician is as a collaborator and shaper of other, better melodic ideas. It’s even there that his vocal talent soars (the layering/stacking technique), creating something simultaneously alienating and affecting. Or it’s simply that Bowie doing Eno is better than Eno doing Eno.

Disraeli Gears

Cream

3/5

Finding out the big softy racist asshole was once a cool cat capable of making decent music, truly one of the conundrums of growing up Gen X. Strange Brew + Sunshine of Your Love are so synonymous with a kind of minor chord, proto-acid rock I still won’t allow that Clapton was in any way involved.

Very

Pet Shop Boys

2/5

Mostly I remember this for the lego-like jewel case it came in, back when groups would still try different approaches to CD releases (U2, Pearl Jam...others...). I might’ve enjoyed this at the time a bit, as the sound is situated in the eurodance aesthetic that I had and have some fondness for. Today, it’s a bit opaque - I don’t connect with any of the traces of melancholy, such as there are. Coming off electronic, I was all in favour of Neil Tennant and would remain a fan into the late 90s, but it’s just all a little too pleasant maybe?

Vanishing Point

Primal Scream

2/5

It is absurd XTRMNTR is not on here. The conceit of this record is a bit lost to time now, Vanishing Point and other b-movies are pretty easy to see now and respecting the original ideas behind a film soundtrack is more accepted today (and somewhat in keeping with the 1001 premise of trying to appreciate older music for its era). Anyhow, not as into this one as the ones on either side, one of which is the best thing Gillespie has maybe ever been involved in. Again, it is absurd XTRMNTR is not on here.

All Directions

The Temptations

3/5

The “epic” 12-minute “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” is worth the time, but I don’t know that it really coheres with the message of the song. It’s a very tense, suspenseful rendition, more suited to a heightened dramatic scene than reflections, laments from mother to son, son to listener, etc. But it’s a damn impressive miss. Likewise the rendition of “The First Time...” points up a regular practice of groups from the 60s and 70s that has disappeared: established groups doing their own take on a hit song. Sure, you’ve heard Roberta Flack, but what about your heroes The Temptations? It’s a fine take, but doesn’t surpass Flack’s mix of melancholy and longing.

Don't Stand Me Down

Dexys Midnight Runners

1/5

Hailed as the Pet Sounds of the 1980s in some quarters, such as Dimery’s publication, but the whole deal with Dexys from Rowland’s voice to the mandolin to the fiddle to whatever this forgotten masterpiece is about just does not connect with me. Nails on a chalkboard. One of the many parties guilty for Arcade Fire.

Elastica

3/5

A bit of a curio these days between Frischmann’s subsequent musical/career choices/tastemaking, the Wire/Stranglers lifts (later repeated with more Wire and The Fall), and the speculation about just how much input Elastica had from “Dan Abnormal.” To that end, my sense has always been that Frischmann had a great sense for simply what worked, be it in the early days of Suede and Blur or here, picking Donna Matthews, and on The Menace, so borrowing from Albarn might’ve been just as plausible as Wire. Dude was on an all time run, it’s hard to think that didn’t result in contributions, credited or otherwise. Whatever the authorship, Elastica is a rip smart, sharp collection, still as cool today as in britpop’s hey day. It’s a bummer Frischmann quit music.

Kenya

Machito

3/5

Can’t find much info on this one. Mostly feels like the accompaniment to a dance troupe that became its own standalone art form. Super lively for sure! Razzle dazzle!

Who's Next

The Who

3/5

Even in my big Who phase, I knew these hits so well from classic rock radio, tv, and film I couldn’t hear them fresh. The thudding 3 chord motif is kinda hilarious in its monotony, but they sure surround it with appropriate bombast.

Beauty And The Beat

The Go-Go's

2/5

Always had a passing respect for the Go-Go’s although if I drill down enough, that’s about punk rock integrity and well, that’s not what this is. Which can be a foolish idea, depending on who is wielding it. Anyhow, I could use a bit more melancholy or angst here, less rah-rah new wave let’s just have a good time at the dance sensibilities. But it’s not bad...

Rating Distribution

Rating Timeline

Taste Profile

Breakdown

By Genre

By Decade

By Origin

Albums

You Love More Than Most

You Love Less Than Most

5-Star Albums (9)

Popular Reviews

1-Star Albums (22)

All Ratings

Perfectionist