Rap as a genre is maybe the hardest for me to hear with fresh ears. This feels like the pre-Renaissance wing of the museum, except maybe the Renaissance wasn't a 100% great idea in this timeline. All the pre-Chronic jazz-inflected rap feels like a vein that maybe wasn't completely mined before everyone moved on. "The Pros" goes for dub but just feels sluggish after the first five tracks, which is maybe a sign that the first five tracks bring a great energy. Energy changes in the back half but it all mostly works. I didn't expect to think the album was too short, but that's the sign of something good - "Inside Out" is a powerful closer. I guess what I'm saying is maybe don't skip straight to the Caravaggios.
As I write this, a significant portion of the planet is attempting to decipher social media messages from the "leadership" (scare quotes intentional) of Israel, Iran, and the United States to try and determine whether we're going to have World War III or not. Alongside that endeavor are various attempts to propagate, detect, and/or guard against misinformation, scams, bullshit, slop, and flat-out stupidity of various kinds, any of which could conceivably push humanity materially further towards midnight on the doomsday clock. Mistrust is a reflex at this point. The trenches dug within our hearts, indeed. (I got bad news for the refugee being sung about on track 6 - the war may be slightly colder here in America but it isn't any less warlike.)
Everybody who thinks Bono & Co. are just such damn pretentious blowhards for making rock music about the Big Issues of Life needs to explain why, when the Big Issues of Life are really weighing down, a 1983 album from the damn pretentious blowhards is a better and more honest listen than pretty much anything else out there. There are, after all, no atheists in foxholes, whether those foxholes be literal or spiritual or both.
I have this constant feeling of being one or two music theory classes away from really understanding jazz. That said, as someone who doesn't Get It but is trying to, this is a vibrant and affirming set. The opener "Part of a Whole" and "Inner Crisis" are standouts but there aren't really any low points.
You know what's crazy? "She Said She Said" is a damn near perfect psychedelic pop song. It would be a highlight of any other pop album. Here it's, like, the eighth best song. Crazy, like I said.
The first things that jump out to me are the abrupt dynamic changes; beyond just feeling quite foreign to me as an inhabitant of the post-Loudness Wars apocalyptic landscape, they reveal a deep insecurity that cuts through this entire collection - Stevens might be a Nice Guy but he still seems to feel like he has to get loud to be heard. (He's *not* shouting, don't accuse him of shouting.)
And what does he have to get loud-but-not-too-loud about? The usual shit, mostly - rejection from girls, fake friends in the music industry, the requirement to fulfill his contractual obligations. Behind the veneer of Nice Guy-ness he's downright venomous - I hope the subject of "Wild World" feels like she dodged a bullet. No wonder John Belushi smashed this guy's guitar in *Animal House*.
All that said, there's genuine talent on display here, which is part of what makes Stevens frustrating. I guess it's anthropologically interesting to hear the Sensitive Guitar Asshole template used by everyone from John Mayer to Billy Corgan being formed in real time. As a recovering Sensitive Guitar Asshole myself, I guess I should be more sympathetic - but my ongoing recovery is probably part of why I'm not.
What can I say about this album that hasn't already been said, other than the "oh hell yes" I uncontrollably uttered when it popped up as today's selection? Everything that is good and vibrant about the American country music tradition is present here - empathy, longing, tragedy, murder, dirty jokes, gallows humor, family ties, faithless and faithful women and men, poorly behaved dogs, the erasure of the boundary between the speaker and the hearer. Most of all honesty, real as the beads of sweat dripping down the side of Cash's face on the album cover. There but for the grace of God goes he.
I suppose it's a sign of the art form's evolution that rappers, like their prog-rock brethren before them, could come up with a half-baked, interminably horny concept for their concept album and wrap a bunch of ponderous, overlong songs around it. If only they understood anything about what would actually be sexy - better rhymes, for one. To take just one example: the song with all the moaning in the background also contains an extended discussion of the technical aspects of soundproofing the room where you're doing the deed. We are not aroused.
One of the dirty little secrets of punk rock is that it's better when it steers clear of out-and-out nihilism in favor of pure raw desire - eros rather than thanatos. There's a reason Joey Ramone's favorite word was "wanna." And these guys wanna, whether it's ripping off Bowie's "China Girl" to end a song about people enjoying the Thin White Duke's favorite pharmaceutical or trying, over and over without much success, to get with that vain girl at the party who's bad news in a good way. All along there are great lines ("All the weekend rockstars are in the toilet /Practicing their lines," from the aforementioned coke song) to go with the tunes and the musicianship. (the closer "A Certain Romance" is downright beautiful.) The fake San Francisco call-out is telling - if you're gonna be a Northern Beat then this is the way to do it. Bonus points awarded for looking past Roxanne to see the dark satanic mill keeping her on the street at night.
Liberated from Can on account of his inability to keep up technically as a live player, Czukay takes the opportunity to leave live performance behind completely, playing instead with his new studio toys to build a realm of pure fantasy and play (in the childlike sense). And his imaginary world contains multitudes, from mislabeled origins (the guitar figures on "Persian Love" are clearly Spanish, then Caribbean) to cinematic touches (what's the Teutonic equivalent of a spaghetti western, I wonder). He thinks in phrases, not riffs; the whole thing, especially on the standout "Oh Lord, Give Us More Money," has the constantly shifting and moving feel of a living organism. And the synth tone palette is instantly evocative and futuristic - one imagines this album being played on repeat at the Capcom offices in the NES era. By the time he starts taking the piss out of Pink Floyd on the closer "Hollywood Symphony" it's clear he's onto something grand.
I don't know what metaphor to use here: death's-head moth pushing out of its chrysalis? Swamp monster rising from the mud(dy production)? Rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouching towards Bethlehem to be born? All of the above? You can hear they're not quite there yet (Bruce Dickinson won't arrive for a couple more albums) but you can tell where they're going and that the trip will be exciting.
The question of England, In All Its Englishness, was the subject of so much late-Sixties, early- to mid-Seventies British rock music - from the Kinks to Pink Floyd to Paul McCartney's post-Beatles work - that it's sort of odd to realize that Queen, known to most as the foot-stomp stadium-shout lads, were working in that same tradition. It's even odder to realize they might have done it better than any of the others, McCartney very much included. I know you're not supposed to try and remake Sgt. Pepper but they may have pulled it off here; witness the time changes on "Sweet Lady" (shades of Pepper's "Good Morning Good Morning"), Brian May's McCartneyesque vocals on "'39," the George Harrison-influenced guitar solos throughout the album. And "Bohemian Rhapsody," of course, a reminder that the Beatles were themselves trying to create pocket symphonies - and never made one quite as symphonic as this.
Axl Rose sings "Out Ta Get Me" like someone who knows exactly what he did and isn't sorry. Shit, he sings the whole album that way. In the pantheon of gifted rock-n-roll shitheads he might be Zeus - within a few tracks he somehow gets away with bragging about DUI, mooching off a one-night stand for some more booze, and composing the most brazen ode to heroin since the Velvets. And then he has the fucking temerity to demand that we feel bad for him. And you know the worst part? Having seen the end of his story, I kinda do.
If Britpop was an attempt to recover the British musical legacy for a new generation then these Oxonians were mostly after the Sex Pistols specifically - affected snotty accents, lyrics about being outcasts, lots of cymbals from Danny Goffey. It mostly works, with occasional forays into Jaggerism (like on "Strange Ones") - even though these guys are too good technically to restrain themselves to simple onetofreefores (see the aforementioned "Strange Ones"). I don't know yet whether it signifies as anything beyond just competent flattery. Sometimes that's all you need, I suppose - "Alright" will be in ads long after we're all dead.
Things broken by Green Day, on or with this album:
- Furniture, probably
- Various commandments, most notably the one referred to in catechism as "onanism" ("Longview," "All by Myself")
- The narrator's face on "Pulling Teeth," in what I believe may be the first meaningful discussion of female-on-male domestic violence ever in pop music
- Taboos around queer male sexuality (the pronouns on "Basket Case" get all the attention but "Coming Clean" is one of the most touching coming-out songs you'll ever hear)
- The floodgates for an entire generation of punk drummers, via Tre Cool's playing (the fills on "Basket Case" alone are revelatory)
- Various and sundry rules about what charter members of the heretofore insular West Coast punk scene could and couldn't do, in a way that worked only because Billie Joe et al. had the hard-won credibility to withstand peer pressure
- Punk itself, finally, irrevocably, into the mainstream, in a way that not even Nirvana had done a few years before
- Generational divides, which I can attest to because my teenage kids love this album with zero prompting from me (great art has a way of finding the people who need it, when they need it)
- Barriers, which is what all this is supposed to be about
Part blue-eyed soul swerve, part semi-requited love letter to his pal John Lennon (beyond just "Fame" and "Across the Universe," note, for example, the Beatlesque arpeggios on "Won"), multiple parts attempt to keep up with Lennon's Lost Weekend habits, with attendant consequences (the backup singers overpower Bowie on "Fascination" like he's losing a battle with the voices in his head). Come to think of it, this is perhaps the least Bowie Bowie album - the sound of someone tired of his old persona, trying on a new one, not sure who he really wants to be and fighting valiantly to keep the demons at bay. I play it less than Low or Ziggy but I think I respect it equally.
The Duality of Mick: on one hand, he's lazy, amoral, and unabashedly scummy. (The lyrics of "Stray Cat Blues" have probably been read aloud in a deposition at some point.) On the other hand, when he gives a shit he's downright inspiring ("Sympathy for the Devil," "Jigsaw Puzzle," "Street Fighting Man"). And how come "Salt of the Earth" hasn't been on a gazillion ads at this point? I mean, I know why - enough talk about the Brotherhood of Man and people might get the idea you actually believe in something.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever." --This Is Spinal Tap
Mix one part peak Cocteau Twins, two parts early New Order (insouciance toward singing on pitch: it's not just for Bernard Sumner anymore!), one part Robert Smith at his navel-gaziest, one part Chris Isaak's "Wicked Game" (repurposed here for "Infinity," the standout track that imagines what happened after those two impossibly attractive people finally had to leave the beach and go back to the allegedly real world), one part Millennial post-everythingness. Bake while lying on the floor in your mate's flat for 38 minutes or until just kinda done with life.
It's not that they're afraid of desire, it's that they don't quite know *how* to desire anything, not really. I see why it resonated - and why it still resonates.
"I want to tell you something you've known all along," she sings on the opener, and then she proceeds to do exactly that, running through power pop that feels both fresh and timeless in a way that's both relentless careerist (Disco! From a punk-adjacent band! The horror!) and quietly revolutionary by virtue of it coming from her voice. I'd call it the sound of the hunter getting captured by the game except that it collapses the categories of "hunter" and "game" so thoroughly.
You won't believe who Johnny Lydon really doesn't like: religious people, psychiatrists, Malcolm McLaren, his former bandmates, the generic "you" of a million bad nu-metal lyrics a generation later, his record label (how dare they expect him to turn in a full album when he specifically contracted and was paid to do so!). I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say the average church would be better off without the sort of person who finds "Religion I" or "Religion II" (same stuff, just chanted in rhythm and a different cadence, with zero recognition of the irony) convincing. Shame about John - he's not terrible when he can get out of his own way ("Public Image"). But he's in his own way an awful lot.
One of the most beautiful things humans have ever made, full stop, and on par with the Sistine Chapel as a work of Christian art.
It's sort of fascinating to listen to an artist who seems so focused on himself and his own thoughts, to the point of not necessarily caring who does or doesn't overhear what he's doing. (Contrast with someone like John Denver, who hits on a lot of the same nature/transcendence themes but seems to put a lot more effort into welcoming the audience.) At first I wanted to dismiss Morrison as a self-serious wanker, and he might still be. But this album sounds so damn good that I was seduced despite myself. There's a reason your mom warned you about boys with guitars.
Listen, if you don't find this riveting then I'm certainly not going to argue with you - Kevin Shields is an acquired taste and plenty of people don't acquire it and that's fine. But, speaking as a *Loveless* devotee for multiple decades, I could spend the rest of forever listening to Shields look for himself in the wreckage of his former self. Whether it's the haunting rhythmic figures on "she found now," or picking up right where *Loveless* left off on "who sees you," or using the church organ as an instrument of anticipation rather than bombast on "is this and yes," or the erstwhile Britpop throughout (I hear *13*-era Blur in there, which is a very good thing), Shields (and his bandmates!) are never less than intriguing.
I don't know if I can adequately explain why this album matters so much. It feels like the indie-kid equivalent of Syd Barrett turning up for the *Wish You Were Here* sessions as if nothing had happened, only this time, rather than being a husk of himself he's actually ready to play. Standout track is "in another way," which scans like Shields' "The Private Psychedelic Reel" - all groovy and slinky before it mutates into something just plain gorgeous around the 2-minute mark.
Apropos for an album on which the title track has been appropriated for Tarantino's famous "hangout movie," this is hangout music; it's generally pleasant and it's reasonably evocative and it's totally fine if nothing much sticks in your memory afterwards.
For an admitted Coke Album this doesn't feel like one, aside from, you know, having a song called "Snowblind" (they wanted to call the album that but some tightass at the record company objected). The songs are tightly written, suitably loosely performed, and all the right length. I'm not going to bat for the stuff (and it's sort of rich to hear the sentimentality on "Changes" knowing it's about Bill Ward trading his wife for the aforementioned stuff) but, you know, if you rock like this maybe you can get away with it. For a while, anyway.
First thought: if you've ever wondered why people used to consider jazz to be lascivious and immoral music, well, this is why. The subtitle for the second track is "Hearts' Beat and Shades in Physical Embraces," which is a lot of words for a downright horny track that everyone will understand wordlessly. Second thought: and then the pathos sets in, with weighty tunes to explain why all the hedonism was necessary in the first place. Third thought: it all ends with a synthesis, the sex and heaviness and joy all stirred together in a bouillabaisse that feeds and delights. Fourth thought: freedom is freedom is freedom is freedom.
Slower burning and more background-y than its peers - if you're used to the bombast of Howlett, James, Rowlands/Simons et al. then this may hit a bit different. But that doesn't mean it doesn't hit, and by the time we get to "Pearl's Girl" you can hear what the fuss is all about. Now, who's in the mood for some Wipeout XL and a can or two of Surge?
In hindsight this feels like the next Blur album, if Blur had gotten really into Check Your Head-era Beastie Boys in the interim (Exhibit A: "Double Bass," which mimics the vibe and placement of "Something's Got to Give" on the Beasties' album). As a fan of both, I'm on board here; remember that the blues went from America to Britain and back to America before hip-hop ever did.
Maybe it's just the reunion tour talking but if they aren't the World's Greatest Stadium Rock Band then the list of competitors is short. (Journey? KISS? Queen?) They're certainly the best of their era in any event. Transcendence like this wasn't supposed to be possible anymore by the 90s; it sure as shit isn't still supposed to be possible now, and yet here we are.
First things first, I would listen to all these songs in pretty much any format, and have for decades; if you have a choice between Metallica and no Metallica then the answer is pretty much always Metallica. And 15-year-old me (along with the rest of the low brass section in freshman concert band) specifically thought this album was proof that metal was The One True Genre and had swept all its enemies (Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys, mostly, at that point) under its feet. It was a different time and the Sux/Rulz TRL Wars were in full swing. If you know, you know.
That said, in retrospect I question the setlist - seriously, no "The Unforgiven?" Only one track from *...And Justice for All*? - and in general there's not enough done with the orchestra to justify this project's existence (the opening to "Battery" is the exception that proves the rule). Which on some level I get, because teenage metalheads like Former Me couldn't be trusted to follow it, but still - opportunities have been missed here. So in summary it's cool, but inessential. But cool.
"Get me Jimi Hendrix!"
"He's unavailable."
"Then get me his non-union Beverly Hills equivalent!"
I don't know that I need 75 minutes of this, but there are parts I find charming and interesting - "Kein Trink Wasser" is a highlight, and I think I hear the genesis of Korn's "Got the Life" in "Are We Here?". I do sort of question who this is for - it purports to be dance music but much of it doesn't really feel like it (at least not to my ear). It's been good "writing an appellate brief on Saturday" music, I suppose. Maybe it will reward me more on multiple listens.
How am I supposed to review this? More precisely, who am I to review this? I am but a mortal. Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord. Seriously, it's like being asked to review a monolith. Did Moses review Mount Sinai afterwards? Do people review Uluru? 'Cause Uluru don't give a shit about your review, man, just like Page and Plant and Jones and Ghost Bonham don't give a shit, they don't have to, they already made their monument. Where were you when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? I mean, I guess the answer is wherever you are when you hear any of these eight tracks, so iconic that the band's shirts just list all the tracks in order on the back.
All happy bands are alike; each unhappy band is unhappy in its own way. This particular unhappy band is unhappy because, first of all, they're all aggressively using at this point (and not in any of the fun ways!) but also because Lindsey Buckingham, who does *not* want to just remake *Rumours* over and over (you succeeded there, bud) feels like freezing out his bandmates - especially Stevie Nicks - in favor of long stretches of ennui-fueled mid-tempo musings. Cruel irony (ironies usually are): his insistence on trying to be more front and center only makes us miss Stevie more - when she finally arrives on "Sara" it feels like a relief, to the point that she can get away with six minutes of meandering of her own, because hers feels like it's actually going somewhere.
This all sounds harsher than perhaps is warranted; there's nothing *bad* here and there's plenty that would have been worth keeping on a pared-down single album, from "Sisters of the Moon" to "Beautiful Child" to the title track. (Gotta say, hiring the USC Marching Band is an all-time great Coke Album move.) But there's a heaviness about all of it; maybe that's the point, and maybe this album is a record of a party that's gone on too long. Maybe *Tusk* actually is what *Hotel California* claims to be - but, see, *Hotel California* is better.
All the handwringing over Yoakam's poser-ness feels downright quaint at this point, in the Year of Our Lord Thirty-Six A.G. (After Garth). Which means we can talk about how this album puts the "western" back in what used to be called country-and-western music; one can picture Dwight as Henry Fonda, threatening Claudia Cardinale to the tune of "What I Don't Know." He's Nick Cave with a twang, which suits the darkly funny, morbid, self-effacing persona he adopts throughout. And the sweet, misguided attempt to reclaim "Dixie" for some non-toxic purpose is offset by the pretty damn convincing White Boy Tejano (tejano gringo?) on "Streets of Bakersfield" and the title track.
For someone who's known for the artificiality of her visual style, it's striking how effortlessly authentic and authoritative Parton's singing and songwriting voice comes across here (Porter Wagoner's contributions are strong as usual but I think Parton out-writes even him for the most part). It occurs to me that this album is her career in microcosm; the world has been in love with Dolly's image and hasn't paid enough attention to her soul, on display most particularly on the title track and the brassy "Here I Am." She's a walking parable; s someone as biblically literate as she is would surely tell us, man looketh on the outward appearance, etc., etc.
A song cycle about a heartsick man who, having broken his love's trust, keeps trying to write different songs and inevitably just writes the same song over and over. I mean that as a compliment; this album is perhaps the greatest display of denial, guilt, and preoccupation ever recorded - all the more potent because Our Narrator, Nobel laureate that he is, remembers to show rather than tell his stories. The production is unobtrusive and intimate. And Dylan is so lonesome he could cry.
Among other superlatives - more important ones, like Greatest Living Songwriter by resume - McCartney seemingly has suffered the greatest amount of critical disdain for the crime of Not Being His Former Bandmate (in this case, John Lennon). Thing is, I never got the feeling Lennon liked being Lennon all that much, and anyway we ought to be hearing McCartney for who he is and not who he's not.
On this album McCartney is his usual excellent self - a rock hit here ("Jet," "Helen Wheels," and the title track), some mellow folky stuff there ("Bluebird" and "Let Me Roll It" - he always was the Beatles' biggest stoner), some Abbey Road-y combo of both, well, everywhere (but especially on "No Words" and the mini-suite "Picasso's Last Words"). And most poignantly, on "Mamunia," a sweet, hopeful rejoinder to his erstwhile friend Lennon, then attempting to drink and drug himself to death under dark clouds in L.A.
I don't exactly know what he's saying but he seems to be saying it rather well.
The pleasures here are myriad - the Nuggets-esque bell tones (Telecaster?) on the opener "Family Entertainment," the jangle of the opening riff on "I Gotta Getta," the psychedelic organ firing up on the same track, the vocal harmonies on "Jump Boys" (which I guess is the Northern Irish term for surfers?). And "Teenage Kicks" remains as great as its reputation.
It's almost like they decided to write a bunch of pop-rock songs, but only the good parts (cut to a shot of young Robert Pollard in a basement in southern Ohio, furiously taking notes).
Willie ran into Booker T. Jones on the beach in Malibu one day and the rest is, literally, history. The link between Tin Pan Alley and the rest of American music has rarely come through this clear - I hate to be the guy who tells you to focus on the notes that *aren't* there but, you know, *do that*. And I love the Eagles as much as the next guy but this album represents the real Road Not Taken for El Lay country - respectful, serene, centered, edibles rather than powder. "Blue Skies" sounds like a prayer. They all do, actually.
As somebody who loves Glenn Branca and was raised on Black Flag, I feel like a hypocrite for not liking this album more. Maybe I'd appreciate it better if I were more familiar with the Coleman compositions Zorn and co. are beating the shit out of. As it stands I respect it. But.
A rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouching towards the digital hellscape to be born. Where once its fractured, pixelated humanity felt prescient, now it just feels trenchant. "Life in a Glasshouse" feels like a jazz funeral for the future we were promised.
Yes, it's uneven, and yes, the misses here miss wildly - I can't tell whether "Student Demonstration Time" is an earnest attempt at a Doors song or a parody. And the production and related turmoil swirling around the group is constantly evident here, for better and worse (I'd like to take this opportunity to point out that Van Dyke Parks remains a fart-sniffer of the highest order). But the meaning of the Beach Boys has always been, like the sport they represented but mostly didn't actually practice, in moments of transcendence, and those are present in spades here - all the more impressive for being carried out mostly in Brian Wilson's absence. And if there's such a thing as "hitting wildly" then "Feel Flows" does it.
Finally, an album! By a female R&B singer! About sex! And relationships! I was prepared to hate this after the preachy intro. But Sullivan spends the next half hour examining the Problem (which might as well be her nickname for the hung dude she sings about on "Put It Down") from all angles in an honest, vulnerable, angry, self-deprecating way. I don't know that this album deserved all the ballyhoo it got at the time - if you come for the Miseducation, you better not miss - but it's good at being what it is, and that counts for something. I just don't know if I'll be back anytime soon.
Long before Alyson Hannigan became the world's most famous Freaky Band Kid, these psychos were at it, with Keith Emerson doing in his own way for the Hammond organ (heheh, he said "organ") what Cage and Branca were doing for the piano and guitar. Be patient with the slow start; once you hit "The Old Castle" it's nothing but speed and power and virtuosity from there on out. The encore turns the Nutcracker March into a demented dancehall tune for good measure.
Punks aren't supposed to be able to actually play. Punks aren't supposed to be able to actually write. Punks aren't supposed to be able to play in multiple genres and actually hang. Nominal punk music isn't supposed to have this kind of emotional range - tender and hurt and empathetic and hopeful in addition to the usual punk anger. Old-fashioned rock and roll isn't supposed to still sound vital. Isn't it refreshing to encounter something that's *better* than it's supposed to be? I can't remember the last time it happened, honestly.
Proust in musical form: a fey man on the Lower East Side sits in a gay bar and (mis)remembers every love song he's ever heard. In the process he manages to (mis)remember some of the best songs Jackson Browne, Cole Porter, Jonathan Richman, Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Nicks, Bernard Sumner, etc. never actually wrote. A miracle.
As delightfully free-associative as Paul's Boutique was, I think this album - which seems to seek to draw a throughline all the way through American music, from jazz to funk to punk to hip-hop - might be even more ambitious. I also think it's not quite as good as Paul's Boutique (or Check Your Head, for that matter). But the highs are still incredible - "Sabotage" will be played at high school pep rallies for the rest of time (likely with the f-bomb intact).
"Hey, these guys kinda sound like Be Here Now-era Oasis!"
"Actually, I hear early Stereophonics."
"I hear some Second Coming-era Stone Roses in there too."
"And some Chemical Brothers, even."
"There's even a little bit of early Coldplay in there."
Truth is, all those bands sound like them. And when Richard Ashcroft says on the title track that he's gonna die alone in bed, he sounds more than a little like the Northern souls from down the road in Liverpool who they're all really chasing. Phony Beatlemania has rarely worked this well, both as elegy ("On Your Own," which feels ragged and Plastic Ono-y in the best ways) and as muted, half-shrugging optimism ("History," which doesn't outpunch "Eleanor Rigby" in the strings department but at least goes the distance). The Harrisonesque stretch-outs throughout the album only add to the ambience.
There's a reason you've heard "Somebody to Love" and "White Rabbit" a gazillion times in every form of media at this point: Grace Slick's vocals are unique for a White female singer from her era, with a just-right combination of bluesy earthiness and pure tone. Frustratingly, the rest of the band doesn't seem to know what they have on their hands with her, veering instead into more standard, period-reflective folk and soul led by Marty Balin (that's Jerry Garcia playing lead on "Today"). Which doesn't make the latter stuff bad - it's actually generally quite good. But it ain't special the way Slick's voice is. Feels like the musical equivalent of making Bill Walton play on the JV team for a year at UCLA.
Disco Demolition Nights notwithstanding, there's a reason this particular flavor of dance music was so captivating to basically the entire world in the late 70s: perfectly comfortable grooves, lived-in, organic production, and an appealing emcee in Jackson. For years people have debated whether this collection is better than Thriller; for my money, the highs aren't as high here - there's nothing as instantly iconic as "Beat It" or "Billie Jean" - but the lows aren't as low either (nothing as clunky as "The Girl Is Mine"). Nevertheless, it deserves all the acclaim it gets - and now, after Everything With MJ (you know what I mean) it serves as a monument to all that was lost. Look on his works, ye mighty, and despair.
I feel conflicted about rating this album, simply because I already love it and have nostalgic feelings about it and love the genre as a whole. At the same time, it feels sort of weightless - like it's wonderful but not essential. But the rapid-fire songwriting feels equal parts tossed-off and crafted (probably the exact effect Dando et al. are going for), and there are constant sugary pleasures here - most of these songs could be singles, or at the very least in the background of a Friends episode. And as far as Steinian statements about the slacker zeitgeist go, "ship without a rudder's like a ship without a rudder's like a ship without a rudder" is pretty damn good. I don't know if it's a great album but I like it better than a lot of great albums.
I question some of the choices of material (especially the ballads). I question some of the instrumentation and production choices. I question whether I can ever really hear this the way it must have sounded in 1956. I hear the iconic "one for the money, two for the show / three to get ready now go cat go" and I'm mesmerized. What was the question again?
I want to be snarky about Brett Anderson's understudy performance in the role of Queer Rock Star but I can't, simply because I remember what 1993 was like (my own parents were firmly in the God Hates F--s camp at that point). And I couldn't listen with a lyric sheet in front of me but I suspect I will want to do so - I have a feeling there's gold in them there verses. But all that being said, if something here's going to make me question my sexuality it's Bernard Butler's effects box.
Describing an artist as "weird" always carries with it an air of judgment; "weird" artists are always either too out of it to know what they're doing (the Syd Barrett/Daniel Johnston outsider school) or else they're Doing It On Purpose, with all the fraught weight of intention that entails.
Which is to say that, given Bjork's reputation, what's striking, thirty-plus years later, is how effortless this all sounds; casually inverting Byron on "Venus as a Boy," channeling - I don't know, Dinah Shore maybe? - on "Like Someone in Love," making the Eurodance subtext into text on "Big Time Sensuality." This album feels like an old friend taking you on a trip to a place she knows well and is excited for you to get to experience. Music of her mind, one might say.
There used to be these ads for GMC trucks that said, "Do one thing. Do it well." Bolan does one thing really, really well here - finding great grooves and just living in them, for three and a half minutes that feels like it could go on forever. This is a Coke Album in the best way.
As much I hate to encourage the contemporary phenomenon of inceldom, David Thomas and co. made the perfect window into that headspace: by turns horny, abrasive, placid to the point of passivity, contemplative (which a nice way of saying too smart for its own good), and just downright weird in the best way. A perfect soundtrack for making DOOM .wads in your room. Alternate title: Songs About Not Fucking.
Knowing how close these songs were in time to the end of the band, it's easy now to hear hints of everyone's exhaustion. On the other hand, Morrissey's whole thing is that he perpetually sounds Over It, so I don't know how reliable an indicator that is. In any event, the production here is better than on The Queen Is Dead, which is both progress and an indictment; a lot of what makes the Smiths' early work so compelling for me is the rough-hewn nature of the recordings. That said, there's plenty of good stuff here.
I see why this band worked and also why it didn't; Young's guitar workouts are, to borrow a Cameron Crowe word, incendiary ("Mr. Soul," "Bluebird") but Furay gets too much airtime to say too little ("Sad Memory"). Stills seems to gamely be playing mediator here ("Rock & Roll Woman"), but the result feels disjointed rather than simply varied. That said, there's historical value in remembering how much psychedelia owed to the country and soul on display here. And "Broken Arrow" shows both how Over This Shit Young was already (at 21!) and where his restless ambitions would eventually take him.
I once became a vegan because of this album (for a week - my willpower didn't survive a spring break barbecue). I've been listening to it for more than two decades and it feels like I only just realized what Moby is trying to do here, which is call back to and synthesize pre-rock blues ("Honey," "Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad") with Seventies ambient music (the Eno-ism is especially poignant on "Inside") with modern sounds in disco and hip-hop music (complete with Gwen Stefani playing the Debbie Harry role on "South Side"). He's not just listening to Eno and Byrne and Pink Floyd and Scott-Heron - he's listening to the stuff they listened to. Which is why what he's made here contains multitudes - among them Wish You Were Here-esque lonesomeness ("Guitar Flute & String"), a "Dancing in the Street" for a new era ("Bodyrock"), and a spiritual call-out that, like all good spiritual call-outs, is really directed at the one doing the calling out ("Run On"). Also: if you were born to White parents between mid-2000 and early 2002, this album may be somewhat responsible for your existence.
The Revolution is already here - it just isn't evenly distributed yet.
There is a very real sense in which the entire grunge project was an exercise in attempting to rescue the legacy of Sabbath and Zep from the hair-metal bozos - to return to the deep-in-the-cold-dark-ground *heaviness* those bands exemplified. Chris Cornell (on whom the Mandate of Heaven fell in the form of his Plant-ian vocal aptitude) and his bandmates come the closest of anybody to realizing that ambition here. It all works - suitably gentle-rough production courtesy of Michael Beinhorn, grooves that frequently lurch in odd meters but never in ways that feel unnatural, Kim Thayil's riffs moving at the exact speed they should move. Even the impressionistic lyrics work for them better than they'd work for pretty much anyone else, because Cornell's voice is operatic in the communicative sense - the notes he sings and how he sings them are more important than the words per se. I don't need to know what he's saying to *know what he's saying*. I miss him.
Reviewing this so soon after 69 Love Songs is revealing. Stephen Merritt proves that brevity is the soul of wit; his observations land because he sticks and moves. Neil Hannon, on the other hand, lingers and languishes; he feels like he's wallowing in it, which makes his lyrics feel a bit banal rather than incisive. More than that, though, Merritt feels like he's in on the joke of being a lovesick worm; Hannon feels like he thinks he's in on the joke but actually isn't. Insert Vonnegut's observation about how we are what we pretend to be, so we must be very careful what we pretend to be.
Maybe it's just the knowledge of where the protagonists all ended up - Pras in prison, Lauryn on the edge of sanity, Wyclef giving keynotes at meetings of the Legion of Doom or some shit - but the tragic notes in this album feel especially tragic now. Perhaps that's to be expected as we all age (speaking as someone who grew up with this album). And perhaps it's an expression of what I hear more than anything else here - the paradox of youth, of being both incredible artists at the height of their creative powers and simultaneously powerless to transcend the personal and social circumstances that cultivated those gifts. I guess I can't do anything more than look back with some sadness - and gratitude that "Family Business" still slaps, "Ready or Not" still feels vital, "No Woman, No Cry" still wrestles the original to a draw. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, I guess.
Feels more important for what it represents (the flame of the British soul tradition being kept alive and transmitted into hands of original pigmentation, plus a launching-off point for Massive Attack et al. a few years later) than what it actually is (varied, perfectly serviceable, well-produced late-Eighties R&B that more than anything reminds me how much I like Blue Lines and that one Lisa Stansfield album). I suppose it's possible I'm not familiar enough with where the genre was before this to see this as particularly revolutionary, but at least it's energetic.
I've never really asked any of my peers about this but I suspect that for many of us who came of age during the Great Recession the term "recession pop" is never going to be cute or funny or ironic on account of the sheer fucking horror it invokes - your upcoming internship vanishes, then your evening/weekend job cuts everyone's guaranteed pay and just goes straight commission, then you wander into a job fair where there's exactly one (1) employer hiring for non-engineering majors and it's fucking Allstate Insurance, then your dad calls and tells you he got laid off again, and at some point you just wander, dazed, back to your shitty apartment down the hill from campus (stopping at a pre-med advisement seminar along the way because you can pretend to be anything for free pizza) and hope somebody's throwing a party tonight. *We're going nowhere so we'll just dance 'til we're dead.*
*It's Blitz!* isn't strictly a recession-pop album (although there are feints in that direction, most notably on "Heads Will Roll") but it's maybe the best representation of what that exact time felt like - the Yeah Yeah Yeahs camped out in Tornillo, struggling to find inspiration, writing and rewriting and tearing up their progress and rewriting again, spending money they don't have on a record that'll never make back what they owe. "Skeletons" feels like the sound of an entire generation marching towards its own funeral. And when Karen O sings "Run, run away/ No sense of time" she's modeling our collective coping mechanism. It's the soundtrack of a life spent forever in the red. I love it and it also hurts to listen to.
I bob my head, always halfway amazed, when they lay down "The Magic Number" in rapid fire. I laugh out loud when they compare losing your virginity to playing "Chopsticks" at your first piano recital on "Jenifa Taught Me." I reach temporary enlightenment during "Eye Know" (that Otis Redding sample was worth waiting 35 years to clear). I hear the fountain of so much of what hip-hop is, and was, and could be again, on "Potholes in My Lawn." I daydream about how much time was wasted on D.A.R.E. courses when I was a kid that could have just been replaced with playing "Say No Go" for the kids and then walking out. I can't listen to "Me Myself and I" without my White ass shaking semi-voluntarily. Can't help it - I'm powerless against something this good.
From a certain perspective, I am not the sort of person who should be enamored with this album. I'm drug-free and have never tried heroin. I'm not into S&M. I don't pay for...any of the things being bought or sold on this album. I'm not preoccupied with clowns like Reed apparently is (seriously - check the lyric sheet).
So why do I love this album so much? Because it encapsulates *freedom* in the purest artistic sense, because every note of it - the reclaimed Sixties girl-group ones, the folky ones, even the off-tune ones from Nico and the dissonant ones from Cage - testifies to the fundamental truth that *you can do whatever you want*, as long as you do it with your whole chest. And that truth has saved my life, over and over again.
Slavery in America was fundamentally an institution of familial destruction - of obliterating the natural bonds between parents and children and spouses and lovers, selling human beings as livestock to highest bidder at any moment, negating all sense of identity those essential bonds create. *For in the last days men shall be lovers of their own selves, blasphemers, without natural affection.*
So it is unsurprising that Scott-Heron, prophet that he is, is so preoccupied with the loss of family here. On nearly every track he gropes for something or someone to hold on to - brothers, fathers, uncles, cousins, sons, sisters, first loves - and all elude him. And when he confesses on "The Bottle" - after recounting the tales of covetous winos around him - that he himself is one of the hopeless husks hanging outside the liquor store, we understand that the chains were never really broken but rather just changed form.
One's mind tends to wander while listening to jam bands, which is a feature and not a bug. Beyond just taking this in - it's all at least pleasant although it drags a little bit at times (as jammy stuff tends to do), and the good stuff is mostly the stuff you've probably already heard, plus "I Wanna Go to the Sun" - my mind wandered to how odd it is that this album exists at all, much less that it became a cultural phenomenon.
Like, Frampton was never *that* famous before this - his previous album had topped out at #32, he hadn't had any real successful singles, and his previous band Humble Pie hadn't done much of note either (besides purchase Penny Lane from Stillwater for $50 and a case of beer). There's nothing here that's really mind-blowing - even the talkbox had been done already by Stevie Wonder and Jeff Beck among others, and these compositions just feel like pretty standard live-era classic-rock fare. Point is, Frampton wasn't doing anything that Zep or Bad Company or Steve Miller or a thousand other bands weren't also doing at the time. And yet these recordings show he was playing to sizable crowds who were clearly into his music. Like, what cultural itch was being scratched by *Frampton Comes Alive!* - were people really just that desperate to vicariously experience some mid-tempo, vaguely proficient rockin' out? Was it just a fad, like Pet Rocks or Sea Monkeys? Was it better high, like *Fantasia* or *2001: A Space Odyssey*? I'm fascinated by it even though I only kinda halfway get it - maybe *because* I only halfway get it.
For all the ballyhoo about the melange of influences on this album, the best thing I can say about it is that nothing - not the Fugazi-inspired power-chord riffs, not the funk rhythms, not the occasional shred solos, not the timbale figures, not the tribal chants - feels the least bit out of place. All of it is different but it all sounds like it belongs exactly where it is. Metal Cubism. Bonus points for being an all-time great Weight Room Album (time your mid-workout cooldown for "Jasco").
