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.

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

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

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

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.

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”).

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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 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.

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!

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...).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

Horns and punk rock? What a concept.

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

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.

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...

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.

lol cmon man

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nope

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Maybe my favourite album of the 80s

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.

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.

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.