This is less noisy and more jazzy/post-punk than I expected. The pokes at New Wave and Michael Jackson in the song titles seemed to imply something like Dead Kennedys - I Like Short Songs. Some songs do hit the expected punk takes on politics and capital-s Society (Viet Nam, Shit from an Old Notebook) but the album ranges from very concrete and mundane (a verbatim note from the landlady about not using the shower) to abstract and poetic.
I can easily see how this might blow your head open as a kid in the 80s, especially if you were coming from Top 40 Radio and your parents' record collection.
I don't care for a lot of the vocal performances on this one, aside from the comradely group chants, but I can appreciate this album as a cultural keystone of the late 60s that I had completely overlooked until now. I'm sure I'd heard The Weight and (covers of) This Wheel's On Fire but never knew their origins. I enjoyed the early synth and electric organ flourishes on a few of the tracks, too.
Exciting stuff. I hadn't heard stuff from this early in James Brown's career before and it was cool to find out that he had already taken on the "hardest working man in show-business" moniker and that his vocal style was already fully formed.
Back in highschool I blind-bought Expensive Shit/He Miss Road and loved it. I'd always intended to go back for more but never did until today. Felt like hitting the jackpot when this dropped.
I'd already heard some of this as a consequence of having been alive in 1993 but I'd never heard the full thing. I was too young for it then and I'm too old for it now. Snoop mentions being 18 in one song, so I can totally see how you'd go nuts for this if you were like 14 or 15 when it dropped. The early 80s P-funk samples would sound like your childhood and you'd be in the market for something loud and transgressive
I'm not inclined to really love acoustic guitar folk music but listening to this album for the first time brought to my attention the updated version of "Father and Son" that has him, aged ~72, singing in the role of the father against a recording of him at 22 as the son. The original version was Fine but the combination of his young and old voices in the update is surprisingly affecting.
The start of the title track is to sudden amorous changes of mood what the Wilhelm scream is to guys falling to their deaths
These guys must have fallen into some obscurity after their heyday. Most of the 20th c. artists on this list I recognize either from having heard one of their big hits, seeing them mentioned on one of VH1's boomer nostalgia documentaries, or at the very least, having flipped past their section at a record store.
As you might guess from the title, this is dancey psych rock, perfectly suited to a party scene in some late 60s AIP movie called like Professor Vampire and The Talking Bikini
I love the progressive impulses that motivate this album and the early 90s hiphop sounds but oh my god "Children Play With Earth" is so funny:
"Okay, the way kids are living is 100% European
African boys and girls:
Set down your Nintendo joysticks right now
Unplug the television and make way for an old vision
Which will now be a new vision
Yes, Headliner, lay the foundation
Dig your hands in the dirt (that's right)
Children play with earth (that's right)"
As a kid I did spend time running around outside and playing in the dirt but I also loved videogames and I cannot think of something less likely to work than telling kids to put down the Marios and go play with "the earth that eventually will take you"
The lyrics are by far the strongest part of this. The music often sounds like it's from a commercial for vaguely-specified B2B solutions
This was kinda fun to have on while playing a dungeon crawler. I can appreciate it on the level that it's fun to be noisy, and there were some cool sound design moments, but I'm not sure I'd be able to recognize any tracks on this a week from now
I grew up in the 80s, when the 1970s were commonly held to be the absolute nadir of popular taste. As time wore on, drawn by the allure of the forbidden, I came to love some stigmatized genres characteristic of the 70s and shed my prejudices against the decade.
But as I was listening to Supertramp's shitty attempts at bluesy melisma while reading on wikipedia that this was the sound of them SUCCESSFULLY aiming for a commercial breakthrough, I came to realize that the adults of my early childhood were right. The 70s really did suck.
An hour of chill piano instrumentals. Although it isn't what you'd usually call ambient music, it fits the criteria in that it can sink into the background but still rewards close listening.
Loved a lot of this but the anti-filesharing protest song was very 2001 (derogatory)
By luck of the draw, this is the first album that I'd actually heard before. When I first heard it, I was dazzled by the rapid-fire tumble of genres but on revisiting, I'm not sure how the genre hopping supports the themes she's going for. The James Brown homage on Tightrope is such a natural fit for her talents that it doesn't really require any further justification, but what about the Beatles/Donovan/psych pastiche on Mushrooms & Roses?
I feel like this would have really hit as a teen but Human Cannonball is still a banger.
Who knew that Otis Redding recorded "Respect" before Aretha? Not me! His take is certainly not bad, either, but Aretha's arrangement deservedly made the song all hers.
Wikipedia calls this an embrace of commercial pop, but all of this sounds like it was engineered in a lab not to actually top charts, but specifically to be on the original motion picture soundtracks of action comedies starring Robert Carradine.
The lyrics of "WOOD BEEZ" are cutely playful/surreal, though.
I kinda like how early sample/turntable-based hiphop is often built around tight 1 bar loops, which gives it kind of an obsessive, relentless sound.
Kinda disappointed by this one because I always kinda liked most of Tom Petty's 80s/90s singles. At its worst, it sounds like anything else from the 70s. At its best, it sounds like if Elvis Costello was stupid
It's been forever since I've heard this. I knew my taste in music had evolved since maybe 2004-2005 when I last listened to this but I was constantly surprised at how happy I was to hear Speakerboxxx in particular again.
Kind of fascinating just because I can't imagine anyone unironically releasing anything that sounds remotely like the first five tracks after 1980.
Faves were Shadow of a Doubt and Bubblegum
I already knew that the cover of The Clash's London Calling was based on the cover of this Elvis album, but I didn't find that out for years. Decades, even, and the first thing I think of when I see this is how I missed the reference for so long.
Rock's cultural relevance has steeply declined in the 21st century, so I can't truthfully say that this inaugurated the *current* cultural era, but the first half of my life was spent in the long wake of this initial boom.
That said, I was expecting this to bang a little harder. I kinda hate his vocal phrasing sometimes.
Bjork fronting an alt rock band is kind of like watching a walrus lead a parade. Like, it's remarkable even under normal circumstances but surely awe-inspiring and bizarre if you had never seen or heard of walruses before.
"Do the Strand" bangs. I looked it up on wikipedia and it was inspired by Cole Porter songs, which explains a ton. "In Every Dream Home A Heartbreak" is hilariously unhinged. The title track grew on me a lot over the course of its runtime, with the heavy echoes and drum fills gradually drifting away from their standard sound into giallo OST territory.
I ended up liking this one more than expected. Discovered some non-single tracks I like: Frances Farmer and Very Ape.
"Help Me" was apparently her biggest hit and it's easy to see how it would fit in on 70s commercial radio. "Raised on Robbery" is fitting single material too, the kind of thing that could easily by licensed for a chase sequence on a dusty road. "Twisted" is a cutely comedic and jazzy send-off for the album.
This sounds very 00s to me. You can hear the influence of "freak folk" and electro-acoustic acts like The Books, Caribou and Four Tet.
Bangs. I've been curious about 1950s jazz so it was nice to see this come up.
It's always interesting to finally listen to the non-single tracks on an album that's mostly known for a couple of mega-hits. Or so I thought! "Shout", "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" and "Head Over Heels" were the big hits in the US but in the UK a literal majority of the tracks on this thing charted.
Surprisingly, "Broken" is not one of those. Out of all the new-to-me tracks, this one seems like the one best suited for club play.
I'm a huge sucker for post-punk guitars but I'd never checked out the first Siouxsie album until now. She sounds especially raw on this one, sometimes effectively and sometimes to the detriment of the songs. A lot of "post-punk" is more post than punk but this record makes it clear why the genre ever had the term "punk" associated with it in the first place. Overground and Suburban Relapse are my faves.
I never owned this but this is the platonic ideal of the kind of CD I'd get from Best Buy in highschool on the strength of a single, play through once, play the single track(s) 5 more times, and then never touch again until selling it off in college to make room for cooler stuff.
Bittersweet Symphony is an incredible needle drop in Cruel Intentions but the rest of the album is pretty forgettable. So many of these tracks feel like a shameless but unsuccessful attempt to duplicate OK Computer.
And ok, I know from firsthand experience that Radiohead did not originate the secret hidden track after a long silence at the end of a CD but repeating the exact gesture that ended OK Computer comes off like they're cargoculting Radiohead in hopes that their album somehow becomes good.
Honestly this sounds like peak cocaine. The instrumentation of the early 80s (fairlight cmi, etc) but abrupt structural shifts of 70s prog.
"There Goes A Tenner" is fun and despite the cockney imitation it sounds like it was probably inspired by The Asphalt Jungle (1950) or something near-identical in plot.
I'm not sure what to do with the title track. The concept (destruction of Aboriginal lands in pursuit of uranium) is both strong and well-intentioned but the fact that the song started out with an accidentally racially offensive title shows that Kate was working at or past the limits of her cultural competence.
The lyrics to Houdini are great. Gothic ghostly romances are her home territory.
"One part lover, one part child"
what did he mean by this
anyway this just doesn't hit the same when it's not being blasted over the speakers on the Gravitron
I'm glad I got James Brown Live at the Apollo before this one because it really drove home, especially with the cover of "I Don't Mind," how much Roger Daltrey was doing a JB impression. Well, with the notable exception of the album's title track, where he affects a tweaked-out Mod's stutter.
These guys completely fell through the cracks of late 90s VH1 boomer nostalgia shows, which is the only way I know of most of their peers. I'm sort of indifferent to the folkier stuff, but the more sonically experimental tracks are fun to listen to.
