1001 Albums Summary

Enjoyed this. Wish I’d been more aware of it at the time. A fascinating collection of songs.

I like the 'no cymbals' rule. Engaging, thoughtful, listenable in spite of being Peter Gabriel. The singles were the best thing about the album, though, which slightly disappointed. Low 4 star.

An absolute masterpiece. Nilsson’s voice is in top form.

Unfussy roots Americana. Prefer CSNY.

Well, I know this one. JD don't fascinate me as much as they do some people, but I do love their iciness and the way the instruments sound out-of-tune and yet aren't. Good dynamics and drama. An accidental masterpiece.

A masterpiece, Joni in transition. Touching, marvellous and at times laugh-out-loud funny. Thanks to Prince for turning me on to this album in the first place.

On the one hand, a document of its time - that time a band that sounded like Slade had been influenced by the Pistols suddenly burst onto programmes like The Word and demanded your attention. It's also a major offender in the Loudness Wars, as Oasis's output was recorded so compressed that it pinned your ears against the wall. But the songs. Oh, the songs. Cigarettes and Alcohol in particular. Cryptic lyrics, rock 'n' roll excess and noize, noize, noize.

Not my thing at all at first, but grew considerably in stature on subsequent listens.

An absolute gem, this. Why have I never heard of it until today?

"Ya don't fuck abaht wi' Jack White" Jason Williamson, Sleaford Mods The White Stripes hit their high-water mark with this gorgeous 21st century refinement of garage rock. From the stadium-filling riffmonster that is "Seven Nation Army" to the whimsy of "It's True That We Love One Another", the album doesn't hit a bum note. An absolute classic.

A game changer. Admittedly one that spawned OMD, but let's gloss over that. I was fascinated by Kraftwerk as a child, and the notion that songs didn't have to be about humans, or, indeed, emotion. Love this album so much.

Perfect.

Great ensemble album, with the interplay between the band contributing to an incredible final product.

Absolutely stunning songwriting underpinned by Kenney Jones' perfect drumming. A great band for a great songwriter.

If this has been by any other band than the Stones, it would have passed without notice.

The best album of the 1980s and the last great album Prince recorded. I once broke a toe dancing barefoot to Housequake. It's that good.

A strangely tentative album with a degree of recycled material. Think I prefer Bookends.

Dazzled by the brilliance, put off by the cringe

I wouldn’t buy it, but if I walked into a bar with a band plying like that, I’d not only set the drinks up, but I’d have to be gently prised out of the bar at closing time whilst noisily shouting for yet another encore.

This is great fun - bright, daft, tuneful, but with something sly going on underneath. Little weird noises, odd turns, bits that seem to grin while they’re quietly rearranging the room. It comes from that moment where Brazilian music could be playful and dangerous at once - weird enough to smuggle the mischief through for a while before the junta caught up.

He sounds like the real thing straight away - not polished, not tidy, not trying to present folk music to you like it’s some worthy cultural item. More like he’s just wandered in with it already in his coat. What got me was how many sides of it are already there. Some of it feels ancient and half out in the wilderness, some of it feels grubby and practically feral, and then every so often it suddenly sounds oddly modern - like the road to a certain very famous young man from Minnesota is sitting there in plain view. That’s what makes it so good, really. It doesn’t feel “revivalist” in the later clean-shirt sense at all. It feels lived in. Scruffy, dry, funny in places, a bit haunted in others, and never trying too hard. You can hear why so many people would have nicked lessons from it, because it’s got that rare quality of sounding completely natural while still feeling a bit like a dispatch from another world.

It’s one of those records where the reputation isn’t inflated. You can hear within moments why people bang on about it. The groove is the thing - deep, springy, ridiculously assured - but what really makes it land is how relaxed it is. Nothing is over-forced. It knows exactly what it is and doesn’t need to sell itself with noise. What tends to get called “jazzy” about it is really more useful than that. It isn’t just nicking a few classy textures to seem sophisticated. The whole thing moves with a kind of pocket and conversational ease that makes loads of other hip-hop records sound either stiff or overeager by comparison. The two voices help as well - one cooler and more fluid, one a bit more blunt-force and needling - so it never settles into a single tone for too long. Also, for all the reverence around it, it doesn’t feel museum-piece important. It still feels playful, physical and weirdly fresh. A lot of later records clearly learned from it, but this still sounds like the real article rather than an early prototype of something better.

There’s a point at which virtuosity stops being exhilarating and starts becoming slightly exhausting. That’s where I found myself with 25. Adele is, obviously, an extraordinary singer. There’s no useful argument to be had about that. The control, the power, the phrasing, the ability to take a fairly conventional ballad and inflate it until it fills every corner of the room — all of it is formidable. But listening to an entire album built around that level of command began to feel a little like attending a one-woman show in which the performer can switch from Beyoncé to Streisand in the blink of an eye. You spend the first twenty minutes thinking, Christ, that’s impressive. Eventually you start yearning for somebody to miss a cue. My daughter can do that sort of thing. Big West End Style. Total commitment, total projection, absolute certainty that the person in row Z deserves exactly as much performance as the person sitting three feet away. It’s a genuine skill. It can also leave you desperate for Syd Barrett to wander on and sing Terrapin slightly sideways. That’s essentially my problem with 25. There’s almost no slack in it. The songs may be vulnerable, but Adele herself never sounds vulnerable. She sounds magnificently equipped to sing about vulnerability. Heartbreak arrives miked, lit and ready for the balcony. Even the quieter moments carry the sense that an enormous voice is merely choosing, for now, not to flatten the scenery. And yet it would be churlish to pretend the thing doesn’t work. Adele’s great gift is making very traditional material feel monumental without making it incomprehensible. There are no puzzles here. No need to spend three listens wondering what the emotional stakes are. She can take regret, nostalgia or romantic wreckage and make it instantly legible to millions of people. The voice isn’t really sitting inside the arrangements. The voice is the architecture. That explains the scale of 25 rather better than any argument about innovation. This isn’t an album that rewrites the rules of pop music. It’s an album that demonstrates just how enormous conventional pop can become when the person at its centre has enough authority. And I think that’s probably why it belongs in a book like this. Not because it’s Adele’s best album. It isn’t. 21 is, by some margin, a better record: more alive, more varied, more likely to surprise me rather than simply impress me. 25 feels different. It feels like the point where Adele stopped merely being a hugely successful singer and became an institution. This is the monument. That distinction matters. A canon doesn’t only preserve the records that changed musical language. Sometimes it preserves the records that became too culturally enormous to ignore. 25 represents Adele at maximum public scale: the gigantic voice, the gigantic songs, the gigantic emotional reach, the sense that an album release could still briefly make the whole culture turn its head in the same direction. I admire it considerably more than I love it. After a while I start craving a wobble, an odd corner, a badly placed chair, anything that allows a little air back into the room. But perhaps that’s partly the point. 25 is not trying to sound fragile, eccentric or accidental. It’s the sound of Adele becoming inevitable.

There are records which stretch the idea of what an album can be, and then there is A Wizard, A True Star, which appears to have found the idea of an album unattended in a corridor and drawn all over it. This is batshit. Todd Rundgren had already demonstrated that he could write proper songs, arrange them beautifully and make records which behaved themselves. Here, he seems to have discovered that there was nobody actually in charge of the recording studio and decided not to report the oversight. Ideas arrive faster than they can possibly be accommodated. Songs turn into fragments, fragments mutate into other songs, noises appear for no obvious reason, genres are picked up and discarded, and genuinely lovely melodies occasionally swim into view before Rundgren becomes interested in something else. It can resemble someone changing radio stations while simultaneously rewiring the radio. The obvious criticism is self-indulgence. It certainly contains enough material to support the charge. But after a while I began to wonder whether that slightly misses the point. The abundance isn’t an unfortunate side effect of the record. The abundance is the record. Rundgren seems interested in how many things pop music might be allowed to do if nobody insists that it choose one of them. Psychedelia, soul, music hall, electronic noise, elaborate harmony, cheap jokes and straightforward pop melody are all apparently equal citizens. The transitions can be absurd, but there’s usually enough musical intelligence underneath them to prevent the whole thing simply becoming a box of studio tricks tipped down the stairs. It also has something I don’t always associate with supposedly difficult early-70s records: a sense of fun. There’s no great slab of prog solemnity here, no air of BEHOLD WHAT THE SPLICING BLOCK HAS ENABLED. Rundgren’s cleverness is frequently silly, brightly coloured and almost cartoonish. Even when the album is showing off, it often seems amused by the fact that it is showing off. That probably helps explain why Prince’s name keeps appearing around discussions of Rundgren. I don’t particularly hear A Wizard, A True Star as a blueprint for Prince’s music so much as a blueprint for a possibility: one person can write the songs, play the instruments, manipulate the studio, ignore genre etiquette and construct an entire private pop universe without waiting for somebody else’s permission. That permission may be the most important thing here. My other discovery was that Liz likes it. This surprised me rather more than the album did. I’m supposed to be the left-field member of this partnership. She looks entirely capable of chairing a respectable committee while I’m the one expected to arrive waving some obscure cultural oddity about. Then she casually revealed that she first heard A Wizard, A True Star in the sixth-form common room. Of course she did. That matters, because she didn’t encounter this as a historically significant album that critics subsequently told her was important. She heard it when this kind of experimentation was part of the present tense. I’m hearing decades of descendants in it; she heard the thing itself arriving. And perhaps that is the most difficult part of judging it now. So much of what was once astonishing studio freedom has subsequently entered the bloodstream of pop music. We’ve had half a century of artists using the studio as an instrument, jumping between styles and treating albums as constructed worlds. It is difficult to unhear everything that came afterwards. Even so, this still feels unruly. My verdict is that it’s a very good record, sometimes a brilliant one, and also an exhausting one. I admire it more than I love it. There are stretches where Rundgren’s refusal to edit himself is exhilarating and others where I find myself wishing somebody would gently remove a few toys from the room. I can absolutely see why it matters, and I can hear why people became obsessed with it, but I don’t think I’m going to become one of them. What wins me over is that the excess feels purposeful. This isn’t a great songwriter temporarily losing the run of himself. The loss of proportion is the artistic decision. A Wizard, A True Star sounds like Todd Rundgren discovering that there is no adult supervision in the recording studio. I’m glad nobody came to collect him.

There is an obvious version of this album that could have gone horribly wrong. Frank Sinatra, enormous personality, walks into bossa nova, puts his feet on the furniture and turns Brazil into Vegas with a quieter drum kit. That isn’t what happens at all. Instead, Sinatra does something much more interesting: he gets smaller. I’ve always had a soft spot for that laid-back Brazilian sound that became internationally fashionable in the 1960s. Jobim, João Gilberto, Sergio Mendes — music that can be harmonically and rhythmically sophisticated while giving the impression that nobody has broken a sweat. Mendes is perhaps the more pop-facing version of it: brighter, more outward-looking, the smart hotel lounge with the perfect air-conditioning. Jobim’s world is more inward, more suspended, as though time has simply agreed to stop pushing for a while. And Sinatra, remarkably, understands that. This was also a useful direction for him. By the later 1960s he was having to solve the problem of how Frank Sinatra could continue to sound contemporary without doing anything as undignified as pretending to be twenty-five. Bossa nova offered a route out. It was modern, sophisticated and fashionable, but it also suited the things he was already very good at: phrasing, timing, restraint, implication. The crucial thing is that he doesn’t treat Jobim’s music as an exotic accessory. He doesn’t sound as though somebody has explained “Brazilian” to him over lunch. He actually submits to the scale of the music. That is the revelation here. Sinatra usually carries enormous gravitational force. Even when he is being tender, you are aware that Frank Sinatra is being tender. Here, much of that force is deliberately withdrawn. He sings softly, almost conversationally, leaving space around the words and allowing the arrangements to breathe. The authority is still there, but it no longer needs to announce itself. And that turns out to be gorgeous. The danger with music this tasteful is obvious. At some point sophistication can become expensive wallpaper. But the record repeatedly avoids that by being so attentive to detail. The rhythm is gentle rather than vague. The harmonies have movement without agitation. The melancholy is present without being underlined. Everything feels beautifully balanced. It also has an atmosphere I find almost absurdly appealing: civilised, warm, faintly wistful, and somehow outside ordinary time. This feels like an Easter Sunday record. Nothing urgent should happen while it is playing. Coffee should be involved. Possibly sunlight. Certainly nobody should be checking Teams. What I like most, though, is the lack of conquest. Sinatra does not absorb Jobim into the Sinatra machine. Nor does he sound like a tourist trying on a fashionable style. The pleasure comes from hearing two mature musical languages discover that they can coexist. That makes the album more than a prestige collaboration or an exercise in late-60s cosmopolitanism. It becomes part of the wider story of Sinatra repeatedly finding new versions of himself. Not reinvention through disguise, but adjustment through intelligence. Fashion may have opened the door, but musical compatibility is what keeps him in the room. Frank Sinatra discovering that authority can whisper.

I am not, as a rule, a Zappa person. Years ago at Bretton I knew someone who didn’t take recreational drugs because, as he put it, “I don’t want to be bollocking on about fucking Zappa at every opportunity.” That has always seemed to me an entirely defensible lifestyle choice. Which makes Hot Rats mildly inconvenient, because I like it rather a lot. The difference, I think, is that this feels first and foremost like a composer’s record. There is virtuosity all over it, obviously, but it rarely feels as though the point is simply to stand back and admire somebody’s technique. The music has shape. Ideas arrive, develop, mutate and occasionally wander somewhere that seems gloriously unwise for the genre, but there is almost always a sense that somebody knows why they are there. Peaches en Regalia establishes that immediately. It is intricate without feeling fussy, melodic without being lightweight, and full of little decisions that make the arrangement feel designed rather than accumulated. The whole album has that quality: serious musical thinking with just enough daftness in it to stop the seriousness becoming oppressive. Willie the Pimp is the closest it comes to “listen to my guitar”. Captain Beefheart arrives sounding as if he has been dragged through a hedge made of whisky, then the track settles into a long Zappa solo. But even here the playing is unusually coherent. It has a blues construction and jazz logic. The further it develops, the less it feels like somebody emptying a box of guitar tricks and the more it starts to resemble a line of thought. At moments I found myself thinking of Herbie Hancock, Miles Davis or Coltrane - not because it literally sounds like any of them, but because improvisation is being treated as investigation. The groove gives the player somewhere to think. That matters. I have a low tolerance for clever music whose main purpose appears to be demonstrating its own cleverness. Some prog gives me the impression that an enormous amount of rambling took place and the splicing block was subsequently employed to make everybody sound more disciplined than they really were. “BEHOLD HOW CLEVER THE SPLICING BLOCK MADE US SOUND.” The edit is presented as evidence of ingenuity; to me it sometimes just says they didn’t know where the piece was going until afterwards. Hot Rats feels different. It feels composed and played, rather than rambled and repaired. Son of Mr Green Genes is perhaps the best example of why I found the whole thing so enjoyable. I heard a cursed television theme. Liz heard a cop show. Both seem correct. It has the purposeful forward motion of music written to accompany opening credits, except the programme appears to come from a parallel universe in which the harmonic department has been given rather too much authority. The modulations keep turning up in places where good sense might have advised against them. And yet they work. Little Umbrellas, meanwhile, is simply delightful. Light, elegant and slightly odd, it demonstrates something I don’t automatically associate with Zappa: restraint. The record can be dense, knotty and demonstrative, but it can also let a musical idea sit there and be attractive without immediately setting fire to it. That may be the thing I enjoyed most. The album continually has a “let’s see how far this logic can be pushed” quality. Not random experimentation, and not cleverness for applause, but a musical proposition being tested until it nearly falls over. There is always enough structure underneath to let me settle into it. That was the difference between this and some other technically adventurous records I admire more than I enjoy. I could live inside Hot Rats for forty-odd minutes. I can already imagine moods in which I would actively want it around: something intelligent but not solemn, exploratory but not shapeless, technically impressive without requiring me to salute. Serious and slightly daft at the same time. Annoyingly, that turns out to be a very good combination.

I missed Django Django completely in 2012. Not disliked it, not ignored it, not filed it under “indie band I should probably investigate”: absolutely no radar ping at all. In retrospect there was a fairly mundane reason. Early 2012 was dominated by hernia surgery and a slow recovery; by the time I was properly re-entering the world, Manchester City were winning the league and I was still rough. Django Django simply passed through a temporarily unattended part of my life. Thirteen years later, bloody hell. What a debut. The opening feels almost like an overture: something Kraftwerky in the rhythmic machinery, then a little shift of centre, a slightly wonky guitar, and suddenly we’re somewhere closer to the handmade art-pop world of Pillows & Prayers. That sets out the album’s trick rather neatly. Django Django sound polished, but deliberately small-scale. They have bedroom-pop instincts without ever sounding like amateur hour. The influences are peculiar. XTC’s eclecticism is in there, certainly: that ability to pull bits from everywhere without sounding like a band displaying its record collection. “Firewater” is glam colliding with the lolloping ease of the Beta Band’s “Dry the Rain”. Elsewhere those huge vocal harmonies bring to mind the Polyphonic Spree and Brian Wilson. At times the simplest description may be the Beach Boys on stylophones. Yet none of it feels derivative. In fact, Django Django sound less as though they evolved naturally out of a scene than as though they were beamed in fully formed. The production is a huge part of the pleasure. Percussion often sits not at the front of the mix but in a small, boxy room of its own. Ring modulators, treated sounds and little scraps of guitar occupy separate pockets. Pan gives the record width, but reverb and delay create its depth: foreground, middle distance, little things glinting at the back. The elements remain distinct enough that attention is invited to wander. You can follow the groove for a while, drift toward a harmony, notice some tiny electronic intervention at the edge, then come back to find the song still perfectly intact. That spatial discipline mirrors the songwriting. “Waveforms” sounds pleasingly lo-fi without actually being rough. “Zumm Zumm” is simply charming. “WOR” moves from groove to understated harmonies and then into a psychedelic build with the peculiar elegance of something designed by a committee who had, for once, been given a decent brief. And that may be the important thing: constraint. This is an album full of people who plainly have more ideas than they need, but who also know when to stop. The oddness is allowed to tilt the songs, never to annex them. That places Django Django in a very British art-pop lineage: McCartney’s McCartney and Ram, 10cc, XTC, even Sean Lennon’s Into the Sun. Records where studio curiosity, strong melody, humour and eccentricity coexist without anyone demanding applause for being clever. Art pop without the smartarse element. The vocal harmonies give all this experimentation its roots. However strange the surrounding architecture becomes, voices locking together connect Django Django to something much older and simpler in pop. That was where the Beatles began too. Oddness and lineage at the same time. Perhaps that is why this record feels so coherent. Having once discovered just how exhausting the innocent sentence “I’m making an album” can become, I find the achievement of a debut like this slightly staggering. Plenty of first albums contain good songs and exciting ideas. This one already knows the dimensions of its own universe. Baroque pop without the weight. Sunshine without the sugar rush. Imagination under competent administration. I absolutely love it.

TLC – CrazySexyCool I knew “Waterfalls”, obviously, and had always liked the slink of it, but I’d never really investigated the world around it. CrazySexyCool turns out to be exactly the sort of mainstream R&B I tend to enjoy: understated, polished, groove-led and built with a very strong understanding of pop listenability. What I noticed first was how little the record seems to push. The rhythm section sits back, the vocals sit inside the arrangements rather than climbing on top of them, and everything moves with this loose, unhurried confidence. The songs don’t arrive waving their arms for attention. They sort of slide into the room. That is what I’d always liked about “Waterfalls”, without really having a name for it: the slink. The track barely seems to break stride. Even with all that melodic and lyrical weight, it never turns into a Big Song in the usual sense. It glides. And hearing the album around it makes that feel less like a one-off piece of production magic and more like part of TLC’s whole aesthetic. There’s a softness to the sound, but it isn’t flimsy. The grooves have enough definition to keep everything moving, while the vocals remain conversational, intimate and remarkably unforced. Nobody seems interested in proving how loudly or extravagantly they can sing. The effect is much sexier for it. That restraint is probably the important bit for me. A lot of later R&B can feel very declarative: here is the hook, here is the attitude, here is the point, and we will now deliver all three directly at your forehead. TLC are much more c’mere, babe. The confidence is there, but it doesn’t need to announce itself. It also explains why I always had such a soft spot for All Saints, who now strike me as a sort of homegrown village-fête version of TLC. That sounds crueller than I mean it. They had the same instinct for understatement, the same belief that coolness didn’t require shouting, although with rather less American studio luxury and rather more British weather. And the moment Shaznay Lewis opened her mouth, I was putty anyway. There is something deeply attractive about pop that knows how little it needs to do. CrazySexyCool is smooth without being bland, expensive without being vulgar and accessible without sounding desperate for approval. It doesn’t grab you by the lapels. It just moves slightly closer and waits for you to notice.

At 27, I thought Woodface was inessential. At 61, I think that judgement tells me rather more about 27-year-old me than it does about Crowded House. In 1991 I was listening to Prince obsessively, deep in baggy, hanging around people who liked psychobilly, going to see Johnny Thunders near the end of his life, and drinking in bars where the carpet alone constituted a health and safety issue. I liked music that seemed to matter immediately: music with danger, scene, attitude, damage, modernity. Crowded House looked suspiciously well-adjusted. They wrote proper songs, sang in tune and seemed like people who knew where the washing-up liquid was. I sneered. The funny thing is that even then the case against me was already quite strong. Around the same period, a fanzine called Slag jokingly dismissed me as a “Prefab Sprout fan”. I laughed because it was truer than I let on. I clearly already had the receptors for yearning, wit, sophisticated melody and beautifully constructed pop. I simply preferred those things when they arrived wearing less respectable clothes. Listening to Woodface now, that contradiction becomes rather obvious. “Chocolate Cake” wins me almost immediately. It is sharper, sillier and more insolent than the tasteful adult-pop object I had preserved in memory. The whole record is dafter than I had any right to expect. That matters, because it means the craftsmanship never becomes upholstery. Then “It’s Only Natural” arrives and lands much harder than it did in 1991. Nothing about the song has changed. I have. What I once heard as merely tasteful now sounds poised, emotionally exact and melodically effortless. “Fall at Your Feet” is worse, in the sense that it leaves even less room for my younger self to hide. I must have heard it countless times while maintaining that Crowded House were somehow beside the point. In fact it is beautifully controlled: vulnerable without pleading, moving without insisting that I be moved. That may be the largest change in me as a listener. At 27 I tended to equate force with importance. I wanted music to announce itself through danger, novelty, scene or abrasion. At 61 I am much more interested in what can be done without forcing the point. Restraint no longer sounds like weakness. Craft no longer sounds like compromise. A song does not need to kick the door in to prove that it belongs in the room. The faint Beatles scent running through Woodface should also have been a clue from the beginning. Not imitation, but the same generosity of melody, the same willingness to let brightness and melancholy occupy the same space, and the same instinct that a song should contain slightly more tune than is strictly necessary. “Four Seasons in One Day” is pure McCartney in that respect, and I mean that as very high praise. It has the kind of small, beautifully observed melancholy that would have sat comfortably on Chaos and Creation in the Backyard. Even “Weather With You”, which I once regarded mainly as the sort of song that would annoyingly lodge itself in my head while I cooked tea, looks different now. Becoming lodged in someone’s head while they cook tea is not evidence of triviality. It is evidence that the song has entered ordinary life. That is a considerable pop achievement. There are moments where the record pushes too hard. “Whispers and Moans” occasionally huffs and puffs, and I recognise the problem because it resembles my own weakness in songwriting. If I try too hard to sound weighty, I often sound less effective. The best things I write tend to work sideways, with a lighter touch. The best songs here do the same. They smuggle feeling in. That recognition is part of the personal arc too. I am not simply hearing Woodface with older ears. I understand more clearly now what kind of craft I value, including in my own work. I no longer need seriousness to announce itself as seriousness. Much of the music I thought essential in the early 1990s drew part of its power from scene, fashion, youth and moment. Some of it still sounds wonderful. Some has withered badly once removed from the weather that gave it charge. I do not regret loving it. That urgency was real. But Woodface never needed the weather. It did not need to be the future. It did not need to be dangerous. It did not need to flatter my idea of myself. It just needed to be full of songs. And it is. So here I am, 35 years later, listening to “Tall Trees” and thinking, bloody hell, that’s decent too. At 27, I thought I was dismissing a record for lacking importance. At 61, I can see that I was partly dismissing a kind of musical value I had not yet learned how to recognise: patience, grace, wit, durability, emotional restraint, and the quiet confidence of very good songwriting. Woodface did not have to change my mind in 1991. It simply stood there until I was ready.

The first thing that struck me about *xx* was how much of its character comes from what The xx refuse to do. Nothing is overplayed, nothing is oversung, nothing is crowded. The arrangements are so spare that every sound has to justify its presence, and the remarkable thing is how rarely you feel anything is missing. Liz’s verdict was that “the tunes don’t go on,” which sounds almost comically faint praise until you realise that it gets right to the heart of the record. The songs arrive, establish their mood, make their point, and leave before they can dilute themselves. That discipline is what makes the album work. Plenty of records are sparse because they are underwritten. This one is sparse because subtraction is part of the composition. The empty space is doing work. Guitar figures appear more like outlines than statements, bass notes have room to carry enormous weight, and the vocals sit inside the arrangements rather than trying to dominate them. There is never any sense that the band are nervous about whether you have got the point. They trust the song, and they trust the listener. The common comparison with R&B initially seems useful. You can hear why people reach for it: the weight of the bass, the intimacy, the duet vocals, the late-night atmosphere, and the willingness to let silence sit inside the groove. There is also something of the production economy associated with the Neptunes here, that confidence that one sharply chosen sound can be more effective than five adequate ones. But the R&B comparison quickly becomes a false friend. This is not particularly warm music. It does not swing very much, the vocals do not have much elasticity, and there is very little of the sense of the body that even minimalist R&B tends to retain. Ultimately this is white indie, albeit white indie that has paid attention to what contemporary Black pop production had learned about space. Its deeper emotional ancestry feels closer to post-punk. There is a line back to Joy Division in the album’s temperature: not in the sound itself, but in the cold air around the parts, the emotional distance, and the sense that restraint can carry as much feeling as excess. The xx make that chill vastly more comfortable. There is no industrial dread here. The coldness is sleek, intimate and beautifully upholstered. This is austerity that knows where the nice headphones are kept. Romy Madley Croft’s contribution is especially impressive. Her guitar playing is wildly tasteful. She seems to understand exactly how little a part needs to do before it starts damaging the balance of the song. I was reminded, oddly enough, of Justine Frischmann: not because they sound alike, but because both have that gift for graphic clarity, for placing a line rather than merely playing one. Frischmann tended towards something harder and more angular; Romy is softer and more inward. But both understand that taste is often a matter of refusal. That may also explain why this record was able to become so successful without ever sounding particularly commercial in the conventional sense. It is mass-market restraint. In old Radio 1 terms, it feels much more Richard Skinner or David Jensen than either daytime programming or John Peel: stylish, selective, clearly cooler than the centre, but still perfectly legible inside the mainstream record-buying world. It never threatens to become difficult for the sake of proving its seriousness. It is HMV-friendly minimalism. And I mean that as praise. There is a tendency to treat accessibility as though it somehow cheapens restraint, but *xx* demonstrates the opposite. Making something this sparse and still making it immediately communicative is a considerable skill. The album does not require you to admire the concept before you can enjoy the music. It simply creates its atmosphere and lets you enter it. What I like most, though, is the confidence of the editing. The xx seem to know that a song does not become more meaningful by lasting another ninety seconds, and that a feeling does not become more intense simply because you add another layer. They stop when the work is done. In a musical culture that often mistakes abundance for generosity, *xx* is a reminder that one of the most sophisticated things an artist can do is simply decline to add anything else.

I came to *Car Wheels on a Gravel Road* knowing almost nothing about it beyond its reputation and the story of its difficult birth. That story immediately made me sympathetic to Lucinda Williams. She took years over the record, rejected work that was apparently close to completion and changed the people around her when she decided they were not getting her where she wanted to go. Predictably, some of the contemporary commentary turned this into a story about a difficult woman who couldn’t finish an album. I’m inclined to see somebody dismantling choices that had been made around her and accepting an enormous amount of risk to get back to the record she actually wanted. Recording is bloody hard work. Once you have sunk weeks and months into something, surrounded by people who would quite like you to declare it finished, pulling the plug requires extraordinary self-belief. There is a point where perfectionism becomes pathology, but this does not sound like *Don’t Stand Me Down* madness, endlessly worrying at details until the process itself becomes the work. Williams seems to have recognised something much more fundamental: this isn’t right. I need to do it differently. If the finished album is the evidence for the defence, she was spectacularly vindicated. Because the first thing you notice is her voice. Everything else is second fiddle to it. Not because the playing is anonymous or the arrangements negligible, but because the entire record seems to understand where its centre of gravity lies. The musicians build a world around her and then get out of the bloody way. And what a voice it is. Not technically spectacular in any conventional sense, but magnificently present. Her phrasing is luscious: sensual, slightly loose, a little bad-girl tipsy. She can stretch something as simple as “Ohhhhhhh, my baby” until it seems to contain appetite, regret, amusement and whatever happened last night. She doesn’t so much deliver lines as sidle into them. There is always the suggestion that she knows more about the situation than she is prepared to put in the lyric. *Drunken Angel* is where I realised how wonderfully dangerous this could become. In lesser hands it could be a sober songwriter observing somebody else’s self-destruction. Williams sings it as though she is scarcely in a position to judge. She sounds as bad as the subject of the song, implicated in exactly the same world of appetite, affection and questionable decisions. It makes the song far more honest. Nobody is standing outside the wreckage handing out moral grades. That is the world of this album: pick-up trucks and hangovers, heat, memory, people carrying yesterday around with them. Importantly, it never feels like Americana as costume. The trucks are not there because somebody has decided that trucks signify authenticity. They are simply what these people drive while going off to complicate their lives. The whole record feels used rather than curated. I kept thinking of Sheryl Crow’s debut, another album whose difficult road to existence seems inseparable from the startling self-possession of the woman at its centre. I also found myself thinking of Chrissie Hynde. Williams is something like the Chrissie Hynde of country: the same adult female authority, the same refusal to package sensuality as sweetness, the same sense that nobody has granted her permission to occupy this much space because she plainly never thought permission was necessary. Imagine Hynde exchanging alleyways and leather for heat haze, pick-up trucks and morning-after regret and you are somewhere in the vicinity. What ultimately makes *Car Wheels on a Gravel Road* wonderful is the combination of exactitude and ferality. Williams fought extraordinarily hard to get the record right, yet absolutely nothing about the result feels over-disciplined. Lust, damage, pride, bad judgement and tenderness remain magnificently untidy. The craft gives them shape without cleaning them up. Three songs in, I stopped caring about the album’s reputation. Canonical importance seemed beside the point. This wasn’t a record I wanted to stand back and admire. This was a record I wanted to take to bed.

I have a standing suspicion of live albums. Too often the audience is roped in as a character reference. The cheering, the applause, the whooping — all of it quietly saying: *look how much this mattered in the room, therefore it matters now*. I like live music enormously, but that doesn’t automatically mean I want the evidence preserved. Plenty of bands have left me thinking that, were they playing in a pub, I’d have to be dragged out at closing time still demanding encores, while having absolutely no desire to take their studio album home from the merch table. _At Fillmore East_ more or less demolishes that objection. The crowd is mixed back enough that they barely function as endorsement. They are almost forensic evidence: yes, this really happened in a room, with no apparent need for the room to tell you how impressed to be. And that turns out to be the whole boast of the album: **look what these guys just do**. The Allman Brothers Band are obviously formidable players, but virtuosity on its own is not terribly interesting. What matters here is their ability to think while playing. George Harrison once contrasted his own tendency to construct a lead guitar solo with Eric Clapton’s ability to jam intelligently, and that distinction feels useful here. The skill is not simply generating more notes. It is hearing what has just happened, remembering it, altering it, returning to it, developing it and knowing when to push forward. It reminded me of birdsong slowed down. A song thrush can sound spontaneous until you examine the pattern closely and hear movement, repetition, variation and development taking place in real time. That is what a good jam ought to be. A bad one merely proves that everybody remains capable of continuing. A good one allows an idea to live through time. That is why the extended playing here rarely feels like acreage. These musicians listen to one another. The guitars braid rather than queue. The rhythm section doesn’t simply maintain momentum; it gives the improvisation memory. The music can wander because somebody always seems to know where the landmarks are. There is an enormous amount of testosterone in the room. This is forceful American rock in a way British rock often isn’t. British rock has always had music hall, art school, theatricality, glam, irony and camp running through it, even when it is pretending to be terribly serious. The Allmans sound almost suspicious of anything that might weaken the claim to masculine conviction. There is very little quotation-mark distance around what they do. And yet it works. It feels like _Easy Rider_: wind over the helmet, engine vibration through the body, distance being eaten. The longer passages make more sense once you hear them that way. This is not musicians standing around contemplating modes. It is motion. “Stormy Monday” produced the strangest moment for me. A few seconds in, I knew it — not the song, but this version. It is one of those rare live performances that has escaped its parent album and become the version that exists independently in the culture. That is the strongest defence a live album can make. At that point the performance is no longer a document of an occasion. It has become the text itself. That made me think of “Too Much Too Young”, where the live version is simply the defining version, or even “Purple Rain”, whose live foundations Prince never seemed especially interested in advertising. The point isn’t that something was recorded live. The point is that the performance had enough authority to become definitive without needing the fact of its liveness as a selling point. The 1001 Albums project occasionally asks for trust. Every so often that trust is badly rewarded and I find myself wondering why a merely successful or respectable record has been elevated into necessity. This one makes a much clearer case for itself. It captures a moment when musicianship itself could be the spectacle: not studio construction, not theatrical apparatus, not even particularly the songs in isolation, but the almost alarming fact that a group of people could generate this much shape, attack, certainty and collective intelligence in real time. This is what they did. And, more importantly, this is what happened when somebody had the sense to leave the tape running.

_Raw Power_ opens like a record that has somehow arrived three or four years early. Not because punk guitarists were about to start playing like James Williamson — most of them couldn’t — but because the attitude is already there: impatience, insolence, speed, contempt for respectable rock behaviour. Williamson is the key to why that comparison only gets you so far. He is one of those guitarists who creates a wonderful can/can’t-play illusion. He clearly can play. What he refuses to do is enjoy the social advantages of sounding like somebody who can play. His technique is used to make the guitar sound nasty, unstable and faintly disreputable. “Gimme Danger” is the first moment where that becomes properly fascinating rather than merely exciting. The song broods, but underneath Iggy there is that repeated manic little guitar figure worrying away at the arrangement. It does not really behave like a lead line. It twitches. The surface of the song is slow, druggy and controlled while something underneath appears to be having a nervous episode. That is Williamson all over: musicianship used to increase unease rather than demonstrate mastery. “Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell” is simply an insolent noise. The guitar sounds as though it has been deliberately made less respectable than a guitar ought to be, but there is still definition inside the filth. That matters. _Raw Power_ is never just undifferentiated racket. Somebody has thought quite carefully about exactly what kind of racket this should be. Then “Penetration” turns up with a celesta. A celesta, in a song apparently preoccupied with sex and drugs. That is a wonderfully perverse arranging choice. It adds this brittle little tinkle above all the grime, and rather than making the song prettier it makes it stranger. More guitar would merely have made the record heavier. The celesta makes it feel faintly wrong. The title track is where I can hear a road leading towards The Damned. There is a ghost of “New Rose” somewhere in the forward rush and the sheer enjoyment of bad manners, although it is not remotely the same song. The missing ingredient is Rat Scabies. His great contribution to The Damned is that the drums are themselves disruptive. He does not simply drive the chaos; he creates another layer of it. That exposes the one criticism I would make of _Raw Power_. For a record so committed to sonic disruption, it does not always seem to have considered the disruptive potential of the drum kit. Scott Asheton drives everything hard enough, but the drums are generally propulsion while Iggy and Williamson get to destabilise the music. Keith Moon would solve that problem instantly, but would create a worse one: you would spend the record listening to Keith Moon. _Raw Power_ does not need another star. It needs the violence to feel collective. “I Need Somebody” changes the gait entirely. It limps. Zombie blues is the best description I can find for it: an old form dug up and persuaded to walk again, except something is wrong with the legs. The blues structure is still recognisable, but it has lost its healthy swagger. Then “Shake Appeal” manages something almost even stranger. It sounds like pre-Beatle dance music for degenerates. There is something wonderfully old-fashioned in its directness: beat, hook, repetition, instruction to the body. Before pop absorbed so much of the Beatles’ older show-tune grammar — the harmonic turns, the major/minor shifts, the bridges that change the emotional weather — plenty of dance music had a much simpler job. Hit quickly. Make people move. “Shake Appeal” has that innocent structural logic, except the Stooges have dragged it through several bad neighbourhoods. That is really what _Raw Power_ does best. It is not primitive because the people making it lack options. Williamson alone disproves that. It is primitive because the band keeps deliberately throwing away the civilising options. Intelligence is applied to impact, filth, movement and bad manners. And then “Death Trip” finishes the album by refusing to finish it properly. There is no comedown, no summing-up, no final piece of wisdom. It just keeps attacking until eventually there is no more record. Anything more elegant would have been a betrayal. _Raw Power_ is routinely described as proto-punk, and obviously it is, but that undersells the strangest thing about it. Punk inherited its nerve much more readily than its musicianship. This is a record made by people capable of considerably more respectable music who have instead decided to use that ability to make rock sound dangerous, stupid, funny and slightly diseased. Controlled degeneracy. That is the trick.

This starts in territory I recognised immediately: that late-90s British world where acid jazz, dub, sampling and cinematic electronica were happily rifling through one another's pockets. There's something of the David Arnold universe about it, but Red Snapper are more committed to the groove itself. The cinematic atmosphere isn't the destination; it's material to play with. And they are extraordinarily good at grooves. The opening stretch is full of them: beautifully constructed, busy without becoming cluttered, and almost entirely free of ego. Nobody seems interested in stepping forward and demonstrating what they can do. Bass, drums, samples, little scraps of sound and occasional vocals all contribute what the groove requires and then get out of its way. The David Essex credit made me raise an eyebrow until I heard the unmistakable bass from "Rock On". That's exactly the pleasure of good crate-digging: something with a strong identity in one context can become part of an entirely different soundscape. I recognised the method, too. My own earliest recording experiments were loop-based instrumentals, and I loved making them. I'd set something running and incrementally feel my way towards the finished piece, changing patches, adding and subtracting things, seeing what happened. I generally preferred MIDI loops because royalty-free audio loops could carry an unfortunate GarageBand aural stamp. Sampling offered infinitely more interesting possibilities, but a one-man amateur musician doesn't have much of a sample-clearance department. Red Snapper had access to a much bigger playground, and they use it brilliantly. "Shellback" is assertive; "Don't Go Nowhere" is lovely, with something that reminded me sideways of Étienne de Crécy's "Prix Choc"; "The Rake" is a beautifully judged piece of work. "Bussing" may be my favourite, a gorgeous groove that seems to need absolutely nothing more than it has. "I Stole Your Car" is another wild success, including a vocal that sits exactly where it should. It's also a superb car album, which I mean as considerable praise. You can put this on and let it provide motion and atmosphere while retaining enough attention to avoid all the twats trying to kill you. You can groove to it. But you can equally sit at home and listen closely, because beneath that immediate physical pleasure is a cerebral record full of tiny interactions, changes of density and remarkably patient development. "Alaska Street" makes that especially apparent. It seems to develop its groove at a glacial pace before the mood changes and the track begins to hang and withhold. By this point the album itself is changing. The sound becomes increasingly spectral and pared back, as though all that earlier excitement is gradually cooling. And then the ending completely complicates that reading. "Belladonna" has what I can only describe as a submariner groove: seabed cool. "They're Hanging Me Tonight" begins beautifully, and even when the drums arrive there's no overwhelm. But the closing stretch gets genuinely heavy: portentous, claustrophobic and menacing. Not abrasive heaviness, either. It's more like drugged chaos. At moments a melody seems to be trying to emerge from it, only to sink again before it can establish itself. So what initially seemed like an exceptionally tasteful groove album turns out to have a superb arc. Excitement gives way to chill, chill becomes something spectral, and eventually the same restraint that made the early music so pleasurable becomes capable of producing real menace. Red Snapper never have to abandon their basic language to get there. That's what finally sold me on its place in the canon. _Our Aim Is to Satisfy_ can function as background, reward close attention or simply make you move, and none of those feels like a lesser way of hearing it. It is cerebral without sacrificing physical pleasure, sophisticated without becoming polite, and constructed by musicians who understand that sometimes the best thing you can do for a great groove is leave your ego out of it.

There is a vocabulary problem around the Go-Go’s. They get described as fun, spirited, breezy, infectious: words that aren’t exactly wrong, but somehow feel like pats on the head. Listen properly to _Beauty and the Beat_ and another word keeps demanding attention: tight. This band is tight as all hell. That matters because it’s surprisingly difficult to draw a long historical line of non-novelty, all-woman guitar pop bands. You can go back to Goldie and the Gingerbreads in the 60s, but then the trail gets remarkably thin until punk creates the conditions for another generation to pick up instruments, write songs and drill, drill, drill until they function as a gang. There was never anything intrinsically male about that route into pop music. The Go-Go’s demonstrate the obviousness of it so completely that the absence of more predecessors starts to look peculiar. They announce themselves with “Our Lips Are Sealed”, already one of the great pop singles, and then spend the album demonstrating that the single is the product of a formidable working band rather than some lucky convergence in the studio. “How Much More” has a guitar figure that recalls “His Latest Flame”; “Tonite” already hints at the jangling guitar language that would emerge in the Paisley Underground; the harmonies on “Lust to Love” are superb. There are decades of guitar pop apparently waiting to happen inside this record. “This Town” shows their economy particularly well. An opening guitar motif has a lovely Duane Eddy-ish twang, but when the solo arrives it is stripped down and simple rather than trying to outdo what has already been established. That restraint runs throughout the album. These are musicians making decisions for songs, not looking for opportunities to demonstrate that they can play. And then there is Gina Schock. On “Skidmarks on My Heart” in particular she propels the song furiously while the entire band remains locked around her. Guitars, bass and harmonies all seem bolted together, leaving Belinda Carlisle free to be gloriously loose over the top. That relationship between discipline underneath and personality above is one of the record’s great pleasures. Carlisle is putting in one hell of a shift throughout: even on the more forlorn “Fading Fast”, little drop-offs at the ends of phrases give the performance considerably more emotional detail than her larger-than-life vocal personality might initially suggest. The album also knows when to stop charging forward. “Automatic” slows everything down and lets atmosphere reign: picked guitar, tremolo and stop-time create space and tension rather than simply filling another three minutes with hooks. Elsewhere, “You Can’t Walk in Your Sleep (If You Can’t Sleep)” somehow anticipates the bright, clipped guitar pop of the Housemartins years before the fact, while the closing stretch lets more of the Go-Go’s earlier club-band identity show through. “Can’t Stop the World” even contains a faint glimpse of the sort of exuberant guitar pop-rock that would be filling the charts two decades later. Perhaps the most revealing comparison is “We Got the Beat”. Imagine precisely that level of economy, rhythmic discipline and collective attack coming from a male mod-revival band such as Secret Affair and nobody would hesitate to call them sharp, disciplined and extraordinarily tight. With the Go-Go’s, the temptation has always been to stop at “fun”. Well, they are fun. Immensely so. But the fun is the result, not the method. Underneath it is a band that has rehearsed until the machinery disappears, leaving only the exhilarating impression that making almost perfect pop is the easiest thing in the world.

I used to find _Remain in Light_ dense, hard and unrewarding. I could hear that Talking Heads were doing something clever, but mostly I heard clutter. Coming back to it now, the clutter has resolved itself into a band locked into a hypnotic groove, and I find the whole thing exhilarating. The great conceptual leap is that this is music which has largely stopped relying on chord changes to create movement. Talking Heads and Brian Eno build loops out of individual performances, then create development by adding, subtracting and reintroducing elements. The remarkable thing is how often those reintroductions _feel_ like chord changes. A guitar figure returns, a voice appears, the percussion is reweighted, and the entire harmonic colour seems to change even though the underlying structure has barely moved. They have found another way of doing the job. In that sense, _Remain in Light_ feels like one of the places where the harmonic world inherited from white 1960s pop finally loses its monopoly. Not because chord progressions suddenly became obsolete, but because this record demonstrates that you simply don't need them to make music move. Rhythm, texture, density and repetition can do it instead. It also changes the role of the singer. The frontman doesn't stand above the music while the band accompanies him; he wanders in and out of the system. Sometimes he's preaching, sometimes chanting, sometimes telling a story, but ultimately he has to submit to the groove like everybody else. Even _Listening Wind_, the closest the album comes to conventional narrative, refuses to reorganise itself around the story. That beautiful four-bar motif comes about as close as the record gets to a chord change, while the groove remains a wash through which the voice passes. It consequently feels slightly in bad faith to single out tracks. This is a glorious wash of a record, and repeated listening isn't really about decoding it. It's about surrender. Follow one guitar part this time, the percussion next time, a backing voice the time after that. The system remains in place while you change your position inside it. Nevertheless, "The Great Curve" is as close as the album gets to a manifesto, and I don't just mean the lyrics. Everything this record believes is demonstrated there: motion without harmonic travel, repetition generating escalation, individual musicians submitting to a collective system, enormous density without collapse. Then Adrian Belew is allowed to FREAK over the top of it. The groove underneath him is so secure that his guitar can sound completely ungovernable without threatening the structure at all. The final minute is sublime: they simply keep intensifying what is already there until repetition itself becomes release. That's what I most admire about _Remain in Light_: the nerve. This working method could have crashed and burned spectacularly. Remove conventional harmonic movement and you risk monotony. Build from loops and you risk sterility. Keep adding independent parts and you risk an incoherent racket. Deny the singer his customary authority and you risk removing the listener's focal point. Having taken all those risks, Talking Heads and Eno then have to make hundreds of tiny decisions about what enters, what disappears and what is left alone. The choices are almost absurdly good. So _Remain in Light_ isn't great just because it's influential, clever or ahead of its time, although it is all three. It's great because it takes a set of extraordinarily risky decisions and proves they can function as music. Forty-odd years after first struggling with it, I think I've finally stopped trying to make the album come to me. You surrender to the groove, choose an element and follow it. Or, more simply: move. Dance.

Few albums in the 1001 have made themselves quite so difficult to enter. The opening pairing of “Wesley’s Theory” and “For Free?” produced an immediate _steady on_. Putting Thundercat and George Clinton on your opening track is a statement of intent; following it with frantic spoken-word jazz that seems determined to deny you a foothold feels almost like a warning to casual listeners. Then “King Kunta” arrives, the groove locks in, and suddenly the persistence is rewarded. By “Institutionalized”, I was in. The key to the album, for me, is its use of jazz. Rock, pop and rap have often worn jazz like a stylish overcoat, borrowing its instrumentation and sophistication without necessarily adopting its language. _To Pimp a Butterfly_ goes much further. This is closer to the language of hard bop: instruments pushing against one another, tension being sustained rather than immediately resolved, rhythm behaving as a conversation rather than simply providing a platform for the singer. At times it sounds like the musicians are arguing with each other, with Kendrick Lamar standing in the middle trying to work out what everybody means. That makes the music peculiarly suited to what Lamar is trying to say. Success, race, guilt, pride, exploitation, responsibility, anger and self-doubt don't arrive here as neatly separated subjects. They jostle for space just as the musicians do. The album can feel like a particularly avant-garde support-group meeting set to jazz: bravado, humour and deflection until somebody suddenly says something painfully real and changes the atmosphere in the room. “u” is the most startling example. It is desperately uncomfortable, but necessary. The swagger that has preceded it collapses into self-recrimination, and Lamar allows the performance itself to sound damaged. Consequently “Alright” means much more when it arrives. Its affirmation has been fought for rather than printed on a motivational poster. Lamar's voice is crucial to all this. He doesn't possess the kind of naturally imposing voice that supplies instant gravitas, nor does he always sound effortlessly comfortable around a microphone. I came to love that. There's hesitancy and thought in his delivery, as though conclusions are being reached while he's speaking. Even his confidence can sound provisional. On an album filled with competing voices and obligations, a more conventionally authoritative rapper might have made the whole thing feel considerably less honest. The musical inventiveness isn't entirely consistent. “Hood Politics” briefly made me feel as though I'd fallen back into the hands of a perfectly ordinary hip-hop producer, although perhaps that says more about how extraordinary its surroundings are. “How Much a Dollar Cost”, meanwhile, has chord changes that made me think somebody from Radiohead had wandered into the studio — “Everything in Its Right Place” stretched into something slower and more ominous. It also raised my one significant reservation. Having spent so much of the album using jazz to hold contradictions open, the later stages increasingly use music and narrative to move towards resolution. By then I was experiencing the peculiar anxiety of reaching the finale of a television series I've grown to love: _Happy Valley_ final party, or _Game of Thrones_? The album does become noticeably more ceremonial as it gathers its themes together. You can almost hear it putting on its best clothes for the ending. Thankfully, it tidies the ceremony more than the conflict. Fame hasn't solved guilt; insight hasn't eliminated self-doubt; the relationship between individual success and collective responsibility hasn't acquired a convenient answer. Lamar has become better able to articulate the problems, which isn't the same thing as solving them. That distinction saved the ending for me, and completed a remarkable reversal. I began wondering whether this record actually wanted me there. I finished reluctant to leave.

This is one of those albums that reminds you how much can be achieved by simply getting the fundamentals right. Proper songs, properly sequenced, and a clear sense of what the record is trying to be from the first note to the last. It sits in that late 60s or early 70s tradition of the album as a continuous experience rather than a collection of tracks. There is an obvious lineage back to Marvin Gaye in the way it flows and holds its emotional temperature, but it never feels like an exercise in homage. It just understands the form and works within it. What stands out is the control. The album is clever, but never in a way that draws attention to itself. Influences are used as signals rather than statements. A hint of Watchtower in a guitar figure, French film music in the backing vocals, a touch of Blur’s 13 or Think Tank weariness in the tone. These elements appear briefly, do their job, and are absorbed back into the whole. The French film music strand is particularly effective. It allows the album to deliver emotion indirectly, through atmosphere and melody rather than declaration. Moments feel observed rather than performed, which keeps everything grounded even when the material could easily tip into grandness. There is also a strong thread of introspective gospel throughout. Not the outward, communal kind, but something more inward and reflective. It adds weight without volume and gives the album a sense of quiet moral seriousness without ever becoming heavy handed. Even when the record opens itself up, as on Hero, it feels like play within a defined system rather than a loss of focus. The palette broadens, but the identity holds. By the closing stretch, the cohesion is undeniable. Nothing feels like filler and nothing breaks the spell. What makes it land is the balance. It is clever, tender and heartfelt at the same time, which is harder to achieve than it sounds. Too much of any one of those and the whole thing would tilt. Here, they are held in proportion. It is not a concept album and it is not trying to be one. It is simply a collection of magnificent songs that belong together, and that is a rarer achievement than it used to be. A modern classic.

There’s a version of this album that shouldn’t work at all. Tango rebuilt inside a loop-based, downtempo framework sounds like the sort of idea that collapses into pastiche or polite background mush. It doesn’t. It holds. The key is restraint. Everything is tightly controlled. Rhythms are locked, arrangements are measured, and nothing is allowed to overperform. Even when the music heats up, it never tips into urgency. It just runs a little hotter at the same speed. That’s a difficult balance to strike and it’s maintained throughout. What stands out is how it behaves in a room. It doesn’t demand attention, but it isn’t ignorable either. Given a bit of time, it starts to feel less like a record and more like part of the environment. Little details drift through. Background noise, distant horns, the sense of a world just beyond the speakers. None of it is foregrounded, but it softens the edges of what could otherwise feel too clean or too sealed. There’s something quietly innovative about the approach. Not in a “look at this clever fusion” sense, but in how the system has been solved. Tango is treated as material rather than performance, something that can be looped, contained and recontextualised without losing its weight. It’s closer to ambient in function than anything else. Ambient tango is about as accurate a description as you’re going to get. It also sits in an interesting place historically. Released late in 2001, it feels like a late arrival from a 1990s mindset. Cosmopolitan, design-led, comfortable with blending traditions without worrying too much about where they came from. It doesn’t react to the shift happening around it. It just exists, fully formed, as a piece of work built on slightly earlier assumptions. The tone is completely straight. There’s no wink, no sense of novelty. That’s probably why it avoids becoming silly. The mischief, if there is any, is structural. The juxtaposition of elements, the decision to submit something expressive and human to a system that keeps it contained. It shouldn’t quite work, but it does. It’s also more precise than it first appears. There’s a kind of European functionalism to it. Everything is in proportion, nothing excessive, nothing undercooked. It feels assembled rather than performed. Closer in spirit to something like Yello without the overt playfulness. The method without the mischief on the surface. The limitation is that it rarely forces a reaction. The emotional range is narrow and it doesn’t escalate into anything overwhelming. You’re unlikely to come away changed by it. But that’s partly the point. It’s not trying to do that job. What it does do is create a stable, inhabitable space. Music that can be paid attention to or not, without collapsing either way. It’s a tool as much as anything else, something you can reach for when you want the room to settle without going flat. As an example of how to build something that is clever without being demanding, it’s very well judged.

This is where the Hi Records system properly announces itself, but it still feels human. Not yet the sealed perfection of the later records - there’s a bit of air in it, a bit of give - and that turns out to be part of the appeal. The title track is the obvious centre of gravity. Not much left to say about it except that the restraint sets the tone for everything that follows. Green never needs to push. The band never needs to decorate. It just sits at exactly the right emotional temperature and stays there. What becomes clear quite quickly is that the album isn’t interested in peaks. It’s about maintaining a condition. Groove over development, tone over display. The chords are rich but never announced - extended, softened, absorbed into the texture. You feel them rather than notice them. The rhythm guitar is a big part of that. Not strumming, more stitching - little muted fragments living in the gaps, keeping everything moving without ever drawing attention to itself. Take it out and the whole thing would quietly collapse. Green’s voice operates on the same principle. Minimal attack, gliding into phrases, often into falsetto without any sense of a join. It’s the opposite of belting. Presence without force. When he does get “muscular”, it’s by his own standards - a slight increase in weight or grain rather than any obvious push. “So You’re Leaving” is a good example of how the arrangement splits the emotional load. The horns carry the urgency, flirting with overstatement but stopping short. Green stays composed, which makes the underlying tension feel more real. It’s someone holding themselves together rather than falling apart. “I’ve Never Found a Girl” is almost absurdly understated at the start. He arrives mid-thought, barely disturbing the groove. It feels less like a performance and more like you’ve tuned into something already happening. “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” shifts register entirely. Less a song, more a sermon. The arrangement thins, time stretches, and the question just sits there. Heartbreak as testimony rather than drama. The organ work here is exceptional - swell pedal constantly shaping the dynamics, Leslie speed changes judged rather than showy. Nothing is static, but nothing calls attention to itself. “Old Time Lovin’” leans harder into the gospel side. More communal feel, more rhythmic insistence, but still under control. The band suggests lift without ever fully committing to it. Across the record there’s a pattern with the endings. You expect the fade, and it doesn’t come. Or it comes late, only once the repetition has done its job. The groove is allowed to sit, to become a state rather than a section. The fade feels like permission rather than structure. “Judy” works as a restatement of the method. Same components, fully aligned. No attempt to conclude anything, just a quiet confirmation that the system holds. “Ain’t No Fun to Me” closes things out in a slightly deeper register. Same approach, but with more weight under it. It could have gone swampier, grittier, but it stays within the Hi discipline. Restraint carrying heat and heft rather than absence. What the album gets right is proportion. Nothing overreaches, nothing is missing, and nothing is there for show. It doesn’t try to impress you. It just keeps being correct. And that turns out to be harder to achieve than anything more obviously ambitious.

There’s a particular kind of record that doesn’t try to ingratiate itself. This is one of them. First pass, it can feel a bit narrow - everything sitting in a similar register, no obvious low-end cushion, vocals that don’t soften or blend in the expected way. You can see how someone might reach for “samey” and think the job’s done. But it isn’t repeating because it’s run out of ideas. It’s holding a system in place. The guitars split the work rather than stacking it, the drums carry more weight than you initially clock, and the two voices don’t really harmonise so much as coexist in a kind of managed tension. It’s not a band missing a bass player, it’s a band that has redistributed the function. The title track is a good example of the con. It doesn’t sound bass-less because the job has been spread around. “One More Hour” is where the twin-voice thing really shows itself - not blending, not resolving, just two lines occupying the same space with different intent. That’s the engine. “Turn It On” is the fork in the road. The insistence either locks you in or sends you packing. It doesn’t develop so much as hold, and if you’re not listening for what’s happening inside that, it can feel like it’s going nowhere. If you are, it’s doing quite a lot. “The Drama You’ve Been Craving” proves they can shape things when they want to. “Heart Factory” is where the architecture becomes visible - same system, but the gain is down and you can hear the wiring. The chorus feels like a Blue Peter “here’s one we did earlier” reveal rather than a bolt-on payoff. “Little Babies” is scurrilous fun, a bit of a sanctioned breach of protocol. “Not What You Want” is a straight declaration - no negotiation, just the line set down and left there. “Buy Her Candy” shifts again, more observational, slightly off-centre, implying more than it states. It’s one of the more adept reworkings of the power trio I can think of. Nothing is missing, it’s just been reassigned. Once you hear that, the rest follows. It doesn’t charm you. It convinces you it works. And it does.

This is one of those records where everything is clearly in place and nothing quite lands. It announces itself as significant from the off - layered, deliberate, very sure that it has something to say. I kept waiting for the point where that confidence translated into something I could actually get hold of. It never really happened. The lyrics are the main issue. There’s a lot of elevated language, but it feels chosen rather than found. Phrases stack up, suggest meaning, then dissolve before they resolve into anything concrete. Reading them doesn’t help. If anything it makes the problem clearer - this is language doing an impression of depth rather than delivering it. There’s also a persistent mismatch between words and rhythm. Lines don’t sit naturally on the groove. You can hear them being manoeuvred into place, which gives the whole thing a faintly constructed feel. Instead of locking in, everything just continues. Musically, it’s competent throughout. The arrangements are tidy, the playing is solid, and there are occasional flashes - some of the horn work hints at something more modular and interesting. But those moments don’t develop. They register as texture rather than structure. Eight tracks in, something finally caught my ear. Even then it felt like a fairly safe song wearing a vaguely Kid A-adjacent electronic coat. Underneath, it’s still straightforward, and the sense of risk never really materialises. There’s a constant feeling of forward motion - a kind of vague marching somewhere - but no real destination. The album keeps implying that something is about to matter, and never quite cashes it in. That’s what turns it from merely unengaging into actively frustrating. I can see why it was well received at the time. It looks like an important record. It sounds like one. But on a full listen, it doesn’t give me enough to justify that status. For all the intent, it never establishes a clear centre of gravity. Fifty minutes later, I’m left with the sense of having heard something carefully made, broadly admired, and ultimately disposable.

The opening run is stronger than I expected. “Hells Bells” establishes a sense of space and intent that simply isn’t there on Highway to Hell. It feels placed rather than thrown together. The bell is theatrical, but it earns its keep - it creates a room. “Shoot to Thrill” continues that. There’s a sense of purpose to the riffing, a feeling that the band is operating as a unit rather than a gang. This is where Mutt Lange really shows - the edges are tightened, the slack removed. It’s not deeper, but it is more controlled. “What Do You Do for Money Honey” is the first reversion to type. The chant returns, the tone drops, and we’re back in familiar territory. It’s well executed, but it’s also the point where the album reminds you exactly what it is. “Given the Dog a Bone” and “Let Me Put My Love Into You” sit squarely in the “Big Balls” lineage. Blunt innuendo, repetition as delivery mechanism, humour as bonding signal. There’s a degree of self-awareness, but it’s not doing any work beyond maintaining the system. This is where the Spinal Tap comparison stops being glib. The title track, “Back in Black”, is less interesting than its reputation suggests. It’s a statement rather than an exploration - a logo stamped repeatedly. It does its job, but the job is limited. “You Shook Me All Night Long” is monoculture in its purest form. It’s designed to function anywhere, for anyone, with no adjustment required. That portability is the achievement and the limitation. It leaves no residue. “Have a Drink on Me” and “Shake a Leg” continue in the same vein - efficient, confident, entirely surface-led. By this point the system is fully visible and no longer especially engaging. “Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution” closes the album by stating the thesis outright. It’s defensive, declarative, and pre-emptive. There is no ambiguity left to deny - it has already been eliminated. The album is clearly superior to Highway to Hell in terms of control and execution. It is a blunt instrument refined to the highest standard. But the refinement serves a single purpose - the removal of ambiguity. That is the achievement. It is also the limitation

Came to this expecting the cliché: cocaine bloat, loss of discipline, a band disappearing up itself. That’s not what it is. It’s looser than the early records, yes, but the looseness reads as process rather than collapse. You can hear them thinking. The opening piece sprawls, but not aimlessly. It’s sectional in a very “we’re following this idea and seeing where it goes” way. That tone carries through the album: decisions are audible, sometimes provisional, often kept. It isn’t polished into inevitability. It feels closer to a room than a monument. The production is a factor. There’s a persistent low-mid density, a kind of baked-in murk. At times it is atmospheric, at others it tips into congestion. On certain tracks it genuinely feels like the top end has been shaved off, everything sits in the same band and merges. The interesting thing is that this occasionally works functionally. When the band collapses into a single mass, the vocal and lyric become the only clearly legible element. Whether that is intention or acceptance does not really matter. It behaves like a choice. Then you get a track that snaps everything back into focus. Proper groove, proper separation, bass and drums doing something elastic and alive rather than just underpinning the guitar. It has that “what if we push this bit harder?” energy, very similar to mid-60s McCartney’s habit of turning a supporting part into the engine of the track. It proves the band have not lost control. They are choosing when to exercise it. There is a recurring sense of play throughout, but not in a showy or ironic way. More like a Midlands habit of trying things without over-framing them. Odd detours, a folkish lilt here and there, an instrumental that just exists because someone liked the sound of it. Nothing is over-justified. The album tolerates things being a bit off if they have life. The “coke song” is striking for how unromantic it is. It does not glamorise or veil particularly. It just states. Change the lyric and the track still works perfectly well as a Sabbath piece, which tells you where the real weight sits. The acoustic interlude is well judged. It opens the space up without tipping into sentimentality. Crucially, it does not announce itself as “the beautiful bit”. It just appears, does its job, and moves on. That restraint keeps it from drifting into parody. The closing track is effectively a corrective. After all the wandering and texture, it reasserts the core identity in very blunt terms. Big riff, clear stance, no ambiguity. Lyrically it is a straightforward rejection of imposed belief, not argued, just stated. It feels less like ideology and more like someone deciding they are not going along with something that had been presented as normal. That thread, the sense of rejecting something ambient and inherited, runs underneath more than it initially appears. It does not come across as theatrical rebellion. It is flatter, more matter-of-fact than that. Overall, this is not their tightest or most consistent record, but it is one of their most revealing. You hear the band without much filtering: the instincts, the overreaches, the good calls, the questionable ones. It is uneven, but it is inhabited. That counts for a lot.

This is best approached as a continuous system rather than a set of songs. It behaves like a room with conditions that are established early and then maintained with quiet discipline. The sequencing is closer to a DJ set than a traditional album: it warms up, fills, peaks, disperses, and decompresses without ever breaking the underlying logic. The palette is immediately legible and very 1990: house piano, light organ, vocal fragments, and a bouncy, funk-derived bass that does most of the real work. The interesting thing is how little they feel the need to elaborate on that. There is no attempt to demonstrate range, no “depth track” to clear the floor, no structural detours designed to prove seriousness. The achievement is that they hold a consistent social temperature for the full run. Most of the material operates on loop logic. Phrases repeat, mutate slightly, and accumulate detail rather than progressing in a linear, narrative sense. You stop tracking sections and instead inhabit a continuous present. The arrangement is often compressed in the sense that there are few clear signposts: elements enter and leave, but nothing announces itself as a formal shift. This is functional. It removes the listener’s ability to step outside the groove and encourages participation over analysis. “Groove Is in the Heart” sits oddly within this. It is an exceptional single, but it behaves differently from everything around it. Where the rest of the album sustains a situation, this track creates an event. It is denser, more foregrounded, more obviously structured. It briefly imposes hierarchy on a record that otherwise avoids it. In lesser hands that would fracture the flow; here it reads more like a spotlight moment within an ongoing set. The decision not to follow it by escalation is key. They immediately return to play, which restores the album’s underlying logic. Elsewhere, the record moves through variations on the same core idea: groove as environment. “Deep Ending” leans into early deep-house language, softening edges and extending time without becoming introspective in a later, more codified sense. “Build the Bridge” is particularly instructive. Its extended opening groove and pared-back arrangement feel more like a cold opener than a closing statement, which is precisely why it works at the end. The album does not resolve; it hands the room back to you. There is a persistent analogue quality to the feel, despite the reliance on samplers and early digital instruments. This comes less from equipment than from behaviour. The basslines carry human phrasing, the timing is not rigidly quantised, and the layering allows air between elements. The result is a system that feels lived-in rather than constructed, even when the construction is obvious. It has dated, but in a useful way. The sound world is specific and unmistakable, but the functional design still holds. This is not a record that rewards close textual analysis or repeated dissection. It rewards tolerance of repetition, attention to flow, and a willingness to let it operate at the level it was designed for. Put simply: it works if you let it work. It is not a great album in the traditional sense of statement or depth. It is a very good example of something more modest and, in its way, more difficult: forty-five minutes of continuous, usable groove that neither collapses nor demands attention.

Blue Lines feels oddly displaced in 1991. Put it beside much of the surrounding product and it sounds three or four years ahead of schedule. Not because it is futuristic in the obvious sense, but because it seems to have bypassed the period’s main argument. While a lot of early-90s music was still negotiating its escape from the 1980s, this sounds as if it has quietly moved on and built a new working model. The record’s achievement is structural. It draws from dub, soul, hip-hop, sound-system culture and post-punk collectivism, but it never feels like a collage. It feels like shelves full of records have become a method. The samples, voices and grooves are not displayed as clever references; they are absorbed into a system. What is most striking is the lack of ego. Nobody tries to dominate the room. Voices enter, occupy a space, then step back. Bass carries authority without bluster. Space does as much work as sound. The album understands that restraint is not absence - it is organisation. That is why it feels so different from more obvious 1991 crossover records. Those often bolt dance, samples or noise onto a band-shaped object. Blue Lines does something more radical: it removes the assumption that the band is the natural centre. The track becomes a room, a field, a negotiated space. There is a lineage here that goes back through dub and sound systems, but also through the rambling collective logic of post-punk and Bristol squat culture. The Pop Group, early Thompson Twins, Soul II Soul (Not Bristol; granted), Wild Bunch - not because they all sound alike, but because they share a belief that music can be a social system rather than a vehicle for one front person. The sequencing is superb. The album moves without seeming to push. It can ramble and not ramble at the same time. The title track into Be Thankful for What You’ve Got is a masterclass in loose structure that is actually tightly governed. Five Man Army makes the sound-system roots explicit, then Unfinished Sympathy gives the whole system propulsion without rupturing it. Even the monster track does not stand outside the album like a novelty hit. It blooms from within it. By the end, Hymn of the Big Wheel feels like the collective writing QED after showing its working for forty minutes. Dub, soul and austere electronics line up, and the album simply demonstrates that the system holds. Its influence is hard to overstate because it is not merely a style record. It changes what later records can be: voice inside environment, beats that breathe, albums as inhabited spaces, collective authorship without chaos. Without Blue Lines, a great deal of 90s and post-90s music becomes harder to imagine. A masterpiece, but not a showy one. More like a lodestone: looking back to 1977 and earlier, pointing forward to much of what came next.

It took me a while to properly sit with this, and I’m glad it happened now rather than earlier. On first principles it shouldn’t quite work for me – too many voices, rough production, fragments of other records stitched together – but once it clicks, it reveals itself as a very coherent system. The key is to stop hearing it as a collection of tracks and start hearing it as a room. There’s a fixed loop running, usually quite minimal, slightly degraded, sometimes almost obstinate in its refusal to develop. That loop isn’t there to impress. It’s there to hold space. Into that space, voices arrive, make an impression, and leave. There’s no attempt to smooth the joins. In fact, the abruptness becomes part of the appeal. You end up listening for entrances and exits rather than conventional song structure. What makes it work is the strength of those voices. They’re distinct enough that you recognise them quickly, even before you fully understand what they’re saying. Some are controlled, almost breathless in their precision. Others are relaxed and warm, sitting easily in the groove. And then there are the moments where everything threatens to come apart, when a voice leans too hard on the beat or seems to ignore it altogether. Those are often the best bits. The system holds, but only just, and that tension keeps it alive. The production is crucial. The samples are not treated reverently. They’re chopped, pitched, degraded, and looped until they lose any comfortable emotional context they might once have had. You can hear the soul records in there, but they’ve been forced into a different role. Rather than providing warmth, they become slightly unstable building materials. That avoids the mawkishness that can creep in when borrowed feeling is left intact. Even the more reflective moments are held in check by the rigidity of the loop and the roughness of the sound. There’s also a surprising amount of humour. Not in a gag-led way, but in the character of the performances. Lines land because of timing and delivery rather than punchline construction. There’s a sense of people enjoying themselves within the constraints, occasionally nudging the whole thing off balance for the sake of it. That stops the record from becoming overly serious or portentous, even when the subject matter is heavy. When it does slow down and allow more space for reflection, it does so without changing the underlying method. The same loops, the same constraints, but with more direct emotional content. What comes through strongly is a tension between regret and pride, particularly around the idea of the hustle. It’s not moralised or resolved. It’s simply presented as a set of conditions that shape identity. The detail is specific enough to feel lived-in, which anchors the emotion and keeps it from drifting into abstraction. There’s a clear lineage back to earlier socially grounded records, but the approach here is less about explaining and more about inhabiting. Rather than guiding the listener through a narrative, it drops you into a working environment and lets you pick up the language as you go. Certain phrases function more as signals than statements. You understand what they do long before you can fully parse what they mean. Over time, that becomes part of the record’s internal logic. What’s impressive is how complete it feels while still sounding like a method in development. You can hear the limitations – of equipment, time, resources – but those limitations are not disguised. They’re absorbed into the aesthetic. The rough edges aren’t just tolerated, they’re doing active work. Clean it up and you’d lose the sense of immediacy and the slightly off-kilter atmosphere that makes it distinctive. In the end, it’s not a tidy album. It doesn’t build neatly or resolve cleanly. But it establishes a set of rules and then demonstrates how much can be done within them. It feels like a world you enter rather than a statement you evaluate, and that’s why it rewards repeat listening. Each pass makes the structure clearer and the details more legible, without ever flattening its strangeness.

This isn’t an album of songs. It’s a functioning environment. What Blur do here is build a model of a place - not just geographically, but psychologically and socially. People move through it, systems shape them, routines carry them along, and every so often something breaks, or opens, or reveals what’s actually underneath. The early stretch establishes the rules. Behaviour is patterned, desire is procedural, identity is something performed within constraints. The city is alive, but not in a romantic sense. It observes, absorbs, and moves on. You are part of it, whether you fully belong or not. As it progresses, the focus tightens. The external gives way to the internal. You start to feel the cost of that system - the fatigue, the misfires, the sense that communication isn’t quite landing, that effort doesn’t resolve cleanly. The loops are still running, but they’re no longer comfortable. Then the album does something most records wouldn’t dare. It opens up completely. The scale shifts. The language of infrastructure - the Shipping Forecast, the rhythms of broadcast and routine - becomes emotional. Not metaphorically, but directly. It taps something below conscious thought. It’s no longer observation. It’s contact. And just as you’re left there, in something vast and involuntary, it brings you back. Not with a grand statement, not with resolution, but with a small, almost absurd piece of continuity. Life goes on. The system resets. The kettle goes on. That’s the achievement. It holds humour, sadness, observation and scale in the same space without collapsing into any one of them. It never overstates its case, never demands to be understood, and never loses control of its own logic. You don’t listen to it for answers. You step into it, recognise the patterns, and leave with a slightly clearer sense of how things actually feel to live through. That’s why it lasts.

A curious one, this. A bedroom record that somehow learned how to behave in public without ever really changing its clothes. What strikes me most is how controlled it is. Everything sits within a very narrow emotional and sonic range - loops, acoustic guitar, soft electronics, and a vocal that never really raises its voice. No spikes, no shocks, no great reveal. It just holds a feeling and lets it run. That could have been fatal. On paper, this is exactly the sort of thing that disappears without trace - too quiet, too unassuming, no obvious scene to carry it. Instead, it does the opposite. It embeds. You don’t have a moment where you fall in love with it, you just notice you haven’t stopped playing it. The method is the thing. This is singer-songwriter material processed through a repeatable system - closer to synth-pop working practice than folk performance. Patterns first, feeling laid over the top. It gives the songs a kind of portability. They don’t depend on performance energy, so they travel. Headphones, car, kitchen, doesn’t matter. Same job, every time. Lyrically it stays in one lane - relationships under strain, distance, trying to hold things together. There is very little sense of a wider world. No characters, no humour, no shift in perspective. Just one voice, circling the same set of feelings until they settle. That is either its strength or its limitation, depending on what you want. “Sail Away” is probably the purest expression of the whole approach. Simple piano figure, minimal movement, voice doing all the work. Nothing to hide behind, nothing to add. It either lands or it doesn’t. For me, that is the point where the album makes the most sense. The Soft Cell cover is revealing in a different way. By stripping out the theatricality and running it through this system, you can hear the working method clearly. The Van Morrison phrasing and lyrical nods pull it even further away from its original context. As a die-hard Cellmate, that takes a moment to adjust. It is less a reinterpretation than a re-domestication. The emotional contract is very clear - this will not upset the room. It will not challenge you. It will sit alongside your life and behave itself. That is why it sold, and kept selling. It anticipates portable listening before the ecosystem properly arrived. Not a big statement, more a useful object. I can admire it without quite loving it. It is touching in places, but so resolved that I find myself slightly outside it, watching it work rather than being pulled in. And yet it is hard to argue with. It does exactly what it sets out to do, with very few moving parts, and almost no waste

This is an album built on decisions. Each track isolates a single idea - dynamic contrast, withheld resolution, pure pop clarity, internal tension - and executes it without distraction. Nothing sprawls. Nothing drifts. Even the strangest moments feel contained within a clear frame. The core mechanism is simple but used with precision: loud and quiet, tension and release, or in many cases the deliberate refusal of release. What distinguishes the album is not the presence of these devices, but the discipline with which they are applied. Songs arrive, demonstrate their function, and exit before the idea weakens. There is a constant sense of iteration. One track offers a clean pop structure, the next denies resolution, the next compresses panic into a minute, the next withholds entirely. The album does not settle on a single answer, but explores multiple working models of what a song can be, all within a tightly controlled space. Production plays a decisive role. Where earlier recordings captured the band as an event, this presents them as a system. The rhythm section carries weight, the vocals are placed to serve the song, and arrangements are reduced to what is necessary. The result is clarity without loss of character. Despite the experimentation, the album remains highly legible. Hooks are present, but often disguised. Melodic intelligence runs throughout, even when delivered through abrasion or restraint. This balance between accessibility and subversion is central to its durability. Sequencing reinforces the design. Moments of openness are followed by denial, intensity is broken by brevity or humour, and apparent resolution is undercut by subsequent tracks. The album maintains forward motion while continually resetting expectation. The closing stretch does not resolve the preceding tensions so much as stabilise them. By the end, the band’s method feels complete - not explained, but demonstrated. The record concludes without flourish, leaving the system intact rather than summarised. The achievement lies in how much is done within strict limits. Short songs, minimal arrangements, and a narrow set of tools are used to produce a wide range of effects. The album feels both economical and expansive, a set of constraints pushed to their limit. This is not a document of a band searching for its identity. It is the sound of a band defining its operating principles in real time, and discovering that those principles hold.

There’s a particular trick this record pulls that still feels rare: it speaks fluent mid-80s pop, then refuses to deliver any of the expected outcomes. Everything about the surface says “big record.” Brass, propulsion, clarity of phrasing, a sense of scale. The grammar is shared with the era’s more aspirational end of pop, drawing on blue-eyed soul for movement and emotional directness. But the function is inverted. Where that language usually resolves tension, here it sustains it. The listener keeps expecting lift, payoff, reassurance. Instead, the songs hold their nerve and leave things open, sometimes uncomfortably so. The opening establishes this immediately. A long, deliberate intro that builds environment before voice. It doesn’t rush to declare itself as “song.” It places you inside a system already in motion, then introduces a narrator who sounds less like a guide and more like someone already affected by the conditions. That sense of prior contamination runs through the whole album. From there, the record alternates between propulsion and immersion. Tracks move, but rarely cleanly. Rhythms feel driven rather than grooving, as if under pressure. The low end behaves more like terrain than foundation, creating resistance rather than flow. It’s not murk for its own sake. It’s a deliberate density that denies easy listening positions. You’re in it, not above it. Lyrically, the record avoids the two common traps of “political” music: slogan and satire. Instead, it operates through inhabitation. Voices feel lived-in rather than declared. There is an actorly instinct at work, but it’s not performative in the usual sense. Characters are not presented for inspection. They are occupied. That matters because it removes distance. You are not asked to agree or disagree. You are asked to experience a mindset from within. At the same time, the album never fully disappears into naturalism. There is a constant counterforce, a subtle distancing effect. The arrangements are often too large, the brass too present, the phrasing occasionally too pointed for pure immersion. You are made aware, intermittently, that you are inside a constructed system. That oscillation between immersion and awareness is central. It allows the record to feel human and analytical at once. Anne Dudley’s contribution is critical here. The brass arrangements do not decorate or uplift. They accumulate. Lines overlap, chords lean, phrases arrive before previous ones have cleared. The result is pressure. Not chaos, but a controlled closing-in. It’s a long way from the elegance of her work elsewhere in the decade. Here, the same tools are used to remove oxygen rather than provide lift. The middle section of the album expands outward without offering relief. National and international themes are introduced, but not as abstract commentary. They feel like extensions of the same internal unease. The record suggests continuity between personal experience and larger systems, without flattening one into the other. It avoids the easy move of locating blame entirely elsewhere. There is always an implication that the narrator, and by extension the listener, is inside the same arrangement. One of the album’s strengths is its handling of time. It does not read like hindsight. It feels like real-time recognition. The language is general enough to travel, but specific enough to bite. That’s why certain tracks continue to feel contemporary. They describe patterns of behaviour and consequence rather than fixed events. The locations can shift, the mechanics can evolve, but the underlying situation remains recognisable. The final stretch avoids resolution altogether. There is no grand statement, no collapse, no redemption. Instead, the record moves into smaller, more intimate spaces, then ends with a sense of preparation for something unspecified but serious. That ambiguity is deliberate. By refusing to name the act, the song leaves the listener inside the state of readiness. It is a deeply uneasy way to close, but entirely consistent with what has come before. Across the album, the sequencing functions as an argument. World-building leads to immersion, then to diagnosis, internalisation, consequence, and aftermath. At no point does the record step outside itself to explain. It trusts the listener to make the connections, or at least to feel them. What holds it all together is discipline. There is a lot here that could have tipped into excess: the scale of production, the conceptual ambition, the density of arrangement. It never quite does. The songs remain legible. Hooks remain intact. The pop engine continues to run, even as it carries increasingly difficult material. That balance is the achievement. Not simply that the album has something to say, but that it says it using a language designed to smooth things over, and refuses to smooth anything over.

There’s a temptation to treat this as a cultural event first and a record second, but it holds up better when you reverse that. The mechanics are surprisingly disciplined. A narrow melodic vocabulary runs right through it - stepwise movement, familiar phrase lengths, recurring interval tensions - and instead of expanding that palette, the band keeps it fixed and varies everything around it. It’s a constraint system more than a showcase. The songs are built on very simple harmonic beds, often deliberately under-specified. Power chords remove the third, leaving the vocal to imply colour. That’s where the friction lives. Cobain repeatedly places brighter tones - major thirds, occasional major seventh inflections - against a darker or neutral backing. It doesn’t resolve in a blues sense, it just sits there, slightly wrong. That becomes one of the album’s most reliable signatures: hooks that feel good in the mouth but never quite settle emotionally. Arrangement does the work that harmony might otherwise do. Dynamics are structural, not decorative. Quiet/loud isn’t an outburst, it’s a switching system. Sections are defined by density, saturation and timing rather than chord movement. “Stay Away” is a good example of harmony being almost entirely static while the form is carved out by stops, starts and pressure changes. The band has to be tight for that to read, and they are. The unison vocal/guitar move is another piece of engineering that masquerades as instinct. It turns a simple line into something physically larger without adding harmonic information. Slight imperfections between the two sources create a natural smear, which reads like an effect. It’s doing the job of processing through alignment rather than circuitry. That idea extends to the vocals more broadly. Double-tracking isn’t just thickening, it’s a scaling mechanism. When it drops back to a single voice, the focus narrows instantly and the listener is pulled into the detail of phrasing and words. There’s a quiet redistribution of roles within the trio. The guitar is often blocky and declarative, the vocal sits within its established range, and the bass carries more of the internal movement than it’s usually credited with. “Lounge Act” makes that explicit, with countermelodic lines that imply harmonic direction underneath fairly blunt guitar shapes. It’s one of the ways the record avoids true monotony even while the topline language stays consistent. What keeps it from feeling like an exercise is the variety of conditions applied to that same core system. The opening stretch cycles through maximal impact, commentary, suspended atmosphere and compressed aggression without changing the underlying grammar. Later tracks show the method more plainly. “On a Plain” feels almost like the template exposed - clear form, recognisable phrasing, no need for extreme dynamics to make it land. “Something in the Way” strips the system to its limit case, where harmony, development and even performance energy are reduced to almost nothing, leaving tone and space to carry the weight. The hidden track complicates the sense of closure. After a genuinely resolved ending, it reintroduces instability in a way that feels less like an extra and more like a refusal to let the record settle into a single reading. It’s not essential to the core argument of the album, but it does underline that the band’s range extends beyond the controlled environment they’ve built. What emerges is less a collection of distinct songs than a single, well-defined approach examined from multiple angles. The melodic consistency that might initially register as limitation becomes the binding agent. It allows the listener to track changes in texture, dynamics and interaction more clearly, because the underlying language stays constant. The result is a record that feels authored and cohesive without needing stylistic variety to prove it.

This isn’t a unified statement but rather a sequence of states. It makes more sense to view it as a person navigating something in real time rather than expecting a tidy argument. The early run is most compelling because it stays within the loop. You gain analysis without an exit, clarity without change and a sense of thoughts arriving mid-line rather than being presented as conclusions. The voice effectively conveys this, sounding like thinking under pressure rather than performance. However, it falters slightly when it attempts to stabilise itself too quickly. There are moments where lived experience transitions into instruction, which are less convincing. This is partly because they claim a level of authority that the rest of the record quietly undermines. With hindsight, they read less like conclusions and more like attempts to impose order. Initially, the classroom framing feels a bit on-the-nose but improves as the album progresses. It shifts from sounding like “here’s the lesson” to “here’s how I’m trying to organise this”. In this sense, it becomes part of the subject rather than a device imposed on it. Midway through, the record shifts between modes quite sharply. This can feel lumpy if you expect a smooth flow but it more accurately reflects how people actually move through things: insight, relapse, resolve and calm. It’s not a straight line and not always consistent. The strongest material is where it acknowledges this inconsistency. Songs that remain within the pattern or return to it carry more weight than those that try to close it down. They feel observed rather than asserted. Later on, the tone softens. There’s less argument and less need to define, and more acceptance of what is. This doesn’t resolve the situation but rather changes the internal relationship to it. The calm feels real because it doesn’t overclaim. The title track serves as the perfect conclusion, stepping away from systems and statements to return to a human scale. It doesn’t seek to win an argument but presents a position that can be lived with. This authenticity resonates and makes it a satisfying end. Overall, the album isn’t a seamless whole. Instead, it’s better seen as a document of movement capturing different versions of the same person at various stages. Some of these versions contradict each other, which is part of its value rather than a flaw. The result is a record that thrives when it resists resolution. It holds together not through formal integration but through a consistent voice and a willingness to leave things partially unsettled.

Savane is one of those albums that makes the category “world music” feel not just inadequate, but actively stupid. It tells you nothing. It is like filing every meal under “food” and imagining you have described dinner. The opening track is almost an onslaught: wiry strings, voices, percussion, heat, dust, everything arriving at once. It feels less like an album starting than being dropped into a street already in full motion. At first the density is disorientating. Then the ear adjusts, and what seemed tangled begins to reveal routes, patterns, conversations and functions. What follows is not a polite desert-blues record, and certainly not Sunday-morning background listening. It is rousing, communal, physical music. The repetition is not decorative or lazy. It is load-bearing. A pattern is established, then lived in. The detail comes through small variations: a percussion accent, a vocal turn, a bowed scrape, a guitar line catching light at the edge of the groove. The structure holds so that the human life inside it can move. That may be the album’s deepest strength. It uses trance at its best: not as drift, but as social technology. The groove organises energy. The body enters before the intellect has finished counting. Some of the rhythms are almost inscrutable, stopping and starting like a badly made loop somehow made perfect by humans. The result is music with seams, breath and joints. The apparent fault becomes the groove. There are obvious blues connections, but the album does not feel like an African version of American blues. If anything, it reverses the map. The American echoes - Mississippi, porch music, harmonica cries, hill-country repetition - feel like signals travelling back along older wires. At other moments the modal drones, open strings, call-and-response patterns and work-song structures bring unexpected Gaelic and Appalachian echoes. Not because these traditions are the same, but because the same human mechanisms keep recurring: drone, mode, labour, memory, rhythm, story, return. That is what makes the record so powerful. It is completely specific and yet widely recognisable. Mali is not Scotland, Mississippi, Appalachia, Paris or Huddersfield. But people everywhere have had to carry things, mourn people, coordinate work, pass time, cook food, court one another, travel, gather, remember and endure weather. The differences are landscape - physical, emotional, political, historical. The animal inside the landscape is recognisable. The singing is extraordinary throughout. It does not present itself as “great singing” in the Western prestige sense. It carries authority, story and communal force. The voices keep the line alive. Sometimes they function like shanty singing, sometimes like waulking songs, sometimes like testimony, sometimes like a public gathering already underway before the listener arrives. The instrumental detail is just as vivid. The guitar work is astonishing, but never merely virtuosic. Even when the soloing becomes dazzling, it stays tied to the pulse. The bowed njarka sound brings a scratchy, keening edge, almost a human cry through wire. The harmonica, when it appears, becomes less a blues signpost than another breath instrument inside the same emotional grammar. By the end, the album feels like travelling on a road lined with synchronised musicians. Each track changes the function - street bustle, road music, procession, work song, communal testimony, trance, story inside structure - but the journey remains continuous. The final stretch even has a quasi-minimalist human-machinery feel that Penguin Cafe Orchestra might recognise, though under utterly different weather. As an epitaph, it is immense. Not a monument to the individual, not a grand farewell pose, but a living system left running. Heat, road, voices, dust, work, rhythm, memory. The music does not ask to be admired from a respectful distance. It asks you to enter the pattern and hear how much life is already inside it.

There’s a temptation with records like this to treat them as endurance tests, or as important artefacts to be respected from a safe academic distance. But what struck me revisiting it now is how physical it remains. Not “heavy” in the rock sense - heavy in the sense of weight, impact, resonance and pressure. You can hear rooms reacting to force. You can hear objects behaving according to their material properties. Forty years later, when almost anything can be simulated cleanly and infinitely inside a laptop, that still carries unusual power. What also becomes clearer with time is that this isn’t simply Year Zero iconoclasm or anti-music provocation. There’s already a lineage underneath it - Kraftwerk’s systems, Can’s repetition, German post-war modernity trying to invent itself outside Anglo-American rock language. The difference is that the sleek mediation has been stripped away. If Kraftwerk often presents the machine as elegant design, this presents infrastructure as lived condition - strained, metallic, unstable and psychologically exhausting. That’s why it increasingly made sense to me not as “noise” but as environment. Once you stop expecting conventional songs to emerge from the wreckage, the album starts functioning more like weather, architecture or civic atmosphere. Repetition becomes structural rather than hypnotic. Rhythm feels less like groove than labour. Even the clatter has internal logic once the ear adjusts to the idea that the machinery itself is part of the composition. What surprised me most this time was how many later cultural forms quietly sit downstream from it. Not just industrial music, but percussion theatre, found-object rhythm, machine aesthetics, infrastructural staging, even things as outwardly audience-friendly as Stomp. The idea that impact, metal, repetition and physical process could themselves become performance language no longer feels radical because the language escaped into culture decades ago. And yet the record still retains something genuinely unsettling. Not because it is chaotic, but because it sounds coherent in a way civilisation sometimes does under stress - systems continuing to operate while the human beings inside them absorb the strain. That may be why the closest modern comparison that came to mind during listening wasn’t another album at all, but the Down Deep in Silo: machinery not as background but as habitat. The remarkable thing is that the album still communicates all this without softening itself into accessibility. It remains abrasive, difficult and at times actively hostile to comfort. But the hostility no longer feels performative to me. It feels necessary to the world the record is trying to describe.

Blood on the Tracks is one of those records that suffers slightly from its own reputation. “The divorce album.” “The confessional masterpiece.” “Dylan gets personal.” You approach it expecting either granite-carved importance or two sides of nasal recrimination. What you actually get is something much more elusive, humane and structurally astonishing. The first surprise, listening closely, is how alive the album feels. Not polished-alive or “great performance” alive, but psychologically alive. The songs don’t settle into a single emotional position because the narrator himself cannot settle. One minute he’s angry, then nostalgic, then tender, then exhausted, then spinning a western yarn because perhaps that’s easier than staring directly into the wound for another three minutes. The album moves like memory moves - contradictory, repetitive, selective, full of false certainties that dissolve by the next song. That’s why the sequencing is so extraordinary. Dylan seems instinctively aware of how long both he and the listener can remain in one emotional register before needing release. When the introspection becomes too intense, he shifts into movement, myth, blues form, story, humour, archetype. Then quietly returns to intimacy again. The album breathes. It never becomes emotionally airless. The architecture is much richer than the “raw confession” label suggests. Dylan is constantly transforming experience into song form rather than simply reporting it. “Tangled Up in Blue” feels less like autobiography than a Steinbeck novel compressed into linked sonnets - roaming characters, shifting perspectives, roads, jobs, weather, remembered encounters. The chronology fractures because emotional truth matters more than factual sequence. “Simple Twist of Fate” achieves devastation through tiny harmonic movements and weary acceptance rather than theatrical heartbreak. “You’re a Big Girl Now” sounds almost frighteningly exposed precisely because the composure initially holds so gently before beginning to crack. And then Dylan repeatedly escapes direct confession altogether. “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” arrives like a pressure valve opening - enough of this emotional autopsy for five minutes, let me spin you a yarn. But even there, the themes remain: betrayal, escape, shifting identities, consequence. The masks and western archetypes simply redistribute the emotional material into story and action. Dylan understands an old truth of ballad-writing: feelings often become more powerful once translated into movement and narrative rather than directly explained. Musically, the album is deceptively subtle. Repeated cadences and rhythmic shapes link songs together almost subliminally. Harmonica breaks function less as solos than emotional decompression chambers - moments where language can no longer carry the weight alone. The arrangements are sparse enough that every chord movement matters. Again and again, Dylan avoids the obvious grand gesture. A major chord quietly turns minor. A phrase hangs unresolved. A guitar figure gently keeps the emotional weather moving. Perhaps the album’s greatest achievement is that it ultimately arrives not at bitterness, but at perspective. “Shelter from the Storm” stands over the experience rather than merely inhabiting it. By the time “Buckets of Rain” closes the record, the masks have largely fallen away. No hood-eyed prophet. No venomous wit machine. Just Bobby Zimmerman sounding tired, affectionate, human and capable of tenderness again. The gorgeous loose fingerpicking and half-smiling warmth of the performance feel like emotional circulation returning after prolonged internal weather. A lot of supposedly great breakup albums climax in devastation. Blood on the Tracks ends with breathing. And that may be why it endures. Not because it is “the definitive statement on heartbreak”, but because it understands something quieter and more adult: after rage, after grief, after narrative reconstruction, life continues. Not healed, perhaps. Not triumphant. But capable once again of warmth, humour, movement and rain.

What struck me most listening properly to this album in 2026 was how difficult it is to hear innocently now. The record arrives carrying a mountain of retrospective mythology: the beehive, the tabloids, the public collapse, the “Blaaaake” caricature that swallowed the person whole in her final years. I found myself initially resisting the album almost on ethical grounds. There are moments where the retro-soul production feels a little too declarative, a little too eager to present itself as “important” music assembled from carefully archived signifiers. Mark Ronson occasionally produces like a man lovingly alphabetising his Motown records in public. And yet the songs themselves keep pushing against that reading. The deeper I got into the album, the harder it became to dismiss it as clever retro deployment. Amy Winehouse’s real strength is not the revivalism but the behavioural specificity. These songs are full of shame, compromise, pettiness, repetition, self-awareness and emotional bargaining. Not glamorous destruction - the far harsher experience of recognising your own bad patterns in real time and carrying on anyway because you don’t yet know how to stop. A lot of the emotional grammar clearly comes from the girl-group melodrama of The Shangri-Las. But where those records often survived on atmosphere, performance and absurd seriousness despite fairly functional lyrics, Winehouse writes the emotional detail those old songs only implied. She updates teenage catastrophe into adult behavioural realism. The songs are full of social texture - shame, bargaining, compromise, possessiveness, emotional repetition, self-awareness arriving too late. They feel less like declarations and more like somebody documenting patterns they can already recognise but not yet escape. What also became impossible to ignore was her age. Winehouse was roughly 22 or 23 making this album. That changes everything. It stops sounding like a fixed tragic monument and starts sounding like an extraordinarily perceptive young person still in formation. The culture later froze her into a completed symbol - doomed soul icon, cautionary tale, tragic genius - but the album itself contains constant evidence of somebody still becoming. Funny. Catty. Observant. Immature in places. Sharp beyond her years in others. Listening while consciously asking “how old is the person singing this?” rehumanises the whole record. The strongest songs survive the production completely. “Love Is a Losing Game” in particular feels less like retro reconstruction and more like a modern song that simply happens to love older forms. The best material here would endure almost any arrangement because the writing underneath is so psychologically precise. “Wake Up Alone” and “He Can Only Hold Her” move beyond melodrama into something colder and more diagnostic: songs about emotional systems continuing after insight has already arrived. What surprised me most, though, was the album’s refusal to fully canonise itself. It repeatedly undermines its own grandeur with ordinary behaviour. Cleaning the house instead of drinking. Weed complaints. Pettiness. Domesticity. The final track, “Addicted,” is practically a palate cleanser after the emotional weight of the title sequence. Instead of ending with a marble-statue summation of doomed artistry, the album concludes with “stop smoking my weed.” That refusal to remain permanently operatic may be what ultimately saves it. I still think the production occasionally overstates its retro intentions. There are moments where the emotional circuitry of older records feels almost gaslit into place through arrangement and rhythm. But the songwriting increasingly exceeds the curatorial framing around it. By the end, what remains is not “important album” prestige so much as the uncomfortable clarity of hearing a very young person documenting compromise, dependency and emotional drift with frightening lucidity. And perhaps that is why the story around the album now feels so ugly in retrospect. The public caricature arrived astonishingly quickly. “Disaster woman off the telly” became “tragic icon” almost overnight after her death, with very little pause for self-examination in between. Listening now, the tragedy is not that the songs sound doomed. It is that they sound unfinished.

What struck me most about this record is that it doesn’t feel like a precocious debut. It feels like a completed internal system. Most nineteen-year-old artists still show the seams - influence, overreach, uncertainty, flashes of brilliance amid attempts to prove seriousness. This arrives with an already coherent emotional and musical logic. Not “promising”, but authored. The obvious headline is the voice, but the deeper achievement is judgement. Fiona Apple already understands arrangement as psychology. The grooves drag rather than propel. The rhythm section sustains atmosphere instead of chasing impact. Songs are allowed to simmer, with tension carried in timing, phrasing and harmonic colour rather than overstatement. There’s jazz all over the record without it ever becoming “jazz-pop”. More accurately, it has jazz intelligence - blue-note pressure, delayed resolution, conversational elasticity, the understanding that restraint can create more emotional force than release. Again and again I found myself thinking about Nina Simone. Not stylistically, exactly, but in the way Apple leans on notes until they become emotionally argumentative. Certain phrases arrive almost declaratively rather than melodically, with straight-tone attacks that refuse easy warmth. A line like “then you let your love abound” lands not because she decorates it, but because she slightly bruises the note on arrival. The emotional uncertainty is embedded directly into the pitch. The sequencing is remarkably sophisticated too. This is not a collection of strong songs occupying the same CD. It behaves as an album - recurring emotional climates, controlled shifts in pressure, strategic releases of tension. Even the weaker moments are revealing. One mid-album groove piece drifts a little too close to “interesting nocturnal jam” territory and briefly obscures Apple herself behind the arrangement, which only highlights how completely the stronger tracks maintain authorial gravity. Most of the time the music bends around her consciousness rather than the other way around. What fascinated me most was the album’s relationship with control. The songs are emotionally intense, but very rarely uncontrolled. Even the confessional moments contain a hovering intelligence evaluating the scene in real time. “Criminal” in particular works because it never fully settles into either guilt or seduction. There’s an arched eyebrow throughout the performance, as though Apple is simultaneously inhabiting and quietly interrogating the role she’s been assigned. The songs repeatedly resist simplification. Shame, power, desire, performance and self-awareness coexist in unstable combinations. “Never Is a Promise” feels like the emotional centre of the record. Not because it offers catharsis, but because it understands instability without collapsing into nihilism. The title itself is devastatingly perceptive - absolutes are promises people make while standing inside temporary emotional weather. The arrangement trusts space and melodic contour rather than grandstanding, and the vocal performance is astonishingly measured. Elsewhere, tracks like “Pale September” show another side of the record entirely. Apple stops projecting over the arrangement and instead sits inside it, becoming part of the atmosphere rather than dominating it. It reminded me less of singer-songwriter confessionals and more of the suspended emotional climates of old torch songs - not melodrama, but weather. The final stretch is particularly impressive because the album refuses obvious closing-track behaviour. Instead of building toward some grand prestige-ballad summation, it initially appears to drift sideways into ambiguity before suddenly escalating in emotional pressure. The shift arrives so abruptly that it feels meteorological rather than conventionally “developed”. You realise retrospectively that the calm was compression. What lingers afterwards is not simply the quality of the songwriting, but the unnerving completeness of the artistic identity. This does not sound like someone entering an existing lane. It sounds like somebody already in possession of a private aesthetic law and expecting the listener to adapt accordingly. The truly absurd part is that she was nineteen when she made it.

Closer is one of those records that shrinks if you reduce it to mythology. “The dark one.” “The suicide album.” “Proto-goth.” None of those descriptions are wholly false, but they all miss the scale of what’s actually happening here. This doesn’t feel like an album about depression to me. It feels like an album about horror - historical horror, personal horror, modern horror - and the awful fact that ordinary life continues underneath the knowledge of what human beings are capable of. The pulse of the record matters enormously because of that. Even at its bleakest, the machinery keeps moving. Songs don’t collapse. They continue, often past the point of comfort, until they finally seem to run out of steam like exhausted engines. The postwar atmosphere hangs over the whole thing. Not in any simplistic “songs about war” sense, but in the emotional weather of the record: industrial Britain carrying on after catastrophe, civic systems still operating under nuclear dread, ordinary people trying to function in the long shadow of mechanised slaughter and moral exhaustion. This is not gothic fantasy. It’s monochrome modernity. Wet concrete, sodium light, decayed optimism, public spaces still inhabited after faith in progress has quietly eroded. That’s why the band’s increasing machine logic feels so important. The repetition throughout the album is rarely hypnotic in a psychedelic sense. It’s procedural. Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook often interlock less like guitarist and bassist than components in a primitive sequencing system, while Stephen Morris somehow manages the impossible trick of sounding both mechanical and deeply human at the same time. The songs repeatedly create the feeling of systems continuing under emotional strain. And yet the more machine-like the structures become, the more melodic freedom Hook discovers inside them. You can hear the entire emotional architecture of New Order beginning to emerge here. Once the pulse is being held by repetition and machinery, the bass no longer has to merely support the song - it can ache, climb, yearn. The future is all over this record: early Mute, Soft Cell, 4AD, post-rock, synth melancholy, electronic alienation. “The Eternal” alone probably launched a thousand careers in atmospheric sadness. Martin Hannett’s production remains miraculous because it never simply creates “mood”. Every sonic choice carries psychological meaning. The metallic reverbs, the treated delays that turn Curtis’s voice into ghostly recurrences of itself, the vast empty spaces around the drums, the sense that sounds are occurring inside architecture rather than inside a studio - all of it contributes to the album’s central tension between humanity and systems. Curtis often sounds less like a singer standing in front of a band than a consciousness being transmitted through damaged civic infrastructure. What makes the album genuinely distressing at times is the lucidity of the lyrics. Not because they predict tragedy in some romantic “doomed poet” sense, but because the warning signs sit there plainly in the songs. Curtis continually interrogates himself, unable to fully inhabit moments of hope or connection before analysis destabilises them. “I exist on the best terms I can” may be one of the bleakest lines ever written precisely because it avoids theatrical despair. It sounds like a negotiated settlement with existence rather than a cry for help. And yet for all the dread, this is not nihilistic music. The album never says “nothing matters.” Quite the opposite. It suggests that consciousness itself becomes difficult because things matter too much once properly seen. The central question running through the record seems to be: how do we continue, knowing who we are? The answer, if there is one, is simply that continuation remains compulsory. People still work, love, dance, argue, remember and endure under the weight of historical and personal knowledge. Even the title becomes slippery by the end. Closer as in nearer. Closer as in shutting down a process. Approaching understanding, collapse, intimacy, exhaustion and finality all at once. The most remarkable thing about Closer is that such enormous emotional and historical weight is carried using such modest means. The opening of “Decades” sounds almost like something assembled in a school hall from borrowed equipment - simple synths, ceremonial pacing, a kind of municipal solemnity bordering on the naïve. It feels as though the band are trying to process the entire postwar condition using whatever cultural tools happen to be available. Somehow, against all odds, it works. The result is one of the few albums that genuinely feels larger than genre. Not simply a great post-punk record, but a sustained attempt to sonically map what modern consciousness feels like after the 20th century.

The really striking thing about finally sitting down properly with Marquee Moon is that my objection to it isn’t that it’s incompetent, unintelligent or historically unimportant. In fact, the opposite problem kept recurring. The band can plainly play. The room sound is excellent - dry, close, unshowy, musicians in an actual small space rather than prog fog or FM-radio bloat. There are moments where the guitars suddenly chime and hover spectrally and you can hear entire future strands of alternative guitar music opening up. REM are all over this record in embryo. So are later guitar bands who treat texture and atmosphere as architecture rather than decoration. But I kept returning to the same objection: the compositional intelligence never seems to match the instrumental intelligence. That sounds harsher than intended. The album is full of good moments. “Friction” finally introduces enough abrasion and nervous energy to justify its insistence. “Guiding Light” relaxes into proper FM-radio melancholy and becomes genuinely comforting. The title track itself even opens promisingly - the interrupted guitar figure and displaced drum fill hint at the sort of structural intelligence that post-punk and new wave would soon make central. There are repeated flashes where the record seems on the verge of becoming leaner, stranger and more modern than it ultimately chooses to be. But again and again, the songs establish an idea, an atmosphere or a figure and then simply continue while the guitars are allowed to elaborate. I don’t object to long songs in principle - I happily listen to Beethoven’s Ninth voluntarily - but duration demands justification. What labour is this section performing? What changes? What develops? Too often here, the answer seems to be “continued tasteful inhabitation of the state.” That, I suspect, is why the album has always felt oddly reactionary to me in spite of its canonical status as a revolutionary text. Not reactionary politically, obviously, but aesthetically. Punk and post-punk increasingly rediscovered composition as editing, structure, interruption, information density and economy. Television often seem to respond to this shift with “yes, but…” - yes, but articulate guitar interplay still matters; yes, but extension still carries significance; yes, but we’d quite like to preserve some of the old privileges of rock musicianship if possible. Hence the strange sensation that the sleeve promises a harsher, more economical record than the one actually contained within it. The visual language suggests modernist reduction, but the music retains a lingering faith in expressive guitar continuation that feels much older. More than once I found myself thinking that this wasn’t so much a blueprint for post-punk as an abstraction of Neil Young - the sprawl retained, the dirt removed, the wound intellectualised. And yet I can also hear why people love it. The ambience is right. The city-at-night mood is right. Verlaine’s voice carries genuine neurotic yearning in places, and when the guitars stop sounding merely articulate and become haunted instead, the whole thing briefly lifts into something genuinely transporting. The problem is that the album rarely trusts brevity, interruption or mutation enough. It remains too languid. Too willing to continue. Which may explain why, after two hours inside its world, autoplay throwing on Sunny Afternoon felt like someone opening a window. Ray Davies establishes a character, a social world, a melody, a joke and a mood in the time Television take to decide whether the guitars have quite finished speaking yet. Still, I’m glad I finally listened to it properly. Even if my final judgement remains something like: excellent textures, strong atmosphere, historically important, occasionally beautiful - but ideologically unsound in its lingering faith that prolonged guitar discourse is inherently meaningful.

Different Class feels less like a collection of songs than a fully inhabited social world. Not merely a portrait of Britain in the mid-1990s, but an account of what it felt like to move through that Britain bodily - hungover, overdressed, underconfident, ambitious, horny, lonely, observant, exhausted and still somehow hopeful. The comparison that kept returning whilst listening was Parklife. Both albums are major authored statements from Britpop’s peak and both elevate the movement beyond trend or tabloid shorthand. But they achieve this from opposite directions. Parklife is the window - Britain observed, curated, arranged into brilliant tableaux. Different Class is the lived-in version. The room after the party. The bed. The supermarket. The all-night café. If Blur mapped the territory, Pulp documented what it cost to inhabit it. What remains astonishing is how meticulously constructed the album is whilst sounding utterly alive. Every musical and lyrical choice appears placed with immense care, yet nothing feels overworked. Chris Thomas’s production gives the record scale without sterilising it. The arrangements shimmer with disco, glam, chanson and cabaret influences, but always remain tethered to recognisably British realities: damp mornings, rented rooms, awkward sex, class shame, cigarettes and cups of coffee attempting to repair the nervous system. Jarvis Cocker’s writing throughout is extraordinary because it never settles for one emotional register at a time. Desire coexists with embarrassment. Humour with genuine sadness. Social critique with yearning. Even the most quoted lines often conceal structural brilliance beneath their conversational surface. The album repeatedly reminds the listener that songs are constructed artefacts - temporal manipulations, performed memories, narratives rearranging lived experience into meaning. Yet this constructedness deepens the emotional truth rather than diminishing it. The sequencing is masterful. Early songs pulse with appetite, excitement and social velocity. The middle section descends into increasingly complicated territory: class resentment curdling into obsession, relationships eroding through routine, rave euphoria shading into psychic dislocation, love arriving as contingency rather than destiny. By the closing stretch the album has become exhausted in the best possible way. Monday Morning turns simple continuation into heroic cabaret. Bar Italia ends not with revelation but dispersal - tired people drinking coffee while daylight quietly resumes control of the city. And perhaps that is the album’s deepest achievement. Beneath the wit and glamour lies an adult understanding of impermanence. Nights end. Love does not necessarily wait around indefinitely. Youth evaporates while you are still inside it. Entire futures pivot on fleeting encounters and missed timings. Yet the record refuses despair. Instead it locates dignity in continuation itself - in carrying on through humour, style, companionship, sex, music and observation even after illusions have faded. Nearly thirty years later, Different Class no longer sounds merely like a great Britpop album. It sounds like one of the great British records about modern adulthood.

Two Dancers is one of those records that gradually reveals itself to be far darker than its surface elegance first suggests. Initially it feels like stylish late-2000s art-indie - all atmosphere, texture and twitchy sensuality - but over the course of the album the emotional climate curdles into something much more disturbing: shame, coercion, masculine performance, emotional dependency and outright violence lurking beneath the moonlit eroticism. The “Two Dancers” suite in particular shifts the album into genuinely traumatic territory. Horror wrapped in ambient dream-pop. Once lines like “They passed me round them like a piece of meat” fully land, the entire record changes temperature. What impressed me most was the sense of place and social anthropology running through it. This is not metropolitan decadence. It sounds like intelligent, sensitive people from constrained northern environments trying to survive the “smash and grab of things going on” in local nightlife ecosystems - peacocking, intimidation, desire, shame and performance all happening simultaneously. The album understands masculinity as something acted out under observation. There’s a real sense of the socially browbeaten analysing the behaviour of the rougher, more physically confident world around them. That gives the record a psychological specificity that lifts it well above generic “arty indie”. The drumming deserves special mention. Absolutely superb throughout - fluid, physical, spacious, occasionally recalling an airier version of Budgie. The rhythm section often carries the emotional intelligence of the album more convincingly than the vocals do. In fact, one of my reservations about the record is that the songs sometimes feel almost “vocalist optional”. The atmosphere is so carefully constructed by the band that Hayden Thorpe’s performances occasionally feel more like behavioural overlays than the actual engine of the compositions. And that, ultimately, is where I slightly part company with the album. The subject matter is important and handled intelligently, but the songs often seem more interested in sustaining atmosphere than fully resolving into memorable melodic statements. They hover beautifully rather than arrive decisively. I kept feeling that the band stopped one polishing pass short of greatness - wary that too much compositional clarity might puncture the ambiguity and emotional fog they were cultivating. Compared with a dream-pop band like Cocteau Twins - who, for all their ethereal reputation, were often extremely focused structurally - Wild Beasts can occasionally feel diffuse. So my final reaction is one of strong respect rather than deep attachment. This is an authored, distinctive, psychologically rich record that absolutely deserved its Mercury nomination. You would never mistake it for anybody else. But while I admired it throughout and found parts of it genuinely haunting, I also found my attention wandering. A very good three-star album rather than a personal classic.

There’s a particular kind of album that doesn’t so much present itself as slowly establish a climate around the listener. This is one of those. By the halfway point I stopped hearing it as a conventional singer-songwriter record and started hearing it more as an ecosystem of perceptions: birds, weather, leaves, friendship, thoughts, faith, rooms, small sounds in air. Everything is connected, but not in a rigid symbolic way. More like a world where consciousness itself is porous and environmental. What struck me most was the way the songs seem to operate through partial understanding rather than polished explanation. The lyrics often feel as though they’re observing reality with slightly limited or animal cognition. Thoughts behave like birds. “Black and screaming leaves” feels less like poetic flourish than a survival-level interpretation of violent weather. Even the language itself occasionally bends into strange dream-logic syntax: “I am a child of linger-on.” The effect is uncanny because the songs are deeply intelligent while refusing the usual signs of literary cleverness. They feel discovered rather than engineered. Musically, the restraint is astonishing. The fingerpicking throughout is incredibly precise without ever sounding performative. The drumming on “Too Many Birds” is especially beautiful - loose, tidal, quietly alive. And the production deserves enormous credit. Small-room reverbs, close microphones, huge amounts of air between instruments. Nothing cinematic. Nothing inflated. The atmosphere comes from physical presence: wood, string noise, bow pressure, skin resonance, room reflections. It makes the album feel inhabited rather than produced. The imagery is extraordinary because it remains materially concrete even when dealing with large philosophical questions. Friendship becomes “two pieces of the gallows / the pillar and the beam.” Courtship becomes “a finch in wild mint vest.” The songs continually translate abstract emotional states into tactile physical structures. That’s the real artistic trick here. The weirdness never floats free of reality. It remains graspable through objects, weather and mechanism. The sequencing is masterful too. By the time “Invocation of Ratiocination” arrives as an instrumental, it genuinely feels as though words themselves have become suspect or insufficient. Then the closing movement toward “Faith/Void” lands with remarkable calmness. “It’s time to put God away” is one of the album’s key lines precisely because of its domestic practicality. Not rage against belief. Not triumphant atheism. Just the tired acknowledgement that a sustaining explanatory structure no longer quite functions. What’s remarkable is that none of this becomes bleak. The album remains warm, funny and companionable throughout. Even at its most existential, it still seems deeply interested in birds, weather, friendship and the continuing operation of small living systems. A profoundly thoughtful and quietly spoken record.

What struck me most listening to this now is that the album’s unevenness is not merely forgivable but revealing. It sounds like Motown caught halfway between two models of what a record is supposed to be. Side one pushes hard toward psychedelic soul, social commentary and groove-as-environment thinking, while large parts of side two revert to impeccably crafted romantic singles. Rather than weakening the album, that split becomes the story. You can hear a 45rpm institution adapting, slightly awkwardly but very intelligently, to a 33⅓rpm world. The title track still feels genuinely radical because it reframes psychedelia away from art-school exploration and toward social pressure and psychological escape. The lyrics sketch poverty, exhaustion and instability, while the music somehow combines tightness and sprawl at the same time. That becomes the defining sensation of the album as a whole. Whitfield’s productions are dense, busy and atmospheric, yet never remotely loose. The grooves stretch outward while remaining locked to the floor. A lot of psychedelic music of the period embraced collapse or drift. This feels engineered. The use of the voices is extraordinary throughout. On tracks like “Run Away Child, Running Wild”, the group stops functioning as a simple lead-and-harmony unit and becomes a field of overlapping signals - warning, pleading, narrating, panicking. The arrangements can feel frenetic without ever losing clarity. That tension between emotional disorder and technical control gives the album much of its force. The bass playing deserves separate mention because it increasingly behaves like a lead instrument. By this point, the rhythm section is no longer simply supporting the songs but actively defining their emotional and physical identity. Several tracks have an outright strut to them - not just groove, but body language. Even the more traditional romantic material feels heavier, more urban and more rhythmically assertive than earlier Temptations records. What keeps the album alive is that it never fully resolves its contradictions. It is neither a fully unified psychedelic-soul statement nor simply a collection of singles. Instead it documents transition itself. You can hear Motown’s old craftsmanship and new ambitions coexisting uneasily but productively inside the same record. The seams are visible, and the album is stronger for it.

I’d somehow managed to avoid this one for years, probably because “important big band jazz record” felt more like homework than pleasure. In reality, it turned out to be one of the most generous and enjoyable listens I’ve had in ages. What astonished me was the sheer amount of invention packed into forty minutes. False starts, fake endings, tumbling brass fills, sly modulations, glissed ensemble swells, sudden shifts from swagger to melancholy and back again - the whole thing feels alive and conversational. You never quite know where a track is going to turn next, but the band’s internal confidence is so absolute that you follow willingly. The Count himself is extraordinary throughout. He barely plays sometimes. Tiny little right-hand comments, repeated notes with microscopic changes in attack and timing, three-note interventions where most pianists would unload an entire paragraph. The orchestra is so large and complete that it gives him the freedom to become almost miniature. He reminds me less of a virtuoso soloist than of Bob Newhart quietly steering a room with perfectly timed interjections. The rhythm section is absurdly good. Eddie Jones in particular plays with frightening precision, while the whole band manages the impossible trick of sounding both tightly controlled and completely relaxed. That becomes almost miraculous on “Li’l Darlin’”, where the tempo drops to a glacial crawl and the orchestra still swings beautifully. Slow playing at that level must be terrifying in practice, which somehow makes the sensation of ease even more impressive. What stayed with me most was the atmosphere of the thing. This is mid-century urbanity at its most generous - sophisticated without being smug, precise without becoming clinical. It doesn’t shut the listener out or demand reverence. It invites you in. You can hear traces of film scores, revue bands, cartoon music, TV themes and later funk arranging all hidden inside these charts. A truly magnificent object.

There’s a strange tension running through this album. On the one hand it’s impeccably made country music - tight Bakersfield snap, proper songs, no wasted motion, enough accordion and rhythmic bounce to periodically threaten a full toot-toot outbreak. On the other, the emotional world it describes is bleakly unstable. These aren’t songs about grand romance so much as people trying to remain psychologically operational inside chronic insecurity. What surprised me was how Californian the whole thing felt once I settled into it. Not Hollywood California, but migrant California - highways, temporary rooms, drift, labour, emotional transience, people carrying “home” around inside themselves because the physical version has long since dissolved. Steinbeck with an overextended credit card. The Buck Owens influence is obvious in the sound, but the emotional weather feels much later and more exhausted. The album is full of movement, but very little liberation. Characters leave, drift, pack suitcases, stand at junctions, circulate through bars and streets, but rarely seem to arrive anywhere stable. Relationships aren’t treated romantically so much as infrastructurally - load-bearing emotional arrangements keeping people functional in a coercive economic landscape. That’s why the loneliness lands so hard. The songs understand that when continuity collapses, ordinary life itself starts to feel unstable. What kept fascinating me was the contrast between the emotional content and the musical presentation. “Streets of Bakersfield” is basically social exclusion and hobo precarity delivered with enough rhythmic uplift to keep the dance floor alive. A lot of American roots music seems built around this contradiction - despair transformed into socially usable momentum. British melancholy often stops and observes itself. This music keeps moving because stopping might mean total collapse. And yet, for all the insight and emotional realism, I never quite stopped feeling the limitation of the form. The album observes hardship brilliantly, but ultimately accepts the conditions as given. Endure, continue, sing, hold on to God, get through another morning. There’s very little sense that the wider machinery producing all this insecurity could itself be altered. That’s probably the point where my instincts diverge from the tradition. Still, as musical anthropology, this was deeply rewarding. Not a record I’d revisit often, but one that revealed a coherent emotional civilisation underneath a genre I’d previously kept at arm’s length.

Highway 61 Revisited is one of those records where eventually you stop asking “is this good?” and start asking “what exactly happened here?” because it feels less like an album than a cultural pressure system suddenly rupturing in public. The accepted story is straightforward enough: Dylan goes electric, rock grows up, the future arrives wearing sunglasses and carrying amphetamines. But sitting with the record properly, what struck me most wasn’t the modernity alone. It was the instability. The whole thing sounds like a civilisation halfway through changing its operating system while still trying to host the old software. “Like a Rolling Stone” still leaves me genuinely conflicted. I understand perfectly why it matters. Rock is abruptly dragged into adulthood. Songs can now be six minutes long, verbally dense, psychologically cruel and structurally untidy. The old pop rules are over. Yet there’s something genuinely vicious in it too. Dylan weaponises the privilege of song. The bile level is extraordinary. Al Kooper’s organ and those staggering piano figures save it from becoming merely hectoring. The whole thing lurches forward like a drunken public-address system announcing the death of social certainty. It sounds tiny and tinny in that very mid-60s way too - like hearing the future through a transistor radio before the culture has fully worked out how to record it. “Tombstone Blues” broadens the target from individual humiliation to institutional sickness. This is where the album starts feeling genuinely prophetic. Doctors, medicine men, authority figures, inherited social logic - all of it feels contaminated. America becomes a travelling carnival of compromised systems and exhausted explanations. Yet the music itself remains rooted in deeply physical American forms: blues, jump rhythm, bar-band propulsion. That’s the genius balancing act throughout the album. Dylan’s language destabilises reality while the band remain planted firmly in the soil. The lyrics fling linguistic crypto-bombs in every direction while the groove just keeps moving. Then comes “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry”, which may secretly be the emotional centre of the whole thing. The album exhales. Suddenly we’re in a different America entirely: humid rail yards, tired movement, half-lit companionship, emotional fatigue. Dylan drops the carnival bark and briefly becomes human-scale again. “I went to tell everyone but I could not get across” may be one of the defining lines of modern cultural exhaustion. Cassandra without heroic certainty. Not “winter is coming” but “winter is coming and I genuinely don’t know what you expect me to do about it.” What increasingly fascinated me throughout this listen was Dylan’s relationship to authority. He invents the possibility of rock as prophecy while simultaneously distrusting prophets. He opens the throne room and then repeatedly refuses coronation. Yet other songs flirt dangerously close to exactly that role. “Queen Jane Approximately” especially becomes much more moving if heard not as guru seduction but as reassurance inside an existing relationship. “When the masks become unbearable, come home.” The repeated invitation stops sounding messianic and starts sounding quietly humane. Home as the place where you don’t have to perform explanation any more. “Ballad of a Thin Man” remains the album’s most unsettling song because it captures the counterculture discovering its own power in real time. Mr Jones is often misread as merely establishment stupidity. He’s more tragic than that. He’s somebody stranded between symbolic systems, dimly sensing that the old postwar moral vocabulary no longer explains the emerging world. The sword-swallower verse is particularly nasty because the humiliation has already occurred before Jones fully understands the transaction. The song’s real horror is asymmetrical literacy. Everyone else understands the codes. He doesn’t. It’s the moment the 60s stop merely being youthful cheek and become epistemic warfare. And yet the album repeatedly undercuts its own grandeur. “From a Buick 6” is practically Ray Charles Americana. Cars, movement, secular joy, bodily life, roadside rhythm - the whole glorious vulgar bloodstream of American popular music. Dylan understands instinctively that America’s symbolic life doesn’t emerge from pure intellectual tradition but from highways, diners, bars, churches, radio stations and improvised social spaces. The title track pushes this even further. Highway 61 itself becomes the dumping ground for America’s helter-skelter subconscious. Biblical stories, commerce, hustlers, violence, jokes, insurance men, drifters - all routed onto the same endless roadside strip mall. At some point during this listen I realised the album’s emotional geography resembles those bizarre liminal spaces like late-night Edinburgh Fringe bars or roadside Americana attractions. Greenwich Village, Edinburgh in August, Juárez in “Tom Thumb’s Blues”, the Church of Elvis in Portland - places where: * everybody is performing * everybody is exhausted * absurdity and sincerity coexist * symbolic identities soften after midnight * temporary communities form around knowingly shared nonsense That’s the atmosphere of “Desolation Row”. Not apocalypse as wasteland, but apocalypse as overcrowded cultural quarter still serving drinks at 2am. The breakthrough for me was imagining the song not as literary symbolism but as the last open bar at the Edinburgh Fringe: * intellectuals still arguing * drag queens too tired to remain catty * washed-up performers holding court * future geniuses beside total frauds * everybody trapped in the same late-night republic of symbolic debris Once viewed that way, the song becomes strangely tender. Dylan no longer sounds like prosecutor or prophet. He sounds like a weary correspondent calmly documenting civilisation’s subconscious district. “If Ginsberg was a journalist” became my shorthand for it. Eleven minutes simply wash over you. No climax. No revelation. Just endless symbolic coexistence under soft acoustic guitar. And GOOD LORD he’s singing a song. A genuinely melodic one. After all the tannoy surrealism elsewhere, “Desolation Row” drifts with this almost lullaby-like grace. The melody humanises the grotesquerie. The music itself reassures you that the symbolic overload remains survivable. The great achievement of the album is that Dylan never places himself outside the carnival. He’s simultaneously: * critic * huckster * prophet * clown * witness * salesman * weary traveller * roadside mystic Cassandra as carnival barker. The warnings may be real, but they’re still delivered through performance and amplified showmanship. And somehow that makes them more believable rather than less. That instability is why the album still feels alive. It doesn’t present a solved worldview. It presents modernity becoming conscious of itself through noise, movement, exhaustion, humour, distrust and late-night human companionship.

This is one of those albums where the mythology initially gets in the way of the music. Neil Young arrives carrying so much cultural residue - the voice, the flannel, the harmonica, the “shambly hippie bloke” caricature - that I’d somehow missed the obvious point for years: the man can write. More than that, he can edit. These songs have a startling confidence in their own sufficiency. Even when the band stretches out, the album never feels flabby or overcooked. It feels written, then exposed to weather. The looseness is the key to the whole thing. Crazy Horse don’t behave like an elite backing band smoothing the songs into prestige Americana. They drag against them slightly. The guitars blur together. Harmonies wobble. Timing leans. Solos feel physically negotiated in real time. Yet all this “imperfection” creates extraordinary warmth because it preserves the sensation of human beings trying to maintain emotional contact with the song rather than demonstrating mastery over it. Neil’s lead playing in particular has this remarkable “heart moving faster than the hands” quality - phrases lunging toward feeling before technique fully catches up. The solos aren’t polished objects. They’re attempts. That’s why the long tracks work for me in a way that many jam-based records don’t. This isn’t formless wandering or virtuoso exhibitionism. The songs already exist before the expansion begins. The groove, melody and emotional centre are all firmly in place. The rambling comes afterwards, enlarging the atmosphere around the song rather than replacing it. “Down By The River” and “Cowgirl In The Sand” don’t sound like compositions being demonstrated. They sound like states being inhabited for a while longer. There’s a comfort about the playing because Neil never sounds like he’s trying to dominate the instrument. He sounds like somebody insisting the feeling through it. The album also feels unexpectedly close to later alternative music in spirit. Not because it predicts grunge in some crude “flannel and distortion” sense, but because it rejects polish as a moral virtue. The slightly out guitars, moving intonation and rough harmonies create thickness and emotional motion rather than “mistakes”. You can hear later indie, shoegaze and lo-fi ideas hiding in plain sight here - the understanding that blur can be more human than precision. A lot of records from this period want to present themselves as finished objects. This one leaves the pencil marks on the wall. Even the lyrics operate with the same confidence in plainness. Neil repeatedly reaches emotional depth through ordinary conversational phrasing rather than ornate poeticism. “But you were not home” lands with more force than pages of grand singer-songwriter symbolism because it sounds like a real human thought under pressure. The album constantly chooses sufficiency over display. The emotional truth arrives and Neil simply leaves it there. I think what finally won me over is that the record trusts wobble without collapsing into shapelessness. I hate flabby jamming and I hate overthinking. This somehow avoids both. The songs are strong enough to survive looseness, and the looseness stops the songs becoming over-managed. The result feels strangely restorative in 2026 because almost nothing now is allowed to remain this visibly human.

Listen, just listen to just how settled it is. Not in the sense of complacent - more that the album never behaves as though it’s frightened you’ll wander off if something dramatic doesn’t happen every thirty seconds. The grooves simply establish themselves and remain there. By the midpoint I wasn’t really hearing “tracks” any more so much as a continuous atmosphere. It genuinely felt at times like listening to some half-fading pirate station late at night - warmth, hiss, deep bass, fragments of conversation, the signal drifting in and out of clarity. The production throughout is WOAH. Questlove’s drums are so compressed and tightly controlled they almost stop sounding human, but the extraordinary thing is that they still breathe. You can hear musicians who’ve fully absorbed loop logic and machine timing, but haven’t surrendered bodily feel. Everything leans slightly. Nothing arrives too squarely. It’s all delayed gratification - drums fractionally behind the beat, basslines surfacing rather than striking, piano figures leaning into chords like appoggiaturas. My mum used to land those little suspensions on the piano like she was playing a harp, and there’s something of that same “not quite yet… now” sensation all over this record. Pino Palladino is immense throughout, though in an oddly self-effacing way. He’s not “showing you bass playing”. He’s altering the emotional weather in tiny increments. The realisation that this is the same man underpinning Paul Young records was a proper moment for me because suddenly the continuity became obvious. Same liquid melancholy. Same relaxed but immovable groove intelligence. Different production era, same bodily understanding of timing. There’s far more psychedelia in the album than the “neo-soul” label usually suggests. In fact I think that term diminishes it. “A Film Called (Pimp)” and “Nag Champa” don’t feel like tidy songs at all - more like overheated altered states. Not cosmic hippie psychedelia; urban psychedelia. Heat, exhaustion, sensuality, moral blur, the room becoming increasingly smoky and indistinct while you’re hoping the atmosphere doesn’t suddenly turn ugly. It has much more in common spiritually with There’s a Riot Goin’ On than with the respectable coffee-table version of “neo-soul” that emerged later. And yet for all that narcotic drift, the album keeps quietly reminding you that it has political foundations. “A Song For Assata” lands with real weight because you simply do not invoke Assata Shakur casually. Suddenly the whole groove ecosystem reveals itself as historically situated rather than merely hedonistic. Listening to it now, it also feels peculiarly poised on the edge of a historical change in America. There’s still an assumption here that warmth, pluralism, black musical lineage, sensuality and political awareness can naturally coexist in the same room. Within a year or two, the national mood hardens dramatically. “The Light” is the emotional centre of the album for me. Macy Gray sounds magnificent because she still sounds contingent and human rather than overcorrected into digital smoothness. Those little vocal handovers with Common are lovely - nobody trying to dominate the room, just people listening to each other properly. And Common himself flows beautifully throughout the album. I’d come to think of him primarily as an actor these days, which now seems faintly ridiculous given how completely embedded he is in the musical fabric here. He doesn’t sit on top of the grooves; he inhabits them. Damn. Ultimately I kept returning to just how comfortable the album is in its own pacing. It lounges. Gorgeously. That confidence in lowered pulse rate is the album’s deepest strength.

There’s always a danger with records like this that they get filed under “tasteful”. That faintly poisonous category reserved for albums that are clearly accomplished but don’t appear interested in smashing furniture or announcing their importance every thirty seconds. But that completely undersells what’s happening here. This is a hugely gutsy record. k.d. lang walks directly into one of the most codified traditions in American music and inhabits it so fully that the question of whether she belongs there quietly evaporates. The obvious comparison point is Elvis Costello’s Almost Blue. Another artist with deep love and understanding of country music throwing themselves into the form. But where Almost Blue often feels tense and slightly cornered by its own ambition, Shadowland feels astonishingly comfortable in its own skin. There’s no sense of “fixing” country music, reclaiming it or modernising it. She just sits inside the emotional architecture of the songs and lives there. The effect is warmer, stranger and much more radical than any overt statement would have been. Part of that confidence comes from the production. This is Owen Bradley territory. Full countrypolitan mode. Jordanaires-style backing vocals, softly glowing arrangements, steel guitar used as emotional weather rather than ornamentation. At its best the album enters a genuinely spooky little zone where torch song, country and dream-state overlap slightly out of phase with one another. You can hear Patsy Cline all over it, not as imitation but as emotional grammar. The sadness smiles. The arrangements know when restraint is more powerful than display. And then there’s the singing. Lordy. The pitch control is absurd but it never hardens into recital. That’s the miracle of the album. She can glide into enormous notes with total authority while still sounding conversational and loose. The glissandi are magnificent throughout. She phrases like someone who understands that the movement between notes often carries more emotional information than the notes themselves. At times she mirrors the lap steel so closely that voice and instrument seem to become part of the same emotional current. The really fascinating thing is that she manages to sound both fully inside the tradition and unmistakably herself at the same time. A lot of singers can disappear into a style. Others remain defiantly individual but never quite inhabit the form. She somehow does both simultaneously. You never mistake her for Patsy Cline, Brenda Lee or anyone else, but equally there’s never a second where she sounds like she’s visiting country music from outside. The emotional fluency is complete. The joy in this album sneaks up on you. Not cheerful joy. Joy in musical mastery. Joy in inhabiting these songs fully. Joy in going toe-to-toe with country standards and emerging not merely intact but completely commanding. The “Honky Tonk Angels’ Medley” seals the deal. Less museum piece than a gathering of women who understand exactly what this music can carry. Hearing k.d. lang alongside Kitty Wells, Loretta Lynn and Brenda Lee only sharpens the sense of just how extraordinary her control really is. She soars when she lets loose. Not every production choice lands perfectly now. One or two moments drift a bit too close to glossy late-80s Adult Contemporary for my taste. One saxophone in particular can absolutely bugger off. But even then the sheer intelligence and vitality of lang’s singing cuts straight through the sheen. Most importantly, this never feels like heritage reconstruction. It feels alive. The performances breathe. The phrasing is playful. The emotional intelligence throughout is deeply adult. Composed, wounded, flirtatious, socially functional, funny. No melodramatic collapse. No prestige suffering. Just beautifully controlled feeling moving through exquisitely shaped songs. And underneath all of it is a wonderfully confident idea. k.d. lang doesn’t ask permission to inhabit this music. She simply does it so well that resistance starts to look faintly ridiculous.

There’s a temptation with Transformer to talk about transgression, decadence and influence first, because the album arrives trailing fifty years of mythology behind it. But listening to it now, what strikes me most is how extraordinarily controlled it is. For a record with such a louche reputation, there’s remarkably little excess. No hippie drift. No endless jammed self-exploration. The songs are concise, sharply lit and structurally elegant. Lou Reed sketches entire lives in a handful of lines, then moves on before sentimentality can settle in. The effect is less “counterculture sprawl” than urban nocturne - fragments of people briefly illuminated in passing headlights. And that Bowie/Ronson/Reed triumvirate wrought an enormous amount culturally. Reed provides the characters, the moral ambiguity, the dry street-level observation. Bowie understands framing - how to turn damaged people and marginal lives into modern myth without flattening them into sociology. Ronson supplies architecture: strings, guitars, arrangement, sheer physical lift. Together they produce one of the key operating systems for post-sixties British culture. Not just glam, either. Vast stretches of British pop and adjacent culture seem to emerge from the emotional permission this album grants. Morrissey’s camp melancholy. Jarvis Cocker’s anthropological nightlife observations. Suede turning alienation into perfume. Blur understanding that character itself can become structure. The idea that style might carry emotional truth rather than conceal it. And for many listeners, this became the route by which ambiguity first arrived. Not through political discourse or theory, but aesthetically. Through atmosphere. Through glamour, wit, posture and theatricality. That matters. Because Transformer quietly teaches that pose is not necessarily dishonesty. Sometimes pose is how vulnerable people survive long enough to communicate at all. The album understands that performance and sincerity are not opposites. Human beings often require artifice before they can safely reveal anything genuine. For me, the route into this world actually came through Marc Almond and Soft Cell. That was the gateway. Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret already contained many of the same emotional mechanics: urban melancholy dressed as glamour, damaged people bathed in sympathetic neon, loneliness disguised as style. By the time I reached Lou Reed properly, the emotional grammar already felt strangely familiar. Which perhaps explains why the album’s cultural legacy feels simultaneously liberating and slightly unresolved. Because while the record undeniably widened emotional and aesthetic possibilities, people absorbed its lessons unevenly. Some absorbed the empathy. Others mainly kept the eyeliner. That tension still echoes through British culture now. Entire generations became adept at signalling ambiguity, sensitivity and outsider awareness aesthetically, while sometimes remaining less comfortable with those realities once encountered directly in ordinary life. Glam made transgression inhabitable through style long before many people fully metabolised its social implications beyond the frame. Yet the remarkable thing is that Lou Reed himself never entirely loses sight of the human beings underneath all this. The songs don’t leer at their characters. They don’t sentimentalise them either. They simply allow them presence: funny, lonely, performative, exhausted, composed, ridiculous, tender. The album’s humanity survives because it refuses both moral panic and patronising uplift. And that may be why Transformer remains alive rather than merely influential. Beneath the posture, beneath the myth, beneath the eyeliner and the cigarette smoke and the cultural aftershocks, there are still actual people wandering around inside these songs. That’s the part that lasts.

There’s a temptation with this one to either pretend it’s instantly revelatory or dismiss it as worthy homework. I’m not sure either response is quite right. At points it absolutely has the air of an Open University lecture, particularly in the spoken introductions explaining the ragas and their structures. My first instinct was almost to resist it on those grounds alone. But once the music settles in, you begin to understand that it’s operating on very different assumptions from western pop or rock. This isn’t music built around chord changes, narrative momentum or “what happens next?” excitement. It’s about inhabiting mood, scale and tone for long enough that tiny variations start to matter. The listening experience becomes less about destination and more about concentration itself. Oddly enough, parts of it didn’t feel entirely alien to me living in Scotland. The relationship between drone and melody, and the sense of emotional atmosphere emerging gradually from repetition, has distant echoes in traditional music closer to home than many rock listeners might expect. Once I stopped listening for hooks and started listening for texture, sustain and movement within repetition, the album became much easier to enter. I still can’t honestly claim I emotionally disappeared into it in the way I do with records built around strong social atmosphere or authored personality. There’s a formality to it that can keep you at arm’s length. But I increasingly respected the concentration it asks of both performer and listener, and the confidence it has in taking its time. It’s less “put this on at a party” and more “enter a musical system and stay there for a while.”

What do you do when the whole world thinks they’ve sussed you? By 1991, U2 had become critically exhausted. Not physically exhausted - though Berlin and the sessions hardly helped - but symbolically exhausted. The signs had stabilised too completely. The delayed guitar. The endless vowels. Bono as stadium conscience, forever pointing toward some distant moral horizon while Anton Corbijn photographed cacti in reverent monochrome. Even people who liked the band increasingly felt they understood the mechanism. What makes Achtung Baby extraordinary is that the band themselves seem painfully aware of this. The album is not a triumphant reinvention so much as an argument held in public about whether U2 can continue to exist at all. You can hear old instincts constantly bursting through - the yearning, the uplift, the huge emotional declarations - while Eno and Lanois keep smearing, compressing and destabilising the signal. Bono fights the urge to become Bono. Edge vandalises his own cathedral guitar sound. Adam and Larry keep trying to hold together a functioning rock band while the upper layers dissolve into mediation, distortion and performance. The opening of Zoo Station announces the crisis immediately. This is not the clean, declaratory U2 of old. The sound itself feels compromised - all smear, abrasion and uncertainty. The old emotional language no longer arrives cleanly. Throughout the album, lyrics, delivery and emotional meaning cease to align in the old rock-critical sense. Devastation arrives wrapped in glossy surfaces. Groove appears, but Bono cannot comfortably inhabit it. Desire and irony coexist in the same vocal line. Even the moments closest to “classic U2” - One, Wild Horses, Ultra Violet - sound worn, hesitant, unsure whether the old gestures still function. That uncertainty becomes the album’s deepest subject. Acrobat practically states the thesis outright: “What are we gonna do now it’s all been said?” The answer, quietly, is performance. Pose. Acrobatics. Theatricality not as evasion, but as survival strategy. This is where the album unexpectedly shares ground with Transformer: the discovery that sincerity and performance are not opposites. Bono’s masks - The Fly, the shades, the slogans, the mediated personas - do not destroy the feeling. They become the only way the feeling can survive under conditions of overexposure and spectacle. And that is why the record now feels prophetic. Not because it predicted technology itself, but because it understood the emotional atmosphere that was coming: unstable selves, mediated intimacy, performance bleeding into identity, truth arriving through contaminated channels. The old desert truth is gone by the end of this album. Everything is artifice now. Yet the longing somehow survives anyway. That is the strange achievement of Achtung Baby. It is not a confident album in retrospect. It sounds uncertain, compromised, exhausted and self-questioning. A band trying to work out, in real time, whether human meaning can still survive once the signal itself has become unstable.

Have a listen to The Score and note how little anxiety there is in it. So much of 1996 mainstream culture now feels like it was unconsciously hardening into systems - Britpop becoming institutionally self-aware, stardom becoming more performative, music journalism beginning to mistake scale for importance. This album somehow sidesteps most of that. Catch this: it doesn’t behave like a canonical statement even though it very obviously became one. Instead, it feels inhabited. Loose. Social. More like joining a conversation already in progress than being confronted with a thesis. The album constantly leaves space for interruption, humour, overlap and drift. That matters. A lot of supposedly “inclusive” music really means “submit to this communal gesture.” The Score is different. It invites participation without flattening personality. You’re not being led by the nose. You’re being asked to step into the current. Musically, it’s extraordinary how relaxed the record remains considering how densely constructed it actually is. The sampling is less crate-digging machismo than emotional architecture. The Fugees pull atmosphere out of records rather than simply quoting them. The Mask somehow extracts nocturnal cool from Nights in White Satin. Elsewhere you get jazz-funk, soul, reggae, classical guitar, Michael Franks smoothness, old sound-effects records and Caribbean rhythmic logic all dissolving into one another without any panic about genre boundaries or credibility bookkeeping. That Caribbean sensibility is probably the key to the whole thing. Even at its hardest, the album lopes rather than marches. The grooves stay socially functional - music for rooms, kitchens, parties, cars, flirting, heat, arguments, fans turning lazily in the corner. Wyclef in particular is crucial to that balance. He overcommits to virtually every syllable like somebody trying to keep the singalong alive at a party, but the album is warmer because of it. Lauryn supplies gravity and clarity. Pras grounds things. Wyclef keeps opening windows in the music. And perhaps that’s why the album still feels so alive. It never loses sight of people. Not demographics or movements or generational declarations - actual people. Couples half-singing along to songs that remind them of old mixtapes. Someone yelling “one time” from another room. Someone hearing Marley through the haze of a hot afternoon and a badly tuned radio. Even the serious moments retain humour and looseness. The record understands that communities sound like overlapping voices rather than perfect synchronisation. That’s what makes it such a defining album of that strangely good natured summer. It was everywhere in 1996, but never in an oppressive way. It drifted through ordinary life like weather.

Bayou Country rejects almost everything rock music would spend the next decade mistaking for seriousness. It is: * compact * functional * atmospheric * repeatable * physically grounded The songs emerge from: * roads * rivers * labour * bars * weather * movement —not fantasy, virtuosity, or symbolic grandeur. John Fogerty understands that ordinary people do not experience life as “conceptual journeys.” They experience: * exhaustion * pressure * brief joy * escape fantasies * work * momentum So the music avoids: * bloat * self-display * technical peacocking * progressive inflation * mystic abstraction Instead it trusts: * groove * repetition * compression * emotional directness * durable songwriting CCR’s great achievement is making highly constructed music feel like shared civic atmosphere rather than authored prestige. The band sound: * competent * grounded * among people —not above them. This is why the music remained woven into American life rather than trapped in “classic album” reverence. These songs became: * barbecue music * driving music * beer music * work music * memory music They function socially. The album also reveals a broader truth about American culture: the counterculture was never outside the machine. It rapidly developed its own: * economies * hierarchies * mythologies * retail ecosystems * aristocracies Yet CCR stand slightly apart from that. They sound suspicious of both authority and utopianism. The music recognises systems, pressure, fatigue, commodification and drift — but without collapsing into cynicism. Which is why the album still breathes. It treats music not as transcendence, but as accompaniment to lived reality.

There’s a temptation with Bringing It All Back Home to talk about it like a monument. The great breakthrough. Dylan goes electric. Pop becomes art. All true. But what really strikes me listening now is how alive it feels. Not heavy. Not portentous. Alive. This album doesn’t lumber around announcing its significance. It skips. It laughs. It swaggers. It blurts ideas out at impossible speed and somehow keeps landing on its feet. The electric side still feels like a liberation. Not because of volume, but because electricity brings movement, melody and air. Suddenly Dylan can sing rather than declaim. The words bounce off the band instead of arriving as tablets of stone. Songs like Subterranean Homesick Blues, Outlaw Blues and Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream feel less like “important statements” than America itself turning into noise - adverts, cops, mythology, jokes, scams, speed, bullshit and possibility all talking at once. And then the acoustic side somehow goes even further. Mr Tambourine Man, Gates of Eden and It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) aren’t just folk songs expanded by surrealism. They feel like thought itself changing shape inside pop music. Dylan stops explaining the world and starts flooding songs with fragments, recognitions, images and pressure. Every other line produces the same reaction: “Well… yes. Can’t argue with that.” But what stops the album collapsing under the weight of its own intelligence is joy. Even at its most serious, it never feels trapped by seriousness. There’s too much humour, too much movement, too much sheer pleasure in language and melody. Dylan sounds exhilarated by what songs can suddenly do. And then there are moments of extraordinary tenderness. She Belongs to Me and Love Minus Zero/No Limit are so melodically graceful they almost disguise their sophistication. Dylan’s reputation as a “poet” sometimes obscures what a startlingly good songwriter he became once the British Invasion pushed him toward melody and flow. By the time It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue closes the record, it feels less like an ending than a world quietly changing shape in front of you. The strained upward melody finally drops into that exhausted acceptance - “d’you know what? I’m done” - and pop music is never really the same again. An astounding achievement. Not because it makes pop heavier, but because it proves pop can contain more life

What makes this album so important is not simply the quality of the songs, but the historical position it occupies. It feels less like a culmination than a transfer point - one era of American pop consciousness handing itself over to another in real time. By 1970, the optimism and collective momentum of the 60s had started to fragment. Rock music was becoming more professional, more studio-shaped, more inward-looking and more adult. This record captures that shift almost perfectly. You can still hear the folk revival roots, the Everly Brothers harmonies, the collegiate intelligence and acoustic intimacy that made Simon & Garfunkel initially distinctive, but they now exist inside a much larger and more sophisticated sonic world. The future soft-rock and singer-songwriter decade is already fully visible from here. What struck me most revisiting it properly was the sheer confidence of the arrangements. Not simply their scale, but their range. The album moves effortlessly between monumental studio grandeur, loose pop buoyancy, urban melancholy and near-lounge sophistication without sounding fragmented. It treats the studio not as a place to document performance, but as an architectural tool capable of constructing entirely different emotional environments from song to song. At the centre of it all is Paul Simon’s writing, which now feels remarkably modern. Not because it is confessional in the blunt singer-songwriter sense, but because it refuses easy emotional simplification. His lyrics constantly search, qualify and recalibrate themselves in real time - “no, not quite that, closer to this.” The honesty comes from the visible effort of approximation. He understands that language is an imprecise instrument and keeps trying to reduce the distortion between lived feeling and verbal expression. That quality gives the album much of its emotional weight. Even at its most polished, it never fully resolves into certainty. The songs remain socially textured, awkward, moving, overthought, funny and slightly tired in recognisably adult ways. Relationships drift. Communication falters. Burnout becomes rhythm. Performance becomes identity. Yet the melodies remain warm and instinctively generous. And for all the sophistication, the record never loses contact with the simple emotional engine underneath it. Simon & Garfunkel originally recorded as “Tom and Jerry” - two harmony-obsessed teenagers shaped by Phil and Don Everly - and by the close of the album you can feel those roots quietly reasserting themselves beneath all the architecture and intelligence. The old dream of two voices locking together still survives inside the increasingly complicated adult world surrounding it. That tension is ultimately what gives the album its lasting power. It stands at the point where youthful folk idealism gives way to something more ambiguous, urban, arranged and psychologically complex, while still retaining enough melodic warmth to stop the transition becoming cold or cynical. A genuine pivot point for the coming decade.

It's difficult to explain to someone who wasn't there just how revolutionary Def Jam felt. Not because of politics or sales figures. Because of permission. By 1986, most musical tribes had become quite protective of their borders. Then along came three New York idiots who seemed happy to nick from everybody. Hip-hop, punk, hard rock, comedy records, street chants - if it sounded good, it was fair game. The remarkable thing is how obvious the thefts are. This isn't crate-digging. It's broad daylight robbery. And that's exactly why it works. The album feels less like a crossover and more like a cultural smash-and-grab. Listening to it now, I'm struck by how little cynicism there is. The Beasties are playing idiots, but they're not playing nihilists. There's an enormous amount of joy here. Even the most ridiculous tracks sound like three mates amusing themselves rather than three professionals pursuing a career strategy. Part of the album's appeal is that even when it behaves like hip-hop, it doesn't. The samples aren't hidden. The references aren't disguised. Tracks regularly break their own momentum. The album keeps reminding you that you're listening to records made from other records. There's a collage instinct peeking through the noise, one that would eventually flower into *Paul's Boutique*, but it's already visible here in flashes. It's also much funnier than people sometimes remember. Not because it's a comedy album, but because the Beasties understand that commitment is funny. Whether discussing cocktails, crafty women, touring, or the fundamental right to make a racket, they approach every subject with absurd seriousness. The joke is never explained. It simply arrives at full volume and dares you not to join in. Of course, not everything has aged perfectly. One or two moments provoke genuine winces, and the Beasties themselves would later admit as much. One of the more admirable things about their later career is that they never seemed especially interested in defending every dumb thing they'd done at nineteen. They learned, changed, and carried on. No grand redemption narrative required. What fascinates me in retrospect is that these supposed frat-boy idiots would eventually become some of the most thoughtful and culturally curious figures in popular music. Looking back, the clues are already here. Beneath the laddishness are three magpies fascinated by records, culture and the possibilities created by smashing unlikely things together. But perhaps the biggest surprise is how much fun it still is. Forty years of influence, analysis and historical significance haven't managed to pin it down. Every time you're tempted to treat it as an Important Album, somebody shouts "Brass Monkey", steals another riff, or starts a football chant, and the whole thing wriggles free again. For all its influence, *Licensed to Ill* remains wonderfully resistant to reverence. It's simply too much fun to be held in 12 inches of vinyl.

Absolutely. The considered notes should be the workshop, not the verdict. Something more like: One of the surprises of revisiting this is how much of the album’s reputation rests on a handful of moments. In memory, I carried around a picture of a force of nature fronting a great band. Listening now, I hear a force of nature fronting a band that often seems unsure whether it wants to be a blues outfit, a psychedelic outfit, or simply an excuse to make an interesting noise for a few minutes. The singer remains unmistakable. What has changed is my relationship with what she’s doing. When I first encountered this record, I tended to equate visible commitment with greatness. The abrasion in the voice, the sense of somebody pushing themselves beyond comfortable limits, felt inherently profound. These days I’m less convinced. Some performances that once sounded like depth now sound more like intensity. Not the same thing. The album itself is a curious mixture of discipline and chaos. There are moments where everyone seems to be participating in the same song, and moments where the singer appears to have brought a blues record while the band have brought a San Francisco happening. The tension is occasionally productive and occasionally distracting. Either way, it is never boring. What struck me most was how young the central figure now seems. The mythology surrounding the record has a tendency to make her appear fully formed, almost elemental. The songs reveal something much more human. The emotional world presented here often feels less like wisdom than a set of assumptions being lived through in real time. I found myself responding less to the legend and more to the person. The album’s strongest moments arrive when force is balanced by restraint. The long blues performances towards the end work precisely because the singer doesn’t attack every phrase as though it might be her last. Space appears. Dynamics appear. The songs stop being demonstrations of commitment and become performances. That’s where the record reveals its real sophistication. The cover may be the perfect introduction. Not because it explains the music, but because it prepares you for a gloriously cluttered experience. Contradictions, competing impulses, questionable decisions and occasional brilliance all coexist quite happily. The miracle is not that the album is messy. The miracle is that something this messy works as often as it does. It’s one of those records that becomes more interesting once the legend starts to wear off. Not less impressive. More human.

The most impressive thing about this record is that it repeatedly leaves me unable to explain how it got from one place to another. The grooves don’t develop in the way rock music develops. There are no obvious signposts, no dramatic transitions, no moments where the band collectively announces that a new section has begun. Yet twenty minutes later you’re somewhere completely different. More than once I found my attention wandering for a few seconds and returned to discover that the music had quietly transformed itself. Not through sudden change, but through accumulation. A horn figure here, an adjustment in emphasis there, a subtle shift in the rhythm section. The process is so gradual that you only notice it in retrospect. The title suggests a summit meeting between Fela Kuti and Ginger Baker. In reality, this is Fela’s world. Baker’s contribution is not to dominate but to integrate. His drumming is wonderfully responsive throughout, finding its place within a much larger machine rather than attempting to sit on top of it. I was also repeatedly drawn to the electric piano. Small repeated figures drift in and out of focus, quietly binding huge stretches of music together. Some of the album’s most important work is being done by parts that initially seem almost incidental. For a live album, it’s a remarkably disorienting experience. Most live records constantly remind you of the room. Here, the room gradually disappears. What remains is the sensation of being inside a process - a system in motion. The Tony Allen and Ginger Baker drum duet only reinforced what I’d been hearing throughout. This music has more in common with the conversational qualities of hard bop than with the grandstanding often associated with rock drumming. The groove isn’t a platform for performance. It’s the thing being explored. Above all, this is a record that trusts duration. It believes that staying with a groove long enough will reveal things that shorter forms simply cannot. And the infuriating thing is that it turns out to be right.

The older I get, the less interested I am in punk as a genre and the more interested I am in what it was trying to achieve. Listening to this again, I’m struck by how little of the record is really about rebellion in the abstract. It’s about reality. Not reality in the grand sense. Not manifestos and barricades. The reality of jobs, boredom, transport, sex, money and loneliness. The reality of staring at the future and wondering whether somebody has made a clerical error. That’s why the record still feels alive. The Clash weren’t simply trying to create a style. They were trying to write songs that sounded like the world they inhabited. Sometimes that world involved race, policing and politics. Sometimes it involved being skint on a weekend. Sometimes it involved condoms. That balance matters. What surprised me most this time was how much of the album belongs to Mick Jones. The accepted story tends to cast Strummer as the visionary centre, but What’s My Name?, Deny and Protex Blue all point towards a different future: one where pop culture, identity, desire and everyday life are just as important as ideology. You can hear why Big Audio Dynamite later made sense. Mick Jones was always interested in image, media, personality and the strange clutter of modern life. The famous songs remain famous for a reason. White Riot still carries extraordinary force, even if it suffers from what I think of as the Curse of Johnny Speight: people hearing the slogan while missing the argument. Career Opportunities remains painfully current. Every generation seems to discover its own version of being offered a future that doesn’t feel much like an opportunity. That song hit harder than expected. It isn’t just about unemployment. It’s about the insult of bad options being presented as opportunity. That feeling didn’t end with the 1970s. It ran straight through the Thatcher years and it is plainly still with us now, only with the added cruelty of the internet holding up endless images of young people apparently succeeding while many others sit in bedrooms wondering what they have done wrong. The revelation, though, was Police & Thieves. It doesn’t just broaden the album musically; it broadens it morally. Suddenly the record becomes curious rather than merely angry. The future Clash is right there in plain sight. It is the one cover, but it may be the most important choice on the album, because it shows that their Year Zero was never really a closed border. They were listening outwards. And every so often Strummer accidentally produces real poetry. The best example comes in London’s Burning: “The wind howls through the empty blocks looking for a home.” What makes it work is the complete lack of self-consciousness. He doesn’t stop to admire it. He just moves on. The image arrives, does its work, and disappears. That lack of self-consciousness is crucial. If someone more theatrically pleased with himself had written that line, you would hear the pause after it. You would hear the little “see what I did there?” smile. Strummer doesn’t give you that. The line isn’t performing poetry. It is simply trying to describe a bleak place and accidentally finds an image good enough to last. And then the album ends with Garageland, which feels like the manifesto hiding at the end rather than the beginning. It is the song that says: this is what we are, this is where we come from, and this is what we refuse to become. The whole “we’re not going on Top of the Pops” stance matters because it is not just anti-fame posturing. It is about containment. The fear is that the machine will absorb the thing before the thing has properly declared itself. That punk will become another portable act, another product, another scheduled entertainment unit with a lighting plot and a clean exit route. Garageland pushes back against that. It says the garage is not a lack of professionalism. It is the source of the authority. The roughness is not something to be polished away. It is the proof of origin. That makes it the right ending. After all the boredom, work, anger, sex, politics, reggae, accidental poetry and youthful acne, the album lands on a statement of identity. Not “we have arrived,” but “we know what we must not become.” For all the mythology, this doesn’t sound like Year Zero in the sense of destroying the past. It sounds like reality arriving in pop music with the volume turned up. Punk’s greatest ambition wasn’t anarchy. It was honesty.

I approached this one with fairly modest expectations. Grammy-winning country-pop about falling in love? Fine. We'll give it forty-five minutes, nod politely and move on. The cover art, the title, the general cultural reputation of the album all seemed to point in the same direction: tasteful, well-crafted songs about romance, delivered with enough charm to keep everyone happy and enough polish to win awards. Pleasant. Competent. Possibly even very good. Just not necessarily something that would linger in the mind once the final track faded out. Except that's not quite what's going on here. Underneath the immaculate production, the vocoders, the sunsets and the butterflies, Kacey Musgraves has made a surprisingly thoughtful album about timing, impermanence and the awkward fact that happiness doesn't actually solve anything. It just gives you something worth worrying about. The record begins with a brief disclaimer that she is, in fact, a bit of a handful, before settling into a state of wonder. Not old-school psychedelic "I have seen the secrets of the universe" wonder, but something much more modern. Call it Instagram psychedelia. Trees are amazing. The sky is amazing. Love is amazing. Existing at all is faintly ridiculous. Somewhere along the way, somebody appears to have dropped acid and come back with the conclusion that they should probably phone their mother. The remarkable thing is how lightly it's all worn. *Mother* lasts barely more than a minute and contains more emotional truth than many artists manage in an entire album. "I miss my mum who misses her mum." That's the song. That's enough. The point has been made. Elsewhere, Musgraves keeps taking familiar country images and quietly retooling them. *Space Cowboy* isn't Steve Miller. It's "space, cowboy." *Love Is a Wild Thing* argues that love can't be owned. *Happy & Sad* observes that the moment you realise you're happy, you start worrying about losing it. Even the title track ultimately lands on the wonderfully unromantic observation that somebody "caught me at the right time." That idea runs through the whole record. The time has to be right. Darryl Pandy knew the score. So did Jarvis Cocker. So, apparently, does Kacey Musgraves. What surprised me most was discovering an arc. The album starts looking up at the stars and ends worrying about ordinary human limitations. The concerns become steadily more grounded. Wonder gives way to attachment. Attachment gives way to impermanence. The light slowly moves across the room. And then, just when things threaten to become too thoughtful, she throws in *High Horse*, which turns out to be country disco. Or, if you prefer, *I Will Survive, Yee-Haw*. There are not many records that can move from generational grief to a mirror-ball-assisted instruction for somebody to stop being a pain in the arse. I can't pretend this will become a foundational album for me. It's not *Parklife* or *Revolver or **The Lexicon of Love*. But I enjoyed spending time in its company far more than I expected. Musgraves turns out to be funny, observant and quietly subversive. The songs are full of country clichés, artfully deployed and slyly repurposed. The production glows. The ideas; well, they sneak up on you. Most impressively, the album survives close inspection. You can happily let it soundtrack a coffee shop. Equally, you can spend a morning poring over it like a Graham Greene novel and discover that it's been thinking about time all along. Maybe more contemporary country artists should drop a tab now and again.

When this appeared in the randomiser, I confess my heart sank slightly. Not because I dislike Richard Thompson. More because I have spent enough time around discussions of English folk music to develop a mild defensive reflex. There is a certain type of listener who can explain the significance of a ballad collected in 1893 with the zeal of an evangelical preacher, and I feared I was about to spend forty minutes wandering through a landscape populated by tragic maidens, doomed farmhands and men whose principal hobby is explaining modes. The surprise is that this album is hardly about any of that. What struck me most throughout was how modern it feels. Not modern in sound, obviously. Modern in outlook. The songs are populated by recognisable human beings rather than folk archetypes. They drink, work, dream, make mistakes, tell themselves stories, chase pleasures and occasionally confront realities they would rather avoid. The folk tradition is present, but it has already passed through pubs, dance halls and market towns. This isn’t England preserved in aspic. It’s England inhabited. The opening song, When I Get To The Border, initially seemed almost slight. A man talking about going somewhere else. Yet as it unfolded it became clear that the border in question is probably not a national frontier at all but the final crossing. The song’s quiet power lies in its refusal to dramatise death. It treats it as a journey already undertaken by those who mattered most. The destination is uncertain, but the longing is unmistakable. From there the album repeatedly returns to the question of how people live with uncertainty. The Calvary Cross wraps artistic obsession and emotional burden inside a hypnotic arrangement that feels oddly contemporary. The spectral percussion, the drone and the starkness of the performance create a mood that reminded me less of folk-rock than of the emotional directness of John Lennon’s early solo work. It isn’t interested in providing answers. It is interested in the weight people choose to carry. The title track arrives like a shaft of light through the clouds. Linda Thompson’s performance changes the song completely. Sung by Richard, it might have become an observation. Sung by Linda, it becomes a declaration of intent. She doesn’t sound like a character being studied. She sounds like someone who has worked hard all week and intends to enjoy herself. The presence of the CWS Band is inspired. It gives the song what I can only describe as a municipal romance. Not glamour. Not decadence. A town turning its lights on and deciding that life is worth participating in. That idea of participation runs through much of the record. The songs are rarely interested in exceptional people. They are interested in ordinary people attempting to negotiate ordinary existence. Workers in We Sing Hallelujah. Drinkers in Down Where The Drunkards Roll. Lovers, dreamers, opportunists and the wonderfully entrepreneurial protagonist of The Little Beggar Girl, who turns out not to be a victim at all but a professional operating a remarkably successful nationwide enterprise and taking evident pleasure in relieving snobs of their money. One of the most fascinating songs is Down Where The Drunkards Roll. It would be easy to hear it as a cautionary tale about alcohol. It is much more interesting than that. The song observes people pursuing what they believe will satisfy them. The boys in their finery. The lover seeking “the real thing”. The dreamers and self-mythologisers. Drink becomes less the subject than the mechanism through which illusion collides with reality. The refrain has a democratic quality. Whatever stories people tell about themselves, gravity eventually enters the conversation. The album’s reputation for bleakness rests largely on The End Of The Rainbow, and initially I thought that reputation was justified. Yet the more closely I listened, the less cynical the song appeared. Its target is not hope itself but false hope. The narrator isn’t telling a child that life is meaningless. He is telling them that the comforting myths adults tell children are unreliable. There is something almost startlingly contemporary about it. At times it brought Richard Dawson to mind: not because the songs are similar, but because both writers are deeply suspicious of sentimentality while remaining profoundly interested in human beings. That balance is one of the album’s greatest strengths. Thompson sees clearly. He notices weakness, delusion, disappointment and compromise. Yet there is remarkably little contempt anywhere on the record. Even the most foolish characters are treated as people rather than targets. The camera observes, but it does not prosecute. Which makes The Great Valerio such a perfect conclusion. Having stripped away illusions throughout the album, Thompson ends not with despair but with possibility. The image of people becoming “acrobats of love” is unexpectedly moving. We watch acrobats not because they deceive us but because they demonstrate what is possible. They expand our sense of the achievable. After an album full of hard truths, that feels like a quietly radical note on which to end. The final surprise came from the live bonus material. Hearing Richard and Linda tackle Buck Owens’ Together Again felt less like an appendix and more like a key. For all the album’s Englishness - its pubs, brass bands, communal rituals and market-town sensibility - its emotional DNA often feels closer to great country music than to the stereotype of folk-rock. The concerns are the same: ordinary people trying to navigate love, disappointment, work, hope and reality without losing their appetite for living. That, ultimately, is what stayed with me. This is not an album about tradition. It is an album about people. About the stories they tell themselves, the burdens they carry, the pleasures they pursue and the ways they keep going when life turns out to be less accommodating than promised. I spent most of the album waiting for it to become the record I feared it would be. It never did. Instead, it became something much rarer: a record that sees humanity clearly and likes it anyway.

The usual story about Let It Bleed is that it marks the death of the 1960s. Altamont is days away, Nixon is in the White House, and the counterculture is beginning to discover that changing the world is considerably harder than announcing your intention to do so. There’s some truth in that, but it misses what the album is actually doing. This isn’t a record mourning a dream. It’s a record accepting reality. The Stones spend much of the album shrinking the frame. Grand theories and social movements give way to people. Hosts. Lovers. Killers. Drunks. Mourners. Miscreants. The title track offers hospitality rather than revolution. Love in Vain accepts loss rather than attempting to transcend it. Midnight Rambler acknowledges darkness without trying to explain it. The closing track quietly lowers expectations from transformation to sufficiency. A lot of 1960s music asks how we might change the world. Let It Bleed increasingly asks how we might live in it. That is a very different question. It is also a much more 1970s question. The album feels like a moment of cultural adulthood. Not cynicism, not defeat, and certainly not despair. Simply the recognition that life remains stubbornly itself. People disappoint one another. Storms arrive uninvited. Dreams incur maintenance costs. The future turns out to contain many of the same problems as the past. The Stones’ response is adaptation. What makes the record so compelling is that it never becomes a lecture. The band remain mischievous, warm, humane and occasionally ridiculous. Country Honk is a prank. Live With Me is daft and oddly endearing. Even the darker moments are animated by curiosity rather than moralising. The Stones are not interested in explaining the age. They are interested in inhabiting it. The album also marks the point where the band seem to understand themselves completely. Beggars Banquet feels like a group making sense of the decade around them. Let It Bleed feels like a group discovering the role they are about to play in the next one. Monkey Man is particularly revealing in this respect. It sounds less like a relic of the 1960s than a preview of the Stones who would dominate the early 1970s. For all the talk of apocalypse and disillusionment, the album ends somewhere unexpectedly communal. Not collectivist. Communal. People gathering together, each contributing something small. The title track offers a seat at the table. The closing track gradually accumulates voices until it becomes an ensemble piece in the truest sense. The answer to the collapse of grand narratives turns out not to be heroism or revelation, but company. In the end, Let It Bleed does not declare that the dream is over. It simply notes that adulthood has arrived and expects everybody to get on with it.

Tusk has a reputation problem. Because the title track is so famous, and because it follows Rumours, it’s often discussed as an act of rebellion. The story tends to be that Fleetwood Mac reached the summit of mainstream success and immediately decided to make something perverse. Listening to the whole album, that explanation feels inadequate. The more interesting question is why a band at the peak of its powers became so interested in accommodation. Not compromise. Accommodation. By 1979, the musical landscape had altered dramatically. Punk, new wave and post-punk had challenged assumptions about arrangement, rhythm, production and performance. Yet Fleetwood Mac’s response was not to abandon their identity. Instead they attempted to enlarge it. The album’s most remarkable feature is not Buckingham’s experimentation, though there is plenty of that. It is the band’s ability to absorb those experiments without losing coherence. Throughout the record, new ideas are admitted into the system: nervous new-wave rhythms, buried vocals, unusual instrumental textures, repetitive structures, songs that seem more interested in atmosphere than conventional narrative. Yet the centre holds. Part of this comes from the extraordinary quality of the musicianship. Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, in particular, function as the album’s infrastructure. Their contribution is less flashy than Buckingham’s or Nicks’s, but without them the record would likely fragment. Again and again, songs are allowed to stretch because the rhythm section provides an unshakeable foundation beneath them. What becomes apparent over time is that Fleetwood Mac are no longer functioning as a conventional rock band. They have become an ecosystem. Christine McVie writes concise and elegant songs that seem almost effortless. Stevie Nicks contributes pieces that operate through image, atmosphere and emotional weather. Buckingham constantly probes at the boundaries of form and arrangement. The achievement lies not in any one of these approaches, but in the fact that all three can coexist. The album is also notable for the degree to which meaning is carried by arrangement rather than lyric. Many of its most memorable moments are musical rather than verbal: the arguing pianos of Sara, the tremolo ripples of Brown Eyes, the stacked vocal textures throughout, the peculiar decision-making that seems present in almost every track. Listening becomes less an exercise in interpreting songs than in observing choices. This is perhaps why the title track functions more successfully within the album than outside it. Heard as a single, Tusk can sound like a provocation. Heard after the preceding eighteen tracks, it feels less like a departure than a culmination. The album has spent over an hour demonstrating how Fleetwood Mac might accommodate new ideas; the title track simply makes that argument impossible to ignore. The closing Never Forget then performs a final act of framing. It does not retreat from the album’s experimentation. Instead it quietly reminds the listener that the traditional Fleetwood Mac virtues remain intact. The message is not “we’re sorry” or even “don’t worry”. It is simply that expansion and continuity are not opposites. The usual comparison is the White Album. There is some truth in that. Both records are fascinated by the tensile strength of a successful group. But where the White Album often asks how much divergence a band can survive, Tusk asks how much change a band can absorb. The answer turns out to be rather a lot.

There are albums that reveal themselves immediately, and albums that spend years quietly following you around waiting for the right moment. If You’re Feeling Sinister belongs firmly in the second category. I’ve always liked Belle and Sebastian, but revisiting this record reminded me how easy it is to mistake delicacy for slightness. The songs arrive lightly. The arrangements rarely raise their voices. The characters often seem uncertain, distracted or half-lost. Yet underneath sits an astonishingly rich piece of songwriting. What struck me this time was how restless the album is. Almost every song concerns someone searching for something - another person, another life, another explanation, another version of themselves. Nobody really arrives anywhere. The athlete remains an object of fascination. Lisa remains caught between stories and reality. The boy gets done wrong again. Judy dreams of horses. The woman at the centre of the title track wrestles with faith, desire and meaning. These aren’t songs about answers. They’re songs about looking. Murdoch’s great gift is his refusal to simplify people. The lyrics are playfully ambiguous without ever feeling evasive. A line can be funny, sad and revealing at the same time. A song can be a love song, a warning and a character study simultaneously. Again and again, Murdoch presents a scene and trusts the listener to do some of the work. The title track remains the album’s emotional centre. For all its reputation as a song about religion, it feels more like a song about vulnerability. The mention of Anthony walking to his death lands with shocking force because it arrives so casually. Murdoch never signals its importance. He simply places it there and carries on. The song’s conclusion is equally remarkable. Rather than offering certainty or revelation, it offers something smaller and perhaps more useful: go and talk to somebody. The chances are you’ll probably feel better. It is a profoundly humane song. What increasingly interests me about Belle and Sebastian is how British their musical instincts are. Not merely indie-British, but connected to older traditions of melodic economy. Listening again, I kept thinking about Ronnie Hazlehurst, Norrie Paramor and the world of television themes, library music and little pieces of functional melody. These songs establish themselves immediately. A few notes and the world is there. Murdoch’s characters may be uncertain, but the songwriting is not. The album is also far funnier than its reputation allows. The Boy Done Wrong Again sounds less like a lament than the verdict of an older Scottish observer who has seen this sort of thing happen before. Even the most serious songs contain moments of gentle absurdity. Murdoch understands that people are often ridiculous, especially when they are trying to become themselves. Perhaps the album’s greatest strength is its compassion. These songs are full of self-deception, projection, longing and confusion, yet there is never any sense of judgement. Murdoch observes his characters closely but refuses to mock them. He understands that most of us spend our lives improvising our way through situations we only half understand. Nearly thirty years on, what remains impressive is not the album’s cleverness, though there is plenty of that. It is the depth of feeling concealed within such modest means. Small observations accumulate into something substantial. Tiny details carry surprising emotional weight. Entire discussions emerge from a single scene, a single line, a single glance. It remains an album of restless vignettes - unshowy, humane, funny, ambiguous and quietly profound.

Yes. This deserves the full municipal inquest. Pictures at an Exhibition is an album that has to be met on its own terms, partly because normal terms appear to have been suspended. It is not enough to say that Emerson, Lake & Palmer adapt Mussorgsky for a rock trio. That makes the project sound faintly reasonable. What they actually do is take a nineteenth-century Russian piano suite, place it inside Newcastle City Hall, attach it to a pipe organ and a bank of synthesisers, and then proceed as though this were the obvious next step in Western civilisation. The first thing to say is that they can play. There is no point pretending otherwise. Whatever else this record is, it is not lazy, incompetent or cynical. Three young men walked on stage in 1971 and attempted something wildly ambitious in front of a live audience. The stamina, precision and nerve are impressive. At several points the only honest response is: well done. The second thing to say is that it is extremely funny. Not always intentionally, but not cruelly either. The comedy comes from disproportion. Everything is huge. Every gesture is treated as significant. Every available keyboard seems to be approached as a moral obligation. The synthesiser does not merely enter the arrangement; it appears to set off from Gateshead and head for Sunderland under its own power. There is a fine line between ambition and vandalism, and ELP spend much of the album sprinting along it in capes. The instrumental excess is often the most enjoyable part. Keith Emerson’s keyboard work is ridiculous, but it is ridiculous in an entertaining way. It has energy, daring and spectacle. The pipe organ moments feel less like accompaniment than civic requisition. At times the record seems less like a concert than an incident report involving regional electricity supply. The difficulty, for me, arrives when the grandeur asks to be taken emotionally rather than theatrically. Greg Lake has a fine voice, but the lyrical and vocal interventions push the album towards a kind of sixth-form transcendence. The upward glissandos, the abstract declarations, the earnest reaching towards meaning - all of it starts to feel like proto-power-ballad territory. At moments it sounds less like Mussorgsky transformed than Mussorgsky interrupted by someone who has had important thoughts. That is the central tension of the record. As spectacle, it works. As musicianship, it impresses. As emotional communication, it often leaves me oddly unmoved. I understood the ambition. I respected the achievement. I was never bored. But I was rarely touched. The record kept generating awe-adjacent effects without quite producing awe. Part of the problem is historical distance. The lovely Mrs C, who knew this music in its natural habitat, said that it sounded genuinely revolutionary at the time. I believe that completely. In 1971, these sounds must have felt startling: rock music expanded into something architectural, electronic, theatrical and enormous. The difficulty is that sounds age. The synthesisers that sounded revolutionary in 1971 now sound like a 1978 BBC-2 programme about concrete. That is not really ELP’s fault. Time has shifted the meaning of the technology. What once signified the future now evokes beige suits, explanatory diagrams, unfinished bridges and a calm voiceover about the benefits of pre-stressed materials. The white heat of technological revolution has somehow ended up in Northern Lincolnshire. And yet that datedness is part of the album’s charm. It captures a moment when rock music still believed it could annex high culture, occupy the concert hall, borrow the pipe organ and return with the spoils. There is something almost touching about that level of confidence. Then comes Nutrocker, and the whole thing relaxes. After all the architecture, symbolism, prophecy, witches, uplift and keyboard warfare, ELP suddenly remember that music can be fun. It is smartarse fun, certainly, but fun all the same. They stop bowing before the classical tradition and bop the king on the head with an inflated pig’s bladder. It is probably the most human moment on the record. So the verdict is not dismissal. This is too capable, too committed and too entertaining to dismiss. But neither is it love. I admire it more than I feel it, and I laugh at it more than I am moved by it. Three stars feels right. A remarkable performance. A fascinating artefact. A frequently hilarious act of progsurdity. But also a record that proves musicianship, ambition and majesty are not quite the same thing as emotional force.

Sarah Vaughan’s At Mister Kelly’s was a welcome palate cleanser after yesterday’s prog-rock archaeology. No conceptual framework, no attempt to redraw the map of popular music, no twenty-minute suites. Just a singer, a trio and a room. The obvious headline is the voice. It would be difficult for it not to be. Vaughan possesses that rare level of technical command where the mechanics become almost invisible. The vibrato is astonishingly well judged, the diction immaculate, and the range so secure that she can casually drop octave leaps into a phrase without drawing attention to them. What becomes clear very quickly, though, is that technique is not really the point. The deeper pleasure of the album is watching Vaughan make decisions. On Just One of Those Things, she treats the melody as a framework for improvisation. The song is so well known that part of the performance becomes a conversation with the audience’s expectations. By contrast, Be Anything, But Darling Be Mine is far more grounded in the lyric. It is a relatively straightforward performance and all the more compelling for it. Vaughan’s facility is so complete that she no longer needs to demonstrate it. She can simply inhabit the song. The emotional centre of the album arrives with Stairway to the Stars. There are moments here that are genuinely startling. A brief riff at the start of a stanza serves as a reminder that she could dismantle the melody at any moment if she chose. Then she returns to discipline. Later, a repeated phrase becomes an opportunity for embellishment, and on the second pass she produces a piece of improvisation so audacious that it momentarily redefines the song. What impressed me was not the daring itself but the judgement. She always returns to the song’s emotional centre. The freedom never becomes self-indulgence. That balance runs throughout the album. Vaughan serves the song and makes the song serve her simultaneously. She inhabits the lyric while commenting on it. She is inside the performance and somehow outside it as well, aware of the room, the audience and the very act of singing. The live setting is crucial. During Willow Weep for Me there is an audible thump, followed by audience laughter. Vaughan instantly folds the mishap into the performance, joking that she has “fouled up this song real well” before later adding, “They’ll prob’ly use that one.” They did. Thank goodness. The incident reveals the person behind the voice and confirms that this is not a recital but an event. The trio are magnificent throughout. Jimmy Jones, Richard Davis and Roy Haynes are so light on their feet that they almost disappear. They provide exactly the right environment for Vaughan’s style of singing: supportive without being restrictive, responsive without becoming busy. The result is a remarkable sense of ease. One of the most interesting moments comes during Honeysuckle Rose. Vaughan seems to borrow something of Fats Waller’s swagger. Not the specifics of his performance, but the stance. Waller has a habit of elbowing his way into a song and occupying it. Vaughan does something similar, all while remaining faithful to the tune’s essential feel. It is a reminder that great performers are not merely interpreters. They are presences. The album closes, appropriately, with Just a Gigolo. Vaughan treats it less as a standard and more as a statement. Even when she departs from the melody and improvises, the seriousness remains intact. The final, gradual slowing of the tempo is masterful. Not dramatic. Not sentimental. Simply controlled. The song comes to rest exactly when she decides it should. My edition included How High the Moon as a bonus track, and it provides a perfect coda. Vaughan jokes about not knowing the words, references Ella Fitzgerald, and then launches into a scat performance that reveals what she has been quietly setting up all evening. It is playful, mischievous and joyous. For a few minutes she seems to step into Ella’s territory, not as an act of imitation but as a demonstration that she understands the language completely. A thought occurred to me while listening. Ray Davies once observed that every band of the 1960s needed an act, except The Beatles. They were simply allowed to be themselves. Vaughan feels similar. Most singers build a persona. Vaughan seems to contain several. She can be witty, romantic, playful, serious, technically dazzling and emotionally direct, often within the same song. None of it feels like an act. It all feels like Sarah Vaughan. By the end, the most impressive thing is not the voice, remarkable though it is. It is the sense of a complete artist at work. Someone with enough mastery to stop thinking about mastery and start thinking about meaning.

There are albums that announce themselves immediately and albums that reveal themselves gradually. This one manages to do both. The opening title track arrives like a cavalry charge, all swagger, strings and emotional overstatement, and for a while it is tempting to hear the record simply as a brilliantly executed exercise in style. Scott Walker, Jacques Brel, Morricone, Gainsbourg and a thousand half-remembered European films seem to be swirling around every arrangement. Yet the longer it runs, the clearer it becomes that there is more going on than homage. The first thing that struck me was how completely shameless these songs are. Modern songwriting often feels obliged to apologise for intensity. A feeling is expressed, then immediately undercut with irony, self-awareness or a joke. Not here. Every emotional impulse is treated as if it deserves orchestral accompaniment and a helicopter shot over Lake Geneva. Women become forces of nature. Rivals become handsome mavericks. A raised glass becomes an act of statecraft. The album's title is one of the great jokes in modern pop because understatement is the one thing it never practices. What saves it from self-parody is commitment. Turner and Kane never wink. The songs are allowed to be ridiculous because they believe in themselves absolutely. Even the most outlandish lines are delivered with complete conviction. The result is exhilarating and exhausting in almost exactly equal measure. Listening through it this time, I became increasingly convinced that the album is far more structured than its reputation suggests. Beneath the strings and bravado runs a surprisingly coherent emotional arc. The early songs are dominated by obsession. People are watched, interpreted and mythologised. Projection follows close behind. The women in these songs often function less as people than as screens onto which longing, insecurity and fantasy are projected. Eventually reality intrudes. The projections begin to fail. Rivals emerge. Repetition becomes visible. Relationships reveal themselves to be less magical and more complicated than the narrators had hoped. Disappointment sets in. Then comes abandonment, embodied most clearly in Meeting Place, where the grand drama gives way to the much sadder image of somebody left standing in a place whose purpose has disappeared. The relationship has gone, but the location remains. The echo remains. By the time we arrive at The Time Has Come Again, something has changed. The emotional temperature drops. The album finally discovers acceptance. Not happiness, not reconciliation, but recognition. The narrator realises that these experiences are not unique catastrophes but recurring features of being human. The song's title is telling. Not "The Time Has Come". "The Time Has Come Again". The lesson has returned. The wound has returned. Life continues. Musically, the record is astonishingly assured. James Ford and Owen Pallett deserve enormous credit for arrangements that do far more than decorate the songs. The strings act as propulsion, commentary and atmosphere. Sometimes they push the songs forward like a pursuit sequence from a lost ITC adventure serial. Sometimes they linger afterwards, gently lowering the emotional curtain. The Morricone influences are obvious, but there are moments that evoke old television themes, forgotten European thrillers and the kind of cultural memory assembled from afternoon repeats and half-remembered broadcasts rather than direct experience. The Sheffield roots never disappear entirely. The arrangements may inhabit an imaginary Europe of spies, orchids and diplomatic intrigue, but Turner's eye for behaviour remains grounded in observation. Gestures, glances, habits and conversational moments carry the songs. The scenery is imported; the narrator remains recognisably northern. What impressed me most, though, is that the album ultimately earns its grandeur. It begins by insisting that every feeling deserves a string section. It ends by understanding that feelings are temporary, recurring and universal. That journey gives the spectacle meaning. Nearly twenty years later, it remains one of the most entertainingly overcommitted records of its era. It is melodramatic, excessive, occasionally absurd and frequently magnificent. Most importantly, it understands that style and substance are not enemies. The style is the substance. The orchestra, the swagger, the references and the emotional inflation are not distractions from the album's themes. They are the themes. The Age of the Understatement turns out to be a record about what happens when obsession gradually gives way to understanding. It just happens to tell that story with enough strings to soundtrack the fall of a small European republic.

When people talk about grunge, they often talk about heaviness, angst and cultural impact. This album has little interest in any of those things. The surprise is that the engine driving it isn’t really grunge at all. It’s garage rock. Again and again I found myself hearing The Sonics, The Kingsmen, all sorts of Nuggets obscurities, the Stooges and Buzzcocks. The structures are wonderfully primitive: find a riff, find a groove, and trust them. The Seattle contribution is mostly harmonic. Sonics structure, grunge chords. What makes the album special is the confidence of its choices. The tempos breathe. The organs sound cheap in exactly the right way. The harmonica repeatedly appears where a guitar solo might be expected. Every decision feels instinctive and immediate. Not careless decisions - swift ones. The band seem to understand exactly when further refinement would start removing the life from the music. The deeper I got into the record, the more varied it became. One moment there’s a chiming guitar part that opens a window in the middle of all the fuzz. The next there’s the swampy menace of “Into the Drink”, the full-on Sonics assault of “Who You Drivin’ Now?” or the unmistakable Buzzcocks pulse running through “Pokin’ Around”. Every time I thought I had the album pinned down, it revealed another side of itself. What surprised me most was the ending. After forty minutes of movement, humour, momentum and glorious racket, “Check-Out Time” changes the atmosphere completely. The spoken delivery, the euphemistic title and the lyric about an ordinary man listening to the wrong voice reveal a darkness that had largely been hidden until that point. It isn’t dramatic or theatrical. That’s what makes it unsettling. The album spends most of its running time behaving like a gang of garage-rock hooligans before quietly revealing that it has something more serious on its mind. The irony is that this supposedly scruffy 8-track oddity sold in enough numbers to help keep Sub Pop afloat. Listening now, that’s not difficult to understand. Beneath the muck is an excellent set of songs. Mudhoney simply had the confidence to leave the muck where it belonged.

I’d spent years hearing Eagles through the lens of Hotel California. That’s probably inevitable. The trouble is that it encourages you to listen for the beginnings of the institution rather than the reality of the band. The reality is more interesting. What surprised me most was how much of the album still belongs to the late 1960s. The counterculture hasn’t entirely packed up and gone home. There are traces of Gram Parsons throughout, particularly in Bernie Leadon’s contributions. There are moments that feel closer to The Band than to the Eagles stereotype. There is even the occasional whiff of the Grateful Dead. This is not yet a machine built for FM radio domination. It is a coalition of musicians drawing from a shared American musical ecosystem before the genre boundaries harden. That matters because the album’s strengths are often misidentified. The Eagles are commonly praised as songwriters, but what impressed me most here was their ability to realise material. Some of the songs are genuinely strong. Others are merely decent. What elevates them is the band’s judgement. They know when to add harmonies and when to hold them back. They understand dynamics. They understand endings. They understand that arrangement is composition by other means. The best example is probably “Take the Devil”. The song itself is good, but the real pleasure comes from the extended instrumental passage where the guitars nag at each other rather than solo. The conversation is more interesting than virtuosity would have been. Likewise, the ending of “Train Leaves Here This Morning” contains a beautiful block-harmony flourish that functions almost like a stage bow. It isn’t necessary. It’s there because somebody cared about how the song left the room. Again and again, I found myself thinking less about songwriting than about presentation. This is a band that understands entertainment in the best sense of the word. Not pandering. Not spectacle. Simply knowing how to hold an audience’s attention. The sequencing reflects it. The variety reflects it. Even the daftness of “Earlybird” reflects it. What initially sounds like lightweight whimsy gradually reveals itself as a playful attack on the work-and-consume treadmill, complete with mocking birdsong and a hero who just wants to lie in the sun reading books and playing music. The central tracks remain the obvious entry points. “Take It Easy” and “Peaceful Easy Feeling” have survived because they provide a form of emotional regulation. Yet both are more fragile than their reputations suggest. The former is a song about coping with overload. The latter is built on hope rather than certainty. Neither is quite the Californian confidence trick I once assumed. What ultimately won me over was not the songwriting, nor the genre, but the craftsmanship. This is not really my music. Yet I found myself admiring the care that had gone into every corner of it. The record never feels desperate to impress. It simply presents itself with confidence and competence. In the end, I found myself preferring it to Hotel California for much the same reason that I prefer Off the Wall to Thriller. Before the institution arrives, you can still hear the band.

From Elvis in Memphis is not really the sound of Elvis reclaiming a throne. That’s too simple, and too much like the official story. It is closer to a fairy tale: a man waking from a deep career sleep, remembering the shape of his own gift, and finding that the old magic still answers when called. The Beatles did not make Elvis irrelevant. Tom Parker did. Elvis was sold like a repeatable attraction: the location changes, the costume changes, the soundtrack arrives, the machine keeps running. Elvis of the Caribbean, if you like. The tragedy is not that the world moved past him, but that he had been prevented from moving with it. That makes this record stranger and more moving than a standard comeback. It is not especially interested in proving that Elvis is modern. It is interested in letting him become present again. The production understands that. These arrangements have extraordinary emotional intelligence. A funeral song is propelled by a restless bass line. A song about impending heartbreak becomes busy, nervous and chattery. Strings and French horns don’t merely decorate; they comment, answer and reveal. A sideman briefly sharing a key line changes its meaning. Again and again, the production seems to understand the emotional situation before the lyric explains it. The album’s achievement is integration. Country, gospel, soul, orchestral pop and Memphis groove are all present, but they never feel stitched together. The seams disappear. The record keeps moving, and the arrangements continue revealing new information right into the fades. It is not innovation for its own sake. It is intelligence, passion and judgement working as one system. That also complicates the old Elvis argument. The old point about Elvis as a refiner refiner of a previous tradirion rather than an inventor of a new one still stands. The album does not really argue with it. Instead it makes the charge less sufficient. Yes, these forms existed. Yes, other people opened the doors. But interpretation is not clerical work. At its best, it is a creative act. That is clearest on After Loving You. For a few minutes, the machinery falls away and the singer steps forward. Not just emotion. Belief. The voice has grain, damage and presence. You can hear the man in the room. By the time In the Ghetto arrives, the album has earned its final act. The arrangement works almost like a stage slowly being built and lit in front of you: a small pool of light, then another, then a wider wash, until the whole system is visible. It belongs in the same adult American pop world as Wichita Lineman and MacArthur Park, where arrangement and production carry as much meaning as the lyric itself. This is not Elvis as monument. It is Elvis as a working singer, awake again, surrounded by musicians and producers who know exactly what the songs need. I expected to respect it. I wasn’t expecting five stars. But here we are.

By 1997, Blur had already discovered that The Great Escape wasn’t. Parklife had made them Britain’s defining band, but The Great Escape showed them the cost. It was bright, clever, successful and increasingly airless: an album full of people trapped inside the lives they had supposedly chosen. The title now sounds less like a promise than a joke. Nobody escapes. Not the country-house exile. Not the office drone. Not the charmless man first glimpsed as graffiti in the toilets at Grantham station. Not Damon Albarn, who had spent years writing brilliant little novels about other people and was beginning to realise he might be trapped inside one himself. That is why the cover of Blur matters so much. A blurred figure on a stretcher, being rushed into A&E. Not a corpse. A casualty. The patient is Blur itself, being carried away from the Britpop wars after technically surviving them. Then comes Beetlebum. It is the crucial track because it does not merely announce a change of style. It enacts the thing the whole album is about. The song drifts in like late Beatles viewed through narcotic fog, owing something obvious to Happiness Is A Warm Gun, but the important moment is not the reference. It is that sudden opening when Damon sings “and when she lets me slip away”. For a few seconds, the burden lifts. The room brightens. Escape seems not only possible but beautiful. The rest of the album spends an hour testing that promise and discovering its limits. That is what makes the record so much more than “Blur discover American indie”. Pavement, Neil Young, Nirvana and lo-fi guitar culture all matter, but they are not the subject. They are tools. America itself is only another proposed exit. So are drugs. So is fame. So is love. So is reinvention. So is being in a band. The album keeps asking the same question from different angles: what if every escape route leads back to the person trying to escape? Song 2 understands this instinctively. It is not the album’s thesis. It is a controlled explosion, a joke about American alt-rock that accidentally became one of the most effective rock singles of the decade. In two minutes and two seconds, Blur blow the doors off and immediately risk creating a new trap for themselves. They escaped Country House only to create another monster. That, too, is part of the point. Even rebellion can be marketed. Even a joke can become your signature. After that, the album proper begins. Country Sad Ballad Man is the first sign that Blur have stopped merely arranging and started discovering. There is boxy air around the song. The band sound relieved, as though Graham Coxon’s wish for music that would “scare people” did not mean horror or aggression so much as uncertainty. The old Blur records are brilliantly designed. This one allows things to happen in the room. Damon’s writing changes accordingly. He had always been a great observer, but here the distance begins to collapse. Graham later said that Damon’s songs were revealing more to him than to Damon, and that feels central to this album. On Parklife, Damon is still the novelist. By Blur, the characters are becoming translucent. The teenager who dies in Death of a Party is not just a social type. It is Damon himself: the death of the belief that the next party, next drug, next lover, next country or next version of yourself will finally deliver the escape you were promised. That is why Graham is so important to the record. He is not merely the guitarist who brought in Pavement records. He is the counter-argument. While Damon keeps searching for exits, Graham keeps shrinking the frame. You’re So Great is almost embarrassingly simple, which is why it matters. It is not a manifesto. It is a small human solution: affection, coffee, television, ordinary life. The same instinct would later become explicit in Coffee & TV. Graham’s answer is not transcendence. It is sufficiency. Maybe simple things have to be enough. Damon is not there yet. Death of a Party is the “I hear you, Graham” song, but not yet the “I agree” song. It hears the argument that the party is over, that the teenage fantasy has died, that the search for elsewhere has failed. It does not yet know what to put in its place. Chinese Bombs, gloriously meaningless and furiously brief, is Graham’s “mid pop life crisis” in miniature: a refusal to let significance smother noise. Sometimes liberation is just eighty-four seconds of racket. Then the second half of the album tightens the noose. I’m Just A Killer For Your Love is not really romantic melodrama. It is letting go, self-deprecation, nullification. Hair cut off. Coat removed. Load dropped. Nothing lasts. Look Inside America is not Magic America revisited. That earlier song was still Damon the novelist, writing a character who projects salvation onto elsewhere. Here the distance is gone. America is real now: hotel rooms, Pepsi, bruises, exhaustion, Woody Allen on rewind. The promised land becomes another place where the same face looks back from the mirror. By Strange News From Another Star, the album has reached the point at which even another country is not far enough. Damon sings “I don’t believe in me” and asks “Will you love me though it’s always the same?” That may be the deepest wound on the record. Fame has failed as self-validation. America has failed as reinvention. Love cannot be safely made responsible for saving you. Even another star would not be far enough away if the problem travels with you. And then comes Essex Dogs. A paranoid, tired vision of 1997 over a strung-out jam. Orange sodium light, terminal pubs, panic attacks, tiny lawns, strange thoughts in the car. The spoken delivery is crucial. Damon no longer sounds like a singer inhabiting a song. He sounds like somebody watching himself through glass. The alienation is not just social. It is bodily. He is reporting experience rather than fully living it. The effect reminds me of Mudhoney’s Check-Out Time: not a sung confession, but an exhausted account from the edge of things. By this point the cover image has become unavoidable. The patient on the stretcher was not an abstract design choice. It was the album’s diagnosis. Blur survived Britpop, but survival left them injured. They won enough to discover that winning was not the same as freedom. The hidden track is the final masterstroke. After Essex Dogs, there is no grand resolution. No anthem. No healing speech. Just loops playing out like a haunted machine. The effect is like the Plastic Ono Band leaning guitars against amps in Toronto and walking away. Human drama ends. The system keeps running. Leave the loops running and go home. That is where Blur finally arrives. It begins with the narcotic promise of slipping away and ends with the acceptance that slipping away is temporary. Fame, America, drugs, love, success, reinvention: none of them can keep the door open. The self keeps turning up wherever you go. For a band trying to escape itself, that is a brutal discovery. For Blur, it became liberation.

The thing that makes this album more than a stylish left turn is that the style is not ornamental. The clothes, cafés, jazz chords, soul references and imagined France are not a costume. They are the visible surface of a much deeper proposal: that life might be made larger by curiosity, culture, politics, love and refusing to accept the supplied version of adulthood. Its great trick is integration. On paper it should be a mess: soul, hard bop, hip-hop, chanson, political writing, love songs, instrumentals, café fantasy and Booker T. grooves all pushed into the same room. But the room holds. That is the achievement. The album feels like a deliberately constructed civic space, not a pile of enthusiasms. The opening matters enormously. It does not begin by reassuring anyone that the old certainties remain available. It begins by changing the organisational chart. The keyboard player is not decoration. He is musical authority. The instrumentals are not breathers between “proper” songs. They are statements of method: listen, respond, leave space, let the ensemble speak. The politics of the record are in the arrangements as much as the lyrics. And those politics are much harder-edged than the album’s reputation suggests. This is not cappuccino socialism as lifestyle accessory. It is a record that takes seriously the possibility that society is arranged wrongly and that merely complaining about it is not enough. It attacks inherited privilege, moral censorship, small-minded conformity, media confusion and passivity. Some of it is clunky. Some of it is earnest. But the earnestness is part of the charge. It is not pretending to care. It cares. What feels startling now is how dangerous some of that seriousness would sound in the present climate. The rhetoric sits far closer to today’s controversy zone than the “nice suits and espresso” caricature allows. The album belongs to a Britain where a pop record could assume politics, jazz, newspapers, socialism, love and cultural self-invention all belonged in the same conversation. The past really is another country. The imagined France is important, but it is not really France. Not literally. It is a composite city: Parisian architecture, village cafés, Riviera light, American music, British politics and the idea that time spent thinking is not wasted time. The café is not a prop. It is a machine for developing ideas. Sit down, read, argue, follow the thought through, do not flinch from the conclusion. But the record would be much smaller if it stopped there. Its real destination is not theory. It is people. That is why the great love songs matter so much. After the politics and the world-building, the album arrives at gratitude, recognition and confidence. The most moving moment is not a manifesto. It is the realisation that the richest things in life may be the ones already present, if only you have the wit to notice them before you lose them. That is not sentimentality. It is wisdom, and it is why the record can still catch the throat. The final instrumental completes the argument beautifully. After all the speeches, the chairman stops talking and becomes a rhythm guitarist. The band settles into a warm soul groove, halfway to Booker T., and the album ends not with victory but with fellowship. No final lecture. No grand resolution. Just musicians playing together. The council adjourns. The ideas remain.

There’s a curious problem with this album. It is very obviously good. The songs are well written. The performances are excellent. Nigel Godrich’s production is meticulous without becoming sterile. David Campbell’s string arrangements do an enormous amount of narrative work. Every decision feels considered. Every sound appears to have been placed with care. And yet, after fifty-two minutes, I found myself admiring it more than loving it. Part of that may be Beck himself. For an album born from the collapse of a long relationship, it is remarkably short on accusation and surprisingly reluctant to tell a story. Instead it deals in atmosphere, perception and aftermath. Roads disappear. Diamonds fracture. Sleep becomes respite. People push against themselves. The songs circle around emotional states rather than pinning them down. Sometimes this is powerful. The opener hangs in the air like a ghost inhabiting its own life. Elsewhere the strings become increasingly austere and dissonant, carrying tensions that the vocal refuses to dramatise. One song ends like a CRT screen collapsing to a point. Another spirals into something resembling an anxiety loop. Throughout, there is a recurring sense of damaged transmission: signals exist, but connections fail. What fascinated me most, though, was Godrich. By the end I became increasingly aware of his fingerprints. Descending ostinatos. Harmonic drift. Frayed endings. Songs that refuse to resolve cleanly. A nagging sense of forward motion without arrival. Sometimes it is exactly what the material needs. At other moments I found myself hearing the producer’s habits as much as Beck’s songs. Perhaps that is why the album never fully landed for me. The emotional weather is vivid, but the human drama often remains obscured inside it. Compare it with the very greatest breakup records and you notice the difference. They populate their worlds with people. This album often populates its world with conditions. That sounds harsher than I intend it to. There is much to admire here. More than once I found myself stopping to appreciate a line, a texture, a string figure or a production choice. The album rewards attention. It rewards careful listening. It rewards thought. But admiration and attachment are not quite the same thing. In the end, I came away with enormous respect for what Beck and his collaborators achieved. I can hear why it matters to so many people. I can hear why it is often spoken of with reverence. I just never quite found the road that led me all the way in.

The first Undertones album feels like an event. A bolt from the blue. A bunch of lads from Derry accidentally discovering they could write some of the greatest pop singles of their generation. This album is different. This is the sound of a band waking up and realising they might actually have a career on their hands. The common description is that The Undertones wrote songs about girls. That’s true, but it’s also a bit like saying Dickens wrote about people. The interesting part is what they do with the subject. By the time of this second album, they’re already moving beyond simple teenage yearning and becoming fascinated by behaviour. Who gets the girl. Who gets compared to somebody else. Who works. Who doesn’t. Who belongs. Who’s left out. Why some people seem to glide through life while others can’t get out of their own way. The album is full of characters. Kevin, the infuriatingly perfect cousin. Terry, whose social problems turn out not to be optical in nature. The Whizz Kids. The boys who read Beanos in bed while somebody else is outside fixing cars. Even the songs about girls increasingly become songs about communication, misunderstanding and social observation. Feargal Sharkey spends much of the record trying to understand the people around him. Musically, the growth is startling. The popular memory tends to place The Undertones in a permanent state of three-chord urgency, but eleven months have changed them considerably. There are acoustic guitars, Hammond organs, soul rhythms, jangling guitars and songs that seem more interested in atmosphere than immediate impact. Wednesday Week points towards a future version of the band. Tearproof hints at influences that have little to do with punk. Nine Times Out Of Ten is happy to sit inside a groove and explore a mood rather than race to the next chorus. Yet none of this feels self-conscious. That’s the clever part. The Undertones never announce their sophistication. They simply absorb new ideas and carry on writing great pop songs. Even when they become more ambitious, they remain recognisably themselves. There is no sense of a band straining for importance. And perhaps that’s why the album wears so well. It understands that teenage life is simultaneously ridiculous and absolutely serious. A pair of glasses can feel like a catastrophe. A cousin’s achievements can become unbearable. A girl looking in the wrong direction can ruin an entire week. The band recognise the absurdity of these concerns without ever mocking the people experiencing them. The result is one of the most enjoyable second albums of its era. Not because it repeats the debut, and not because it rejects it. It expands the world. The songs are richer, the characters more vivid and the musical palette broader. The Undertones are still singing about ordinary lives, but they’re starting to realise just how much material ordinary lives contain.

There are albums that persuade you through emotion. There are albums that persuade you through ideas. This one persuades through sheer force of execution. I spent much of Reign in Blood arguing with it. The lyrics often feel more interested in horror than understanding, more concerned with presenting atrocities than interrogating them. Jeff Hanneman was many things, but a profound lyricist he was not. Again and again I found myself thinking, “Yes, we know. Mengele was bad.” And yet the album kept winning the argument. Partly because the musicianship is astonishing. Not in a showy, progressive-rock sense, but in the way an Olympic performance is astonishing. The speed is one thing. The precision is another. The real achievement is that it never sounds like a technical exercise. Beneath all the violence and apocalypse, Slayer groove. My head was nodding. I wasn’t expecting that. The other revelation was Tom Araya. For an album with a reputation for extremity, the diction is extraordinary. These lyrics aren’t buried in the mix. They’re delivered with the clarity of a man determined that every word will arrive on time. As somebody who has spent time singing, I found myself increasingly admiring the logistics of the performance. The quantity of language being delivered at those tempos is remarkable. What really impressed me, though, was the economy. By the halfway point, songs were beginning to feel like three songs compressed into one. Riffs appear, establish themselves, and disappear before they can become familiar. Nothing lingers. Nothing is wasted. The whole record feels like a fax machine transmitting information at maximum speed. Not simple. Compressed. And that’s where the album’s greatness lies. Slayer don’t stumble towards a thesis. They decide upon one and execute it with frightening discipline. Every decision serves the same objective. The production. The sequencing. The brevity. The complete absence of filler. There isn’t a saggy track on the album. I still don’t think the lyrics are particularly deep. I still wouldn’t choose this world over many others. But by the end I understood something important: this isn’t a great thrash metal album because it’s extreme. It’s a great thrash metal album because it’s ruthlessly, almost unbelievably, effective. I shouldn’t really like it. But sometimes craftsmanship leaves you with very little choice. It’s Slayer - Reign in Blood.

Good Old Boys is a grimly impressive record: compact, funny, ugly, beautifully made, and deeply uncomfortable. It begins with provocation, but it does not stay there. “Rednecks” initially appears to be a grotesque character piece, a Southern bigot given enough rope to hang himself in public. But the song’s real force comes from the way it widens the target. Newman is not simply saying that racism exists in the South. He is also attacking the outsourcing of disgust: the comforting idea that prejudice lives over there, in those people, in that accent, while cleaner and more respectable forms of cruelty can continue elsewhere with a better vocabulary. That is the first sign of the album’s complexity. It refuses to let the listener occupy a safe moral balcony. From there, the record keeps broadening. “Birmingham” gives the opening voice a civic setting. The man is no longer just a poisonous mouth. He has a town, a job, a sense of pride, a local identity. That does not redeem him, but it makes him more plausible. Newman understands that ugly politics rarely exist as pure ugliness. They live inside homes, cities, marriages, memories, jokes, songs and self-descriptions. That is what makes the album feel so contemporary. Its subject is not only the American South in the 1970s. Its deeper subject is the process by which grievance finds a culprit. The grievances on the album are not all imaginary. There is poverty here, bad work, neglect, political abandonment, domestic failure and wounded pride. Men feel ignored. Places feel forgotten. Institutions feel remote. But the horror lies in the conversion process: real wounds are handed the wrong explanation. A person who has been failed is invited to blame someone weaker, stranger, darker, poorer, newer, easier. That is where Good Old Boys becomes more than satire. It is not content to laugh at prejudice. It studies the conditions in which prejudice becomes useful. “Mr. President” is crucial because it gives the working man a grievance that is not merely cultural. The plea is simple: have pity on the working man. The song is not noble in any straightforward sense, but it is materially grounded. Newman knows that economic pressure and moral corruption can coexist. Suffering does not automatically ennoble people. Nor does bigotry cancel the reality of suffering. The album keeps both facts in view, which is why it remains so difficult to sit with. The Huey Long material then sharpens the political argument. “Every Man a King” and “Kingfish” show populism as an emotional transaction before it is an ideological one. The offer is not just “I will improve your life.” It is “I will give you a voice.” That is an immensely powerful promise to people who feel unheard. It can become dignity. It can also become permission. This is one of the album’s strongest insights. The strongman does not first appear to his supporters as a monster. He appears as relief. He speaks plainly. He gets things done. He frightens the right people. He turns resentment into theatre and calls it representation. Musically, the album is almost indecently well made. That is part of the discomfort. Newman gives bitter material a candy shell: warm piano, old songbook shapes, comic turns, parlour songs, little civic numbers, fragments that can sound cosy until the content registers properly. The arrangements do not always announce the horror. Sometimes they make the horror more plausible by refusing to underline it. The writing is wildly economical. Whole towns, marriages, political systems and moral failures are implied in a few plain lines. Newman does not over-explain. He trusts the listener to hear the courthouse, the kitchen, the bar, the floodwater, the campaign truck and the locked room behind the song. The domestic songs are just as grim as the political ones. “Marie” is touching and awful at the same time: a love song in which tenderness does not erase failure. “Guilty” is self-recognition without redemption. “Rollin’” turns denial into routine, showing a man using small rules and a glass in his hand to convince himself that everything is under control. The album repeatedly returns to the same moral fact: feeling something sincerely does not make the conduct good. That may be the core of the record. It refuses all the easy equations. Tenderness is not goodness. Grievance is not justice. Suffering is not innocence. Comedy is not harmlessness. Charm is not moral health. As an album, Good Old Boys is not lovable in any easy sense. It is too sour, too compromised, too aware of how people excuse themselves. But it is brilliantly constructed. Its songs are small, but the world behind them is enormous. It is a record about damaged places and damaged people, and about the stories that allow damage to defend itself. Four stars feels right: not because it is a pleasure to live with, but because it is so precisely made. A four-star record, but not a cosy four stars.

There’s a very strong case that L.A. Woman is the Doors album for people who don’t quite trust The Doors. Not because it disproves the complaints. Morrison is still daft. The imagery still inflates itself. Manzarek is still capable of making the room smell faintly of incense and electricity. The band still occasionally look over the edge of profundity and fall straight into student theatre. But this album gives you something sturdier than the myth usually promises: a band with weight, breath, road grip and an unexpectedly good sense of when to stop showing off. The great surprise is physicality. Early Doors can feel sealed, pressurised, slightly airless. A fascinating sound, but also a strange one: a rock band with no permanent bassist, built around organ bass, jazz-drama drums, exposed guitar and Morrison’s enormous central voice. It is less a band than a chamber apparatus. It creates dread, but it also creates a kind of theatrical vacuum. Everything has to orbit Morrison. On L.A. Woman, the introduction of Jerry Scheff changes the room. It is not merely “they added bass.” It is that the band suddenly has floorboards. Scheff gives them hips and traction. The sound stops hovering and starts travelling. That matters because Morrison’s own voice has changed too. He no longer sounds like the beautiful doom-object of the poster. He sounds heavier, rougher, more lived-in. Not the Lizard King. Not Val Kilmer. Doug Morrison with lungs. That version of Morrison is much more useful. His raggedness works because the album’s material gives it a job. On “The Changeling”, he sounds mobile, slippery, still mutating. On “Been Down So Long”, the damage in the voice becomes texture rather than decline. He does not have to pretend to be a prophet there. He can simply stand inside a blues shape and let the rough edges do the work. The slide guitar helps enormously: dirty, lateral, Cooder-Richards in spirit, not virtuoso display but grime with intelligence. For once, Morrison’s battered condition is not being mythologised after the fact. It is musically functional. That is the key to the album: it makes the Doors’ absurdity functional more often than not. “Love Her Madly” is a perfect example. It rolls. It has proper chassis movement. Krieger’s pop instincts keep it clear and propulsive, while Manzarek throws atmosphere across the surface to stop it becoming merely tidy. The band sound like they’ve discovered that forward motion can do some of the work usually assigned to doom. Then “Cars Hiss by My Window” goes inward without becoming precious. That track is one of the quiet revelations of the album. It is not grand existential theatre. It is 3:15 a.m. filth: traffic outside, someone sleeping somewhere, the mind awake in the wrong way. Morrison’s scat-solo is the masterstroke because it turns the blues solo into a bodily symptom. He becomes the guitar because words have temporarily stopped helping. That is a much better kind of weirdness than “behold my symbolic trousers.” The album keeps working because the band keep changing operating modes. “Hyacinth House” is almost anti-Doors in its method. It feels arranged rather than extemporised. The band seem to have agreed the cue sheet: set the room, keep the frame, leave the life in the vocal. The result is a rare Morrison vulnerability that does not need to announce itself as revelation. It is contained, domestic, tired. Then “Crawling King Snake” does the opposite. Everyone agrees the inherited blues form and the invention moves elsewhere: into timing, sleaze, pressure, patience, touch. That is not laziness. It is using the 12-bar as labour-saving architecture. The weaker or more ridiculous tracks are still revealing. “L’America” is dubious in exactly the Doors way: a wicker man built out of mangrove tendrils, bad anthropology and swamp lighting. It has atmosphere, but it is on thin ice. It gets haunted, then lurches down the pub. “The WASP” is more interesting: jam-band prophecy, a locked groove under a semi-spoken transmission. You can hear an operating system there that Mark E. Smith would later make leaner, crueller, funnier and more durable: band as machine-room, singer as unreliable broadcaster, fragments as authority. But Morrison overcooks the landing. The final bars are the difference between prophecy and a man refusing to get down from a chair in a pub. And then “Riders on the Storm” rescues everything by doing less. That is the astonishing ending. After the swagger, swamp business, blues drag, daftness and overheated American myth, the band suddenly discover absolute restraint. The sound effects are not gimmickry because they dissolve the “band in a room” premise at exactly the right moment. The album has spent most of its time proving that The Doors can still function physically. The final track lets them become weather. Morrison finally stops trying to be enormous. The whisper doubles him into a ghost without making him shout for it. Manzarek becomes rain and glass rather than carnival. Densmore plays like tyre spray. Scheff keeps the road moving. Krieger barely needs to announce himself. The whole thing is drama by subtraction. As an ending, it is almost indecently good. The Beatles had to manufacture their ending. Abbey Road is magnificent, but it is imposed coherence: the system has failed, so the remaining machinery creates one last beautiful act of order. The Doors, somehow, get an ending that feels less designed and more received. Not because they were more intelligent or more important. They weren’t. But because the sequence, the performance, the sound effects, the biography and the silence after it all collapse into one image: road, rain, voice, disappearance. For a chaotic, quick-burn band, that is extraordinary. So the album’s achievement is not that it makes Morrison’s legend true. It does something better. It makes the legend less necessary. The Morrison myth over-promises: death, leather, poetry, shamanism, Paris, abyss. L.A. Woman gives you a flawed, physical, breathing band making a dirty, atmospheric blues-rock record with flashes of theatre, comedy, restraint and genuine menace. The Doors still shouldn’t quite work. That remains part of the fascination. They are cobbled together, structurally odd, slightly ridiculous. But on this record the cobbling holds. The missing pieces are supplied by feel, by watching, by theatrical listening, by Scheff’s bass, by Morrison’s ragged body, by the band’s ability to seethe and breathe. A flawed four-star record, yes. But not a small four. It is the sound of a daft band briefly becoming undeniable, then vanishing into weather.

This is one of those records that is easy to underrate now because so much of what it established became normal. You have to put it back where it belongs: July 1966, a fortnight before _Revolver_. Heard from that side of history, the opening track is genuinely startling. The song form is still blues revivalism, but the guitar sound seems to have jumped two years ahead. It is thick, sustained, loud, certain, and already speaking the language of later British rock. That is the key to the whole thing. This is not just a good British blues record. It is one of the places where British guitar rock acquires its operating system. Before this, British pop and rock was still largely a world of part guitarists. That is not an insult. There were brilliant part guitarists: players who gave songs intros, hooks, fills, tidy breaks, colour and shape. But the guitar usually had a job inside the arrangement. Here, the guitar moves from part to improvisation. Clapton is not merely playing the right thing. He sounds able to keep inventing the right thing under pressure. At his best, the comparison is less with riff-making than with scat singing or horn phrasing. He is working inside an agreed grammar, but he keeps generating musical thought in real time: statement, answer, variation, pressure, release. That is why the playing still lands. It is not just tone worship, though the tone is obviously a large part of the matter. It is the attack and certainty. Some of the best phrases are very simple, but they arrive with complete veracity. A bent note can sound like a whole argument because it has been placed, held and released by someone who knows exactly what it is doing. The album is also more interesting than simple guitar mythology. Mayall’s world is template-driven and purist: correct sources, correct forms, correct seriousness, correct idiom. At times it almost feels bureaucratic, like blues being converted into procedure. But that is also what gives the record its force. The controlled environment allows the guitar to become volatile inside it. That tension runs through the album. The band is often writing to a template, but the best performances turn the template into pressure. _Hideaway_ is not just an instrumental showcase, it is a fluency test. _Little Girl_ has real propulsion. _Double Crossin’ Time_ shows the group producing original material inside the authorised blues form. _Have You Heard_ is where the album really breathes, with a solo that is astonishing not because it is flashy, but because it has shape, patience and command. _Steppin’ Out_ is a cracking ensemble piece, all rising pressure and controlled release. It is also worth noting the restraint on _Ramblin’ on My Mind_. Clapton sings it, and he does not try to overwhelm it. After all the authority of the guitar playing elsewhere, his vocal feels plainer and more exposed, but the performance has a useful humility. He also seems to respect the guitar logic of Robert Johnson’s original world: voice and instrument as interlocked parts of one thought, rather than lead guitar placed on top of a blues text. It is not the album’s most explosive moment, but it is one of its more respectful ones. There are flaws. The version of _What’d I Say_ slightly misunderstands R&B by letting the drum feature sprawl. That is irritating because it should have been brilliant: the end-of-side-one detonation, the point where blues discipline opens into sweaty club ignition. Instead, it mistakes duration for escalation. Eight bars would have been fine. Sixteen, possibly. Over a minute and the manual needs to be reopened. R&B needs collective ignition, not a percussion appraisal. But even that weakness is revealing, because elsewhere the rhythm section does exactly what is needed. _Parchman Farm_ drives hard without stepping outside the machine. The drummer is not asking for separate recognition there. He is keeping the whole thing moving. The non-album single tracks are also worth hearing, even if they are not part of the core record. _Lonely Years_ has a humid, Latinate slink to it, and I can understand hearing something later associated with Santana in the sustained, vocalised guitar line. _Bernard Jenkins_ is heavily improvisatory, but it does not feel like a throwaway. It sounds like a band watching each other, adjusting pressure, leaving space and responding in real time. That may be the thing I came away respecting most. The old guitar bores were right, but not only for the obvious reasons. Yes, the guitar sound matters. Yes, Clapton’s playing is extraordinary. But the record also captures a band and a scene discovering that electric guitar can be more than a part inside a song. It can be a speaking voice, an authority, almost a lead-bearing structure. It sounds conventional now because it helped create the convention.

There are some records where the first job is not deciding whether you like them. The first job is working out what kind of listening they require. This was one of those. I do not think this is an album that benefits from being approached as “rap music” in some broad, lazy category sense, because that makes it too easy for the sceptical listener to dismiss it before it has even started. There is very little here that is trying to win over a listener who wants melody, warmth, harmonic development, instrumental soloing, or the sound of a band moving together in a room. But that is not a limitation. It is the point. This is hip-hop stripped back to its load-bearing elements: MC, DJ, beat, scratch, loop, breath, timing, voice, discipline and proof. Almost everything else is treated with suspicion. Gloss is suspect. Luxury is suspect. Commercial ease is suspect. Even conventional musical comfort feels suspect. The whole record seems to operate from the position that embellishment is where corruption gets in. That makes the production absolutely crucial. DJ Premier does not decorate the rapper. He builds hard little rooms for him to stand in. A bashed piano sample. A clipped drum break. A scratch used like punctuation. A strange little plinking sound that becomes less a hook than a signal. Small flashes of jazz-funk colour, but never enough to let the record become plush or comfortable. It is austere, but not empty. The sparseness is the argument. Again and again, the record asks: if we take almost everything away, who can still stand? That is also where the MC’s style becomes more interesting than it may first appear. He is not flashy in the obvious sense. He does not overwhelm the listener with speed, vocal gymnastics, theatrical charm or melodic invention. His delivery is clipped, severe, declarative. He often sounds less like an entertainer than a man issuing corrective notices over drums. But the lack of flash is deceptive. The technical skill is in the control: breath, stress, attack, articulation, timing, and the ability to keep thought moving rhythmically under pressure. One early track makes that explicit. It is not just about rhyme. It is about flow. The voice becomes a rhythm instrument, and the pleasure comes from hearing a mind move through a hard grid without slipping. That reminded me, oddly, of listening to great blues guitar the day before. Not because the music sounds remotely similar, but because both depend on fluency inside an idiom. A guitarist can demonstrate mastery through phrasing, placement, restraint, tone and timing. Here, the instrument is mouth, lungs, memory, vocabulary and nerve. Different form. Same basic principle: knowing the language well enough to make a phrase land exactly where it has to land. The album is also more conceptually layered than I expected. At first, it is tempting to hear the title idea as simple East Coast reassertion: New York telling the rest of hip-hop not to mistake commercial momentum elsewhere for cultural ownership. That reading is there, especially given the timing and the sound. But as the record develops, “the East” feels older and deeper than the American east coast. The record’s imaginative geography seems to run backwards through Brooklyn, through Black musical memory, through ritual rhythm, through African antiquity. Brooklyn is not presented as the original source so much as the current enforcement office. It is where the matter is being handled now. That gives the album its severity. It is not treating hip-hop as disposable entertainment. It is treating it as a discipline that has been diluted, misnamed, commercialised, misunderstood and abused. The task is to clean the form, strip away the fake glamour, and return to source. The strongest single statement of that idea is the famous minimal track built around that odd, spare, dripping/plinking sound. It is astonishingly bare. No lushness. No comfort. No crossover sweetener. No reassuring chord sequence for the unconverted. Just beat, voice, scratch, space and authority. It feels like a back-to-basics clarion call: stop faking, remove the gloss, prove it on the mic. That, to me, is the clearest answer to the question “why should anyone have to listen to hip-hop before they die?” Because a record like this demonstrates that hip-hop can build a complete musical world from pressure, repetition, voice, negative space and rhythmic authority. If someone hears only “talking over beats,” they are not hearing the form on its own terms. They are asking it to become something else before they will grant it legitimacy. The record has a daft side too, and I liked that more than expected. There is crew mythology, kung-fu language, lyrical combat, and one track that turns the rapper into a kind of conscious-rap superhero battling personified moral forces. It is ridiculous. There are organ stabs. There is a villain addressing The Prophet. It briefly becomes an audio comic book about social decay. But the commitment is total, and that saves it. The silliness is not throwaway. It is part of the world-building. The album is stern, but it is not without imagination. There is one serious flaw, though, and it is not a small one. At one point, after building a case around discipline, skill, wisdom, clarity and higher perception, the album collapses into ordinary mid-90s misogynistic rubbish. That matters more here than it might on a less self-consciously moral record. This album is not presenting itself as dumb entertainment. It is presenting itself as correction. It claims to detect corruption. So when its own judgement fails, the failure is structural. The inspector fails his own inspection. That stops it being a great album in the fullest sense. Its wisdom is incomplete. Its severity can become stiff. Its authority is damaged by one of its own blind spots. It can lecture. It can overclaim. It is easier to admire than to love. But I do admire it. By the end, the record reduces its argument almost to absurdity. The claim is not merely “I can rap over a beat.” It is closer to: give me crackle, give me static, give me almost nothing, and I can still impose flow on it. That is a proper closing boast. The MC does not require comfort. Skill creates order. So I land on a strong but not uncomplicated four. Somewhere around 3.7 to 4.1 feels right. It is brilliantly coherent, seriously flawed, and absolutely belongs in the conversation.

There are Beatles albums I might call deeper, stranger, richer, or more adventurous. But I’m not sure there is a purer Beatles album than A Hard Day’s Night. This is the Beatles as a fully functioning pop organism: film, album, singles, press, radio, television, touring, image, management, studio discipline, and songwriting all moving in the same direction. It is Beatlemania under instruction. United Artists need songs for a film. Brian Epstein handles the logistics. George Martin frames the sound. John Lennon and Paul McCartney write the lot. No covers. No George Harrison original. No Ringo feature. No padding disguised as repertoire. Just Lennon-McCartney operating at terrifying speed while the world changes shape around them. That is why the leap from With The Beatles is so astonishing. That earlier album is superb, but it still broadly fits an existing format: originals, covers, feature spots, stage repertoire, Motown, girl groups, Chuck Berry, R&B, all filtered through the Beatles’ own force. Eight months later, A Hard Day’s Night says something very different. The Beatles are no longer fitting the format. They are the format. The title track begins with a chord that does not introduce Beatlemania so much as assume you are already inside it. I Want to Hold Your Hand had already pushed pop excitement about as far as it could go without actually setting fire to the studio. A Hard Day’s Night starts beyond that point. Lennon gives it complaint and exhaustion; McCartney gives it gratitude and lift. Ringo drives it forward, with the percussion rattling away over the beat until the whole track feels like a moving train with no spare seats. Then the album simply refuses to drop its standard. I Should Have Known Better is a pinup song, but chunkier than that makes it sound. The harmonica is blocky and forceful, not just wistful Merseybeat colour. If I Fell follows it and suddenly the harmonies are so sophisticated they almost outrun the singers. The parts are not intuitive; they have to be learned. You can hear tiny cracks where the voices are stretched at opposite ends of their range, and that makes the song more moving, not less. It is the sound of a band writing something they can only just perform. I’m Happy Just to Dance with You is a beautifully tailored George song. Modest, perfectly pitched for his voice, simple on paper, but gorgeous in arrangement. When the backing vocals arrive, the whole thing lights up behind him. The Beatles’ close harmony work is one of their great underrated strengths: not just sweet, but precise, functional, and emotionally intelligent. And I Love Her is where Paul proves they no longer need Till There Was You to access elegance. Nylon guitar, claves, restraint, clipped English consonants, that slight modulation around the solo: it is sophistication written from inside the group rather than borrowed from an older songbook. Then Tell Me Why kicks the doors open again. The lyric is accusation, but the record sounds ecstatic. Ringo’s kit explodes, Lennon turns grievance into exhilaration, and the daft falsetto near the end stops the whole thing becoming sour. It is pain with a funny voice attached. Side one ends with Can’t Buy Me Love, which is remembered as a bright pop detonation but is really a strange, jazzy, bluesy thing underneath. You can hear why Ella Fitzgerald could take it on. You can hear older dance-band bones under the Beatlemania surface. Teenagers could scream at it, but jazz musicians could understand it. And that is only side one. Side two is supposedly the “remaining material” side. The contractual obligation side. Which is ridiculous, because it opens with Any Time at All, a song many groups would have built an album around. It is muscular as hell, but oddly tender. Lennon does not sing emotional availability as softness. He sings it as readiness: call me and I’ll be there. George Martin’s piano is perfectly placed, adding hard bright accents without taking over. Then that ringing final chord lands like a wink. Still got it. I’ll Cry Instead is a cheeky country number with the damage showing. It has a settled Elvis feel: clipped, countryish, curled lip, wounded pride made stylish. Under the bounce, though, there is something darker: humiliation, revenge fantasy, the abandoned little boy trying to turn hurt into power. It points toward later, uglier Lennon songs without yet losing its comic skip. Things We Said Today is one of Paul’s great early songs. Odd, trundling, shadowed, almost practical in its movement. George keeps chiming in with unresolved dominant-seventh colours, like an insistent nagging presence. Then the bridge blooms into a muscular quasi-major moment and threatens to explode before the song hushes back down. It is a showstopper hiding in plain sight. I also think When I Get Home is badly underrated. It may be the most rock track on the album. You can hear Stax and soul pressure in it, even though it is still being forced through a Beatles beat-group body. The opening “whoa-I” is basically a soul shout, and the block harmonies on “I got a whole lot of things to tell her” are remarkable. This is not filler. This is a song with shoulders. Give it a horn section and everyone would hear what is already there. Then You Can’t Do That arrives as Lennon’s dark counterclaim after McCartney’s Can’t Buy Me Love has taken the A-side glory. Paul gives you breezy blues-pop world conquest. John gives you jealousy, cowbell, stabs, discipline, possessiveness, and one of the great chordal guitar moments in early Beatles. The way the open C7 shape slides up and leaves the top E ringing feels almost like a seed of Wilko Johnson logic: rhythm guitar becoming lead by force of attack. It is nasty, bright, physical, and hugely influential. And then comes I’ll Be Back. What a closer. After all the public victory, the film business, the global explosion, the A-side glory, and the muscular second side, they do not end with triumph. They end with recurrence. “I’ll be back” works almost like one of those end-title promises: the Beatles will return. But because it is Lennon, it is not just a franchise tag. It is also an emotional loop. Is he leaving? Is he promising? Is he threatening? Is he unable to stay away? The public meaning and the private wound sit inside the same phrase. That is the album’s final act of sensitivity. A Hard Day’s Night starts with the world bursting into the room. It ends with Lennon standing in a doorway. The album is wrapped in showbiz: trains, television studios, press calls, managers, jokes, film obligations, radio charm, clean suits, “the boys”. But inside that wrapper, the modern pop group is being invented. Not through psychedelia. Not through studio collage. Not through grand statements about Art. Through guitars, voices, close harmony, pressure, speed, humour, English consonants, and Lennon-McCartney writing the lot. As a refinement of the pop group format, it is revolutionary. It perfects the existing form so completely that the older model suddenly looks provisional. It is not my argument that this is necessarily the best Beatles album in every possible sense. But as the purest album incarnation of the Beatles - the band as a functioning pop organism, Beatlemania under instruction, the world being conquered while the machine still works - it may be perfect. Easy five.

This turned out to be far more than the clever 90s Swedish pop record I half-remembered it as. I already liked their previous album a lot, partly because it sounded as though someone had forgotten to issue the band with the manual for being a band. There was lounge-pop, bossa nova, indie, easy listening, ABBA-adjacent precision, and a general feeling that the wrong drawer of parts had somehow produced something oddly elegant. Here, the manual has arrived. The band sounds tighter, sharper and more deliberate. Not heavy in the obvious sense, but with real muscle under the surface. The songs snap into place. The guitars have more purpose. The rhythm section has more shove. The arrangements still have all the cocktail sparkle and mid-century poise, but the structure underneath is much firmer. The key, I think, is that this is not simply winsome lounge-pop. There is a genuine heavy-rock and metal sensibility hiding underneath it. The Sabbath covers are the giveaway. They are not novelty covers. They are method statements. This is a band taking doom, dread, damage and revenge, then removing the expected heaviness. No thunderous bloke theatre. No grand Kerrang gestures. The material is rebuilt as immaculate, polite, easy-listening unease. Once that clicks, the whole album changes shape. On the surface, it is beautifully arranged pop: airy vocals, neat guitars, bright hooks, lounge textures, tasteful furniture, cocktail-corner polish. But the lyric sheet is rancid. These are not cute songs. They are songs about jealousy, role exhaustion, self-erasure, romantic bargaining, social performance, resentment, damage, and people trying to keep relationship-shapes intact long after the actual warmth has gone. The easy-listening frame is not decoration. It is the mechanism. The music keeps preparing rooms, smoothing faces, pouring drinks, reheating the vol-au-vents, and making everything presentable. Meanwhile, the emotional food hygiene rating is collapsing. Happiness becomes staging. Love becomes performance. Couplehood becomes décor. People who probably should not be inside relationships at all find themselves suspended in atomic-era aspic meticulousness. That is why the big hit is so much darker in context than its reputation suggests. It is basically the 90s equivalent of everyone misreading “Every Breath You Take.” The point is not “love me because love is lovely.” It is “I am not ready for the collapse yet, so please keep performing love until I can bear reality.” Relationship as temporary load-bearing fiction. The chorus is sugar. The premise is awful. The album keeps circling that idea from different angles: people stuck inside private scripts, trying to use relationships as validation, shelter, revenge, proof of normality, or social scaffolding. Nobody quite sees anyone else clearly. Everyone is bargaining with damage. Everyone thinks they are cleverer than the other losers in the room, until the room turns out to include them as well. That is what makes the Sabbath material fit so well. It is not a clever interruption. It belongs. The damaged, unreadable figure nobody cares about becomes part of the same emotional suite. The album has been about failed recognition all along - lovers, fools, monsters, people trapped in their own little worlds. Structurally, this is immaculate. It is not just a good batch of songs. It behaves like a suite of movements. Songs flow into each other, endings fray rather than resolve, and the whole record seems to open room after room in the same emotionally frozen house. This is what prog should have aimed for more often: not grand gestures, but well-executed holisticity. The whole thing feels like spite contained within Frank Lloyd Wright. Beautiful structure, clean lines, careful joinery, mid-century taste - and poison built into the walls. It is dysfunctional recipe-card music for Stepford Couples. Perfect little servings of romantic damage, plated with terrifying care. By the end, the emotional shape is clear. Relationships frost over when the participants stay inside their own private worlds. They had something once, perhaps only for a moment, and mistook that moment for a structure. After that, everyone keeps arranging the room while the actual connection quietly chokes. An absolute little horror show. Beautifully made, horribly sour, and far heavier than it sounds. Five stars. Now excuse me while I choke on a canapé.

I expected this to be a chore. That may be the first important thing to admit. A two-hour-plus country, bluegrass and old-time summit album, heavy with reputation, elders, standards, gospel, fiddle tunes and historical significance, does not necessarily sound like a relaxing morning. It sounds like homework with banjo. It was not homework. It was breathtaking. Will the Circle Be Unbroken works because it is not really a conventional band album. The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band are not always the stars of their own record, and that may be their finest achievement. They convene the room, pay their dues, defer when they should defer, step forward when they have earned the right, and mostly let the music find the people who can best carry it. That is the album’s moral centre. It is not country as costume, country as product, country as tourist scenery, or country as a few decorative twangs laid over rock. It is a young country-rock generation being told, kindly but firmly: if you are going to use this music, learn the country properly. Know the elders. Understand the manners. Do not confuse twang with inheritance. The title is the thesis. The circle is family, custom, repertoire, craft, memory, religious consolation, communal behaviour and musical permission. The question is not simply whether old songs can survive. The question is whether they can survive being handed on without being broken, embalmed, or turned into fancy dress. The answer, across this album, is yes. What makes it so moving is that the handoffs are everywhere. An older voice carries decades in the throat. A younger singer steps into an old song without pretending to have already lived forty years inside it. A virtuoso instrumentalist takes the lead, then gives the tune back to the room. The cast keeps rotating, but the song remains the centre of gravity. That is why the album feels so ego-free. Nobody seems to be trying to own the tradition. They are trying to serve it. The recording method matters too. This does not feel like an attempt to modernise old music. It feels like giving older musicians the same recording dignity younger musicians had started taking for granted. Not: “let’s improve this.” More: “what if we put proper microphones around people who already know exactly what they are doing?” That distinction is crucial. A lot of old music reaches later listeners through technological distance: scratch, thinness, archive haze, the sound of history getting between the performer and the ear. Here, the modernity is not in the arrangements. It is in the access. The record does not modernise the tradition. It modernises the listener’s ability to hear how alive the tradition already was. The live, first-take atmosphere is part of that. You can hear the room working. The chatter, the calls, the tiny bits of social steering, the sense of musicians adjusting to each other in real time. Too many takes would flatten that. The first take breathes. The studio is not a workshop here. It is a witness. And the music absolutely moves. That was the surprise. This is not just historically important; it cooks. The bluegrass locks hard. The ensemble vocals lift gospel material so strongly that even an atheist has to admit the mechanism works. The instrumentals are not pauses between the “important” vocal pieces; they are where the tradition shows its engine. At times the whole thing feels less like listening to a museum piece than wandering into a west-coast Scottish pub just as a live session is about to start. Nobody explains the rules. The room tells you. The voices are a huge part of it. Roy Acuff has age in the larynx. Maybelle Carter has a plainness that is almost austere, and that plainness feels like bedrock. Merle Travis makes difficult things sound barely worth mentioning. Doc Watson’s playing has the quality of total command expressed as ease. These are not just people performing old songs. They are bodies that have carried the music. Then there are the wider historical currents. A tune like “Soldier’s Joy” is not merely an old fiddle number. It is musical common law: portable, durable, altered by use, carried across oceans, localised and re-localised, still able to make a room move. That is when the “circle” becomes bigger than Nashville, bigger than country music, bigger than one national tradition. The circle has crossed water over and over again. By the time the title track arrives, the album has taught you how to hear it. The massed ensemble is not spectacle. It is proof. The circle is the room, the voices, the handoffs, the manners, the memory, and the willingness of everyone present to serve something larger than themselves. The choruses are so blurred with voices they become almost ghostly: not a neat harmony effect, but gathered memory. Then “Both Sides Now” appears at the end and lets the contemporary leak in. After all that inherited repertoire, the album quietly suggests that the circle is still open. A new song can enter the stream too, if it has enough human weather in it. This is why I do the 1001 exercise. Not to confirm the canon. Not to nod solemnly at important records from a safe distance. But for the moment when an album I expected to respect suddenly becomes something I want in the house. Will the Circle Be Unbroken is important, yes. But more than that, it is alive. It is gorgeous, ego-free, disciplined, generous, and much less like homework than I had any right to expect.

I expected this to be more difficult to sit through than it actually was. Its reputation suggests something far more dangerous, obscure and socially corrosive than the record itself quite turns out to be. It is grotesque, certainly. You can smell the rot and hear the flies buzzing. But much of it is also very direct, very legible, and far more pop-aware than the outrage around it suggests. The most useful way into it, for me, is through Alice Cooper. Vince Furnier helped codify a particular American musical grammar for causing outrage: make the threat theatrical, make it singable, blur the line between band, character and product, then allow parents, clergy, pundits and politicians to complete the artwork by panicking about it. This record updates that grammar for the 1990s. Cooper is the carny selling the freak show. Marilyn Manson climbs into the exhibit and becomes the thing the moral guardians claimed to fear. That is where the album is cleverest. It is not simply trying to shock. It takes the froth of American moral panic and treats it as a blueprint. You think rock music is satanic, corrupting, anti-Christian, sexually diseased, nihilistic and dangerous to the young? Fine. Here is the export model. The joke is not warm, but it is there. It belongs to that mid-90s comic territory where the central question is not “is this funny?” but “is this for real?” Musically, the surprise is how much of a band record it is. There are riffs, hooks, chants, choruses and moments where a genuinely funky dance engine pushes through the industrial murk. It is much less airless than Nine Inch Nails, and much more rooted in shock-rock theatre. The production gives it damp, rust and contamination, but underneath that there is often a straightforwardly effective rock machine at work. The concept, though, is not as profound as the endless analysis around the album sometimes makes it sound. Strip away the fog machine and it is basically Kafka’s Gregor Samsa joins KISS and reads Revelation badly. The outsider becomes the monster society accused him of being, then turns that accusation into celebrity, power and decay. That is a strong engine, but not a bottomless one. The more the album asks me to inspect its grand worm mythology and quasi-Biblical machinery, the flimsier it becomes. The basic idea lands early, and much of what follows feels less like development than reiteration. The elaborate framing sometimes looks like scaffolding round a shed, although the shed does have a filthy PA system and a surprisingly good band inside it. Its real achievement is in the execution. Not the concept as scripture, but the deployment: the way it was waved under America’s nostrils and allowed the outrage machine to authenticate it by reacting exactly as expected. It was accessible enough to reach a mass audience, ugly enough to scare people who wanted to be scared, and theatrical enough to make the panic part of the product. So I respect it more than I like it. As industrial rock, it is effective and often more enjoyable than expected. As culture-war artefact, it is fascinating. As a lifestyle accessory or great tragic song-cycle, it is considerably less convincing. I’m giving it 3/5: a clever, foetid, well-executed provocation whose mythology is not quite as deep as its smell.

I came into this with an old prejudice. At the time, I struggled to see what all the fuss was about. I understood the cultural weather around it: Manchester, baggy, clubs, terraces softening, inflatable bananas, the sense that guitar music had suddenly discovered hips. But I’d always slightly filed it as a “better on E” album. One that needed the right room, the right hour, the right crowd, the right social chemistry. The surprise is that it passes the 07:30 test. Heard at breakfast, away from its natural habitat, the album still has architecture. It isn’t just aura. It isn’t just Ian Brown mumbling over dance-adjacent grooves. What you hear is a band that had spent years failing towards the right version of itself, absorbing 60s jangle, Paisley Underground weather, post-punk looseness, club rhythms and Manchester insolence until it all came out as something unmistakably theirs. That matters, because this does not sound like a debut album in the usual sense. It sounds like a band finally shedding the wrong versions of itself. The confidence is unforced. Not “please admire us”, more “obviously this works; keep up.” The key, I think, is that the Roses don’t always give you songs. They give you phases. A lot of the album doesn’t move like conventional guitar pop: verse, chorus, middle eight, resolution. It moves more like pulse, shimmer, lift, refraction, burn, release. That is why it can be hard to reduce to busking, terrace chant, or sober historical explanation. A normal song survives extraction. A phase-band needs the ecology intact: rhythm section, tone, momentum, repetition, altered perception, collective lift. I Wanna Be Adored is a fabulous opener because it prowls before it blooms. It begins like something stalking out of the scrub, then suddenly opens into the kind of wide-armed guitar lift Noel Gallagher would later recognise and simplify. But the Roses are stranger than Oasis. They don’t quite become an anthem. They become the apparition of one. She Bangs the Drums is purer Roses: bright, chiming, absorbed neo-psychedelic guitar pop, lifted by a rhythm section that refuses to sit still. The lazy cliché is “dance groove and mumbling”, but this could almost have blown in from the Paisley Underground, except the Roses don’t sound like collectors recreating the 60s. They sound as though that whole revivalist weather system has passed through them and left the air changed. Then Waterfall happens, and that is a genuine masterpiece. It has the structure of a good acid house track: not simply song sections, but a journey through states. It grooves through phases. The fade-out doesn’t end the song; it lets it pass beyond the frame. Then Don’t Stop folds the same material back on itself. With the backwards reverb on Brown’s voice, the whole thing feels as though the song is arriving before itself. It’s prismatic origami. The dream sequence from Twin Peaks as baggy. What I hadn’t fully appreciated before is how much of the album is running on insurrectionary imagery. Bye Bye Badman turns Paris ’68, tear gas, lemons and revolt into bouncealong pop. Elizabeth My Dear then becomes more pointed: not just a throwaway republican squib, but a little act of folk-song vandalism after a song about riot. Sugar Spun Sister sounds sweet, but the lyric is sticky, bodily and queasy, with MPs tripping on glue. Made of Stone returns to singalong jangle-pop, but with burning cars and cold streets running behind it. Call it Manchester Situationism. Not as academic doctrine, but as instinct: politics as image, city as theatre, revolt as colour, everyday life made strange. It sounds blissed-out, but it keeps smuggling in barricades. Ian Brown’s limitations are not incidental. The album uses them. A stronger singer might ruin parts of this record by over-declaring the emotion. Brown’s flatness keeps the songs suspended somewhere between arrogance, vacancy, bliss, side-eye and threat. On Shoot You Down, the pause before “I’d love to do it and you know you’ve always had it coming” is perfect because he doesn’t snarl it. He lets it fall quietly, which makes it much colder. John Squire’s guitar playing is also more interesting than a simple “guitar hero” reading allows. His solos are often not technically dazzling. He runs through simple shapes. But that simplicity is the point. His real strength here is chordal chops, riffs, texture, rhythmic ignition, and knowing when not to clutter the architecture. He doesn’t smother the groove. He sparks across it. And the rhythm section is absurdly good. Reni makes guitar-pop dance without turning it into ordinary dance music. Mani gives the songs bounce, pocket and confidence. Together they stop the album becoming merely pretty, merely jangly, or merely retro. They are why it levitates. This Is the One gives the album its progressive-pop expansion without becoming pompous. It has opening panels, swelling movement, threshold drama. But it is not earnest in the cosmic old-prog sense. It is blissed-out Manc side-eye. It levitates with its hands in its pockets. Then I Am the Resurrection is the perfect final argument. The first section is pure 60s strut: snap, sneer, riff, chorus, Brown doing the messianic shrug. Then the song finishes being a song and becomes a band happening in real time. The excitement is not really in Squire’s soloing, but in the chordal chops and riffs burning alongside Reni, the stop-time, the sense of “you want more? We got more.” It is controlled detonation. Depending on the edition, Fools Gold then gets shoved on afterwards, and it slightly changes the balance. It is magnificent, obviously, but it is not the same organism. The album proper is a guitar band using dance logic. Fools Gold is closer to dance music wearing a guitar-band badge. Essential Stone Roses, but not necessarily essential to The Stone Roses as an album. So yes, it is an ecstasy album. It wants weather. It wants bodies. It probably still improves with a pill. But the important discovery is that it doesn’t need one. I came in respecting its importance more than feeling grabbed by it. I came out hearing the craft under the glow. It is disciplined, funny, arrogant, strange, politically barbed yet daft, rhythmically alive, and far better built than the mythology sometimes allows. A strong four, blurring into five

This was new to me, and it sent me round an interesting critical loop. My first instinct was to hear the polish and ask whether this was a Senegalese artist being glossed for Western ears. Then I realised that was a deeply suspect question. I don’t feel I have to trace every piece of modern popular music back to Elvis before I can take it on its own terms. I don’t treat Band on the Run as somehow less McCartney because it was made in Lagos. So why ask questions of Baaba Maal that I wouldn’t ask of a Western artist? That became the key to the album for me. Lam Toro is not tradition being dragged into crossover. It is Baaba Maal choosing crossover. Seriously. There are outside hands here, most obviously Simon Booth, and there are moments where the treatment heads towards that early-90s “world music” shelf, but the agency is Maal’s. He wants this music to travel. He wants hooks, funk bass, Western-facing song shapes, layered percussion, tama, call-and-response, synth brass, space around the voice, and a record people can live with. The “world music” label remains pretty useless. It is a filing system pretending to be a genre, like calling something “food”. Lam Toro does sometimes sit a little too comfortably under that shop sign, but it is much smarter and more pleasurable than the label allows. The opening track, Yela, makes a strong case immediately. It begins with a lone voice over synth washes, then opens into interlaced guitar lines, loping funk bass and massed choral responses. It has atmosphere and depth. The voices have air around them. It feels windswept rather than lush. Maal’s voice is immediately the load-bearing instrument: strong, abrasive, declaratory, and never swallowed by the arrangement. There are points where the treatment is almost too immaculate. Daande Lenol, with Davy Spillane’s uilleann pipes and Booth’s elegant production, edges towards cultured global refinement. The track itself is not weak, but the frame is very polished. You can feel the air-con. But the album gradually explains why that polish is there. This is not background music exactly. It is foreground-optional. You can sit down with headphones and unpick the tama, layered percussion, funk bass, guitars and backing voices, or you can faff around with a moka pot and let it fill the room while coffee steam gets round your nostrils. The coffee-table gloss has a function: it makes the album liveable, and then the rhythms keep surprising you from inside that liveable space. Daniibe develops into a gorgeous slow build: percussion, tama, interweaving melodic elements and funk bass gathering around Maal and the backing singers. It works by loop-logic rather than mutation, and its pleasure lies in accumulation rather than surprise. Gidelam was a highlight. It starts with a lurching, unsettled feel before landing elegantly in Afrobeat territory like an acrobat. It pulls off one of Afrobeat’s great tricks: you do not notice the track travelling, then suddenly realise the room has changed. That is probably my favourite aspect of Afrobeat: movement without obvious travel. The groove keeps its face straight while the furniture rearranges itself behind you. The album also makes clear that the accessibility is not simply Booth imposing a gloss. Sy Sawande starts like a Western song, and Booth is nowhere near it. That matters. Maal is choosing legibility himself. It is a lovely slight piece: interwoven guitars, light percussion, and loads of room for Maal. It may actually be my favourite track here because it feels so unforced. Ndelorel and Lem Gi are where the album becomes the sort of thing I had hoped it might be. Ndelorel is busier, with a mad bass part and real propulsion. Lem Gi has Maal’s own production getting almost gloriously cheap: synth brass lines, bright pop surfaces, a bit of cheerful 1992 keyboard-demo grin. But underneath that, the polyrhythms are genuine and lurch the ear all over the place. It is like the track tumbles downstairs perpetually and highly enjoyably. Still pop, though. That is the trick. Fun first, translatable second. The closer, Minuit, is frankly baffling. It feels like a chanson-style set-ender for the fans: spoken word, a bit of cheese, then rock guitars going off at Purple Rain speeds. After an album whose best moments work through interlock, restraint and rhythmic propulsion, the ending suddenly starts behaving like a stadium finale with a cape on. I did have a bit of a “what the fuck was that?” reaction. Still, that does not undo the album. I think Lam Toro absolutely earns 4/5. No faffing with 3.7s. It is not the dust-and-heat revelation that Savane was, and it sometimes feels a little too air-conditioned, but the key realisation is that it is tasteful because Maal is tasteful. The polish is not simply something done to him. It is part of the record’s chosen language. A warm, rhythmic, intelligent, liveable crossover album, with enough detail to reward close listening and enough ease to let the day happen around it.

Christina Aguilera – Stripped This one was never likely to be my genre, but it turned out to be far more interesting than I expected. Stripped is huge, messy, overlong, over-sung, over-explained, and sometimes so 2002 you can practically hear the bootcut denim. But the overreach is not just a flaw. It is almost the album’s working method. The key thing, I think, is control. The opening feels like a blur of media voices already telling Christina’s story for her, and the album then becomes her attempt to seize that narrative back. It is a public image demolition job, a self-defence brief, a sex-positive statement, a trauma record, a vocal showcase, and a serious attempt at old-school songcraft all fighting for space inside the same 77 minutes. That sounds like too much because it is too much. But she was 21 when she made it. Once you pop that age into the mix, the whole thing starts to feel a bit astonishing. This is not a seasoned artist carefully curating a reinvention from a safe distance. It is a young woman barely out of the machinery that manufactured her, already being sexualised, mocked, marketed, compared, psychoanalysed and over-narrated in public, responding with an enormous argument for personhood. The album is also a tug of war. On one side you have Scott Storch and the very early-2000s pop/R&B machinery: blunt feminist statements, clipped vocal cadences, club-adjacent beats, sexual autonomy, glossy grit, guest-rap logic, and all the commercial impact needed to detonate the old teen-pop image. On the other side you have Linda Perry, bringing older songwriting craft: piano, guitar, wound-first directness, Beatles echoes, Four Non Blondes plainness, and songs that feel as if they could survive being stripped of most of their production. Christina clearly wants both, and I cannot blame her. You do not demolish the old image with a tasteful acoustic EP. You need Dirrty. You need impact. You need the old audience to gasp and the new audience to look twice. But spectacle alone would only trap her in another costume, so she also needs Beautiful, Cruz and I’m OK to prove there is a person and a songwriter’s interpreter under the shock. Vocally, she made more sense to me here than I expected. She has not got Mariah Carey’s otherworldly drift. Christina’s melisma is much more physical. It has elbows. There is something of the street fighter in it: forward motion, attack, pressure, a refusal to leave space unoccupied. On weaker material that can be exhausting, but when the song gives her something to push against, it becomes the correct dramatic tool. Walk Away works brilliantly because the vocal excess becomes panic and compulsion rather than decoration. The song is about knowing a situation is bad and still being unable to command yourself out of it. Her voice fights the trap. Fighter is ridiculous in exactly the right way. It is grievance turned into armour. Not subtle, not trying to be. It is basically: “You hurt me, and unfortunately for you, you trained the weapon.” Not a Sunday morning record, but effective all the same. The Storch side dates hard, but often interestingly. Can’t Hold Us Down is wildly 2002 in both production and vocal cadence, but it works as a blunt feminist argument. Get Mine, Get Yours is merely OK, but it is also a perfect little time capsule of major-label sex-positive R&B: low-lit, carefully packaged, and wearing terrible trousers. Dirrty, though, is still remarkable. It is not just a sexy single. It is image demolition. It is the pop equivalent of Daniel Radcliffe doing Equus: not “I have matured slightly,” but “you thought you knew what body I was allowed to have; update the file.” Miley was clearly taking notes. The Latin section is just as heavily signposted. Infatuation comes with every badge on the lanyard: Spanish guitar flavour, percussion, heat, romance, heritage. It is not quietly integrated; it is announced. But it is also a decent song. Good Latina pop with both bite and gloss. The Perry material is where the album finds its strongest bones. Beautiful is bulletproof. It has that plain confidence really good songwriters display, where the thing sounds so obvious you almost think anyone could have done it. They didn’t. Perry starts with a wound, not with the idea of writing an anthem, and that is why the sweep is earned. It has a McCartney-like directness, with those little Beatles-ish falling descents giving it gravity. It gives people a sentence they can stand on. I was the stepfather of a teenage girl during this period, and I know how much a song like that could mean. Make Over is the oddball joy. Linda Perry clearly loves quoting The Beatles, and this one sounds like the Shangri-Las wandering into Abbey Road in spring 1966, being handed flamenco chord changes and told to be bratty. It is trashy, psychedelic girl-pop, almost Tomorrow Never Knows for girls singing into hairbrushes. It should not work as well as it does, but it has bite, movement and a wonderful cheap-thrill energy. Cruz is another proper old-school song, wide-open and unafraid of melody. I’m OK is where Perry’s wound-first method becomes unavoidable. It is underdressed, almost demo-like, with that very Four Non Blondes guitar plainness. Voice, guitar, memory. No glamour escape hatch. It gives the album’s control arguments a private source. Not everything works. Soar is coffee-table uplift: sincere, well sung, but too pre-approved. The Voice Within wants to be a Linda Perry healing ballad, but Glen Ballard ain’t no Linda. It has that “sat down to write an inspirational song” quality and ends up sounding like a movie tie-in. You can practically hear “as featured in the upcoming summer blockbuster” halfway through the middle eight. But even the weaker material helps explain the scale of the project. Stripped is not a tidy album because Christina is not accepting a tidy version of herself. She wants the armour and the wound. The club and the confessional. MTV shock and old-school songwriting. Current impact and lasting significance. That is too much for one album, obviously, but it also feels like the only honest shape the record could have taken. So I’m landing on 4/5, with overreach. More precisely: Stripped is a 4-star album with 5-star nerve and 3-star editing. It is too long, too much, too keen to explain itself, and sometimes absolutely carbon-dated to 2002. But the highs are strong, the self-reinvention is genuinely significant, and the mess belongs to the meaning. A neater version might be a better-behaved album, but probably a less important one.

I came to this one almost entirely cold, and with a long-standing problem: the received idea of Leonard Cohen had put me off him for decades. Miserable bloke, black polo neck, student gloom, Neil from The Young Ones sighing into a bowl of lentils. That sort of thing. Well, that cliché lasted about thirty seconds. You Want It Darker is not soggy bedsit miserabilism. It is one of the most dignified late-life recordings I have ever heard: synagogue, blues, cabaret, soul, prayer, doubt, desire, judgement and bass. Proper bass, too. The opening title track does not shuffle in asking to be admired as an important old-man statement. It has propulsion. It moves. The bass leads like a dark engine, while Cohen’s voice sits underneath the earth, measured and immense. The whole album feels like bargaining: with time, God, death, darkness, love, the body, and the end. But it is not bargaining in the sense of denial. Cohen knows where he is. He knows the summons has arrived. The power comes from the fact that he still insists on naming the terms. That is what makes it such a powerful spiritual record. There is belief here, but not tidy belief. It is faith as argument, covenant as dispute, man going toe to toe with God. The album is full of religious language, but it is not pious in the meek sense. It is pious in the dangerous sense: I am here, now explain yourself. The album brims with musical confidence. The melodies are simple and ungilded. They do not strain to prove anything. Cohen has no interest in showing off, and the arrangements understand that completely. They frame him rather than embalming him. Organ, piano, bass, choir, violin, mandolin, strings, backing voices: everything is sparse, but nothing is thin. The record has mass. It also has extraordinary restraint. Cohen knows what not to give. He does not belt, plead, or perform frailty. He withholds, and that withholding becomes authority. There is still desire here, still humour, still sensuality, still old rogue self-knowledge, but all of it is controlled. He sounds physically reduced, but artistically immense. The album keeps returning to the idea of settlement. A treaty. A ceasefire. Not triumph, not romance restored, not transcendence. Terms. That is where the emotional force sits. Cohen is angry and tired, but he is not collapsed. He is still composing the argument, still filing the grievance, still trying to make the darkness answer properly. And in the middle of all this reckoning, love remains the great organising force. Not sentimental garnish, but structure. Love transforms the way you see the world. It works over distance like gravity. Without it, reality itself starts to lose weight. By the later stages, the album has become more than a deathbed statement. It becomes old man’s advice to the living. All the grand systems are compromised: religion, politics, romance, doctrine, the body, the self. So keep watch. Move mindfully. Correct your course. Steer. It is not comfort. It is better than comfort: usable severity. The ending returns to the desire for a treaty, first with strings that give the music gravity and mass, then with Cohen himself coming back one last time. That matters. The voice is not simply absorbed into tasteful elegy. He returns as the claimant. The peace was not signed. The dispute remains open. This is the difference between this and a lot of other late-life albums. I like some late Johnny Cash, but by comparison this feels like something more authored from the inside out. Cash’s late records can be moving, but they often feel like a great performer placed inside a powerful curatorial frame. Cohen feels like an auteur. The theology, bass register, humour, sensuality, anger, dignity, restraint and final moral weather are all emanating from the same source. It is not moving because he is dying. It is moving because, while dying, he is still in command. An unexpected five. Not necessarily a “play every week” five, but a complete artistic statement five. An “I’m not done yet” album made by someone very near the end, still bargaining with eternity, still arranging the furniture, still making sure the last words are good ones.

The important thing with Shalimar is to avoid mistaking exuberance for accident. This is a soundtrack that can sound deranged on first contact, but you cannot do deranged with an orchestra by mistake. Someone has to write those parts, place those colours, cue those entries, and trust that the whole thing will hold together. Burman does all of that with a jazzman’s ear for effect. I came to this half-expecting colourful Bollywood excess, and it certainly has that, but what stood out was the control beneath the spectacle. The title music immediately opens the stereo field out like cinema curtains. Saxophones honk, low brass growls, female voices hover, percussion darts around the edges, and the whole thing feels less like a song than a set being constructed in sound. It is very much title music: bold, widescreen, and completely unembarrassed about announcing itself. The album also sits in a fascinating international soundtrack language. At different points I heard echoes of Gert Wilden, Piero Umiliani, Esquivel, Barry Gray, spaghetti western scores, lounge funk, cha-cha, disco, spy music and cartoon scoring. That could easily become a mess, but Burman has an extraordinary instinct for colour and placement. He doesn’t simply throw sounds in because they’re available. He uses them as dramatic effects. A mariachi trumpet becomes romance. An accordion suddenly relocates a caper to continental Europe. A harsh brass stab or odd percussion splash makes the music behave almost like animation. That cartoon quality is part of the pleasure. Countess’ Caper / Shalimar is a magnificent piece of controlled nonsense: jewel-heist funk, sudden tempo changes, fanfares, spaghetti-western colours and orchestral stings that seem to have wandered in from a Saturday morning serial. It is funny, but not stupid. Like Carl Stalling or Scott Bradley, Burman understands that apparent chaos only works when every gesture is precise. The vocal tracks broaden the picture. Usha Uthup’s One Two Cha Cha Cha is cheap, delicious and joyously over-coloured. She sings it as though restraint was never included in the contract, and Burman matches her with brass, rhythm and echo that turn the whole thing into a nightclub cartoon. Kishore Kumar, by contrast, brings genuine warmth and longing to Hum Bewafa Hargiz Na Thay. His beautifully controlled vibrato in the closing reprise is one of the album’s finest moments because Burman knows when to step aside and simply let a great singer sing. Lata Mangeshkar’s Aaina Wohi Rehta Hai reveals another side of the record. The vocal production has that hard, clipped, extremely forward Indian playback sound, but the melody is strong and, unusually for this album, the arrangement serves the song rather than constantly demanding attention for itself. Asha Bhosle’s Mera Pyar Shalimar is another highlight: rhythmically supple, subtly coloured and a reminder of how instinctively she and Burman understood one another. The real achievement is the pacing. After the early sensory overload, Burman repeatedly demonstrates that he knows exactly when to stop showing off. The romantic theme contains some gorgeous interlocking acoustic guitars. The final reprise allows Kishore Kumar room to breathe. Even the wildest cues are balanced by moments where the arrangement relaxes and the melodies are trusted to carry the emotion. The spectacle works because Burman knows when not to add another fanfare. So yes, Shalimar is funny. It is lurid. It has moments where the only honest response is laughter. But the laughter is affectionate, because the craft is obvious. Burman’s imagination is irrepressible, but it is never random. Every odd decision has purpose. Every orchestral colour has been chosen. By the end I had stopped asking why a particular instrument had appeared and simply accepted Burman’s musical universe. Romance apparently requires a mariachi trumpet. A caper can unexpectedly become a spaghetti western. Somewhere, a guitarist is contractually obliged to go “chakachakawow.” Fine. He earns it.

I’d always thought of Maggot Brain as “the one with the legendary guitar solo”. It turns out that’s rather like thinking The Dark Side of the Moon is “the one with Money”. The title track may dominate the mythology, but it exists to change the way you hear everything that follows. The opener isn’t really a song. It’s a sonic event. Once I stopped expecting verse, chorus and payoff, and simply let it do what it wanted to do, the ten minutes flew by. If someone is grieving, you don’t put a stopwatch on them. George Clinton’s production is just as important as Eddie Hazel’s playing, with echoes folding back on themselves until memory itself seems to become part of the performance. Listening with modern ears, I was struck by how much of the emotional guitar language later associated with Prince seems latent here, not in the notes themselves so much as in the idea of the electric guitar inhabiting an expressive, artificial acoustic space. That opening also performs a remarkable trick. It recalibrates your sense of musical time. The succession of three- and four-minute tracks that follows feels astonishingly brief, not because they’re underwritten, but because the album has quietly changed your internal speedometer. It’s like coming off a motorway onto a 30mph road. Those shorter pieces are where George Clinton really emerged as the album’s central figure for me. Every track occupies a different acoustic world. Echo is never just an effect. Sometimes it’s haunted interior monologue, sometimes it’s part of the groove itself, elsewhere it becomes tight, metallic, bad-trip architecture. The production continually comments on the songs. The repeated “yeah, yeah, yeah” in You and Your Folks, Me and My Folks gradually shifts from affirmation into sarcasm. Back in Our Minds, often treated as one of the album’s lesser moments, sounded to me like a band performing the inability to keep straight faces. The lyric insists they’re sane again while the arrangement quietly laughs at the idea. That’s not a throwaway track. It’s satire. Bernie Worrell was another revelation. Hearing him here made his later work with Talking Heads feel completely inevitable. Byrne didn’t recruit Worrell to become a Talking Heads keyboard player. He recruited Bernie Worrell because his musical language was already complete. It’s the Billy Preston principle: great bands don’t domesticate distinctive musicians, they make room for them. Politically, Maggot Brain belongs to 1971 rather than to the utopian optimism of the late 60s. The easy rhetoric of “love and peace” has curdled. By the time Wars of Armageddon arrives, the album has expanded from private grief to public catastrophe. It doesn’t simply protest war; it overwhelms you with its machinery. The closer feels less like a conventional anti-war song than a sonic response to the industrialisation of young death. Most of all, I admired the confidence of the album. It refuses to explain itself, refuses to hurry, refuses to stay in one genre and refuses to separate politics from pleasure. The grooves aren’t there to sugar-coat the ideas. They are the ideas. Rather than asking, “What does this mean?”, I found myself asking, “What is this doing?” That turned out to be the right question.

Having enjoyed Good Old Boys more than I expected, I thought I’d probably found Randy Newman. Instead, Sail Away showed me something different. Rather than one sustained moral landscape, this is a gallery of self-contained dramas. Every song introduces a new speaker, a new world and a new way of persuading you to believe something. That word, persuasion, became my way into the album. Almost every song features someone trying to sell a version of reality. The slave trader in the title track sells America as freedom while quietly omitting the chains. The celebrity in Lonely at the Top turns isolation into proof of superiority. The politician in Political Science mistakes grievance for foreign policy. The nostalgic in Dayton, Ohio - 1903 quietly edits the ugliness out of the past so the present has something to complain about. Even the lover in You Can Leave Your Hat On repeatedly insists that he knows what love is, which I found surprisingly unsettling once I stripped away the Joe Cocker baggage. The biggest revelation, though, was Newman the arranger. I’d always thought of him as a brilliant lyricist who happened to write good tunes. This album made me realise the arrangements are carrying half the dramatic weight. The repeated piano ostinato in Sail Away fascinated me. Newman could easily have written a conventional accompaniment. Instead, beneath “In America every man is free”, he places an insistent repeated figure that never quite lets the listener settle. It isn’t harmonically disruptive. It simply nags. He even leaves it repeating after the vocal has faded. Burn On opens with another ostinato, joined by a brass note that’s only gently discordant, allowing unease to develop without ever announcing itself. The arrangements don’t simply support the songs. They quietly argue with them. What gradually emerged was an album about the stories people tell themselves in order to live with the world. A burning river becomes civic folklore. Simon Smith’s companionship with his dancing bear becomes much harder to accept once you remember the bear isn’t there willingly. Memo to My Son is almost comically empty. The title promises distilled wisdom. The song offers little beyond, “I love you. Now along you go.” It ends up saying something unexpectedly profound: none of us really have a clue. Old Man strips away almost all of Newman’s theatrical machinery. I found myself hearing it simply as an acceptance that death comes when we eventually lose the energy to say “not yet”. No grand metaphysics. Just quiet recognition. Then Newman finishes by pulling the rug away entirely. God’s Song doesn’t read to me as a simple attack on religion. Instead it imagines a God looking at humanity almost with bemusement: look at all this suffering, and you still love me. “That’s why I love mankind” becomes less an expression of compassion than an acknowledgement that humanity continues to need God regardless of the evidence. It is a profoundly unequal relationship. What impressed me most was Newman’s economy. He wastes almost nothing. He sketches characters in a handful of lines, trusts the arrangements to carry much of the argument, and almost never explains himself. These songs don’t feel like essays with melodies attached. They feel like tiny pieces of musical theatre, each one presenting a different way in which human beings persuade themselves that the world makes sense.

This was one of the first albums that completely changed my mind about a band. For years I’d dismissed the Stones as little more than the Beatles’ scruffier rivals. Then a friend insisted I sit down and listen to Beggars Banquet from beginning to end. Not a compilation. The album. He understood that the argument wasn’t individual songs, it was the world they created together. He was right. Listening again, it struck me that this is the moment the Rolling Stones stop defining themselves against the Beatles and simply become the Rolling Stones. They’ve found their own musical language. That language is built on accretion. Their greatest songs don’t explode into life. They gather. Sympathy for the Devil grows from percussion and voice into something almost ritualistic. No Expectations quietly accumulates emotion. Parachute Woman deepens its groove until you don’t want it to end. Street Fighting Man piles on tension rather than slogans. The best moments on the album don’t announce themselves. They accumulate authority. The political writing is much richer than I appreciated when I first heard it. Sympathy isn’t really about Satan. It’s about humanity’s habit of disowning its own capacity for evil. There is no Hitler without followers. No atrocity without willing participants. The Devil merely introduces the evidence. Street Fighting Man is just as nuanced. It opens with one of rock’s great bait-and-switches: “Summer’s here and the time is right…” Your brain fills in the obvious ending. Instead, Jagger gives you revolution. Yet the song quickly becomes more ambiguous. Britain in 1968 wasn’t Paris. Parliamentary reform had already delivered enormous social change through legislation rather than barricades. “Compromise solution” isn’t simply surrender. It’s an acknowledgement that British politics has often worked differently. The quieter songs are just as revealing. No Expectations remains one of the loveliest performances on the album, with Brian Jones’ slide guitar forever stained with hindsight. Dear Doctor affectionately spoofs country music while showing genuine affection for it. Factory Girl is one of the album’s hidden gems. Jagger sings about ordinary working life with a wonderfully matter-of-fact warmth. Waiting outside the factory. Friday night drinks. Stains down her dress from a day’s work. No idealisation, just quiet admiration. The final three-song run has always been the heart of the record. Stray Cat Blues inhabits a room rather than presenting a performance. The band are so tightly locked together they somehow sound as though they’re falling apart, the great Stones paradox. Factory Girl finds dignity in ordinary life. Salt of the Earth ends not with certainty but with a complicated toast to working people. It isn’t a simple political statement. It’s a recognition of labour, distance and shared humanity. Musically, the band have become extraordinary. Charlie Watts and Keith Richards are constantly negotiating the groove, Charlie quietly defining where the floor is while Keith leans against it. Nicky Hopkins adds delicate filigree throughout, while Brian Jones contributes some of the most expressive slide playing of his career. Everyone listens. Everyone leaves space. The songs breathe. The album also changed the way I thought about musicians. They stopped being untouchable stars and became cultural workers. People turning up, solving problems together, listening, arguing, making thousands of tiny decisions that history would later call a masterpiece. The Stones didn’t walk into Olympic Studios thinking, “Let’s make a five-star album.” They just went to work. Forty years after it first changed my mind, Beggars Banquet still feels like the moment the Rolling Stones discovered exactly who they were. And once they found that voice, they barely put a foot wrong for the next few years.

This is not really the third Big Star album. It feels more like the first Alex Chilton album, or perhaps the record left behind after Big Star had stopped being a functioning band. What amazed me was not the weirdness. It was that the weirdness never replaces the songwriting. Underneath all the fractured arrangements, loose performances, strange production choices and stream-of-consciousness lyrics, Chilton keeps returning to melody. That seems to be the one thing he still trusts. The album feels wildly ahead of its time, but not in a self-conscious way. It is visionary by accident. Nobody here sounds like they are trying to invent indie rock. It is more like a series of bad days in the office that somehow left behind a map for half the music that followed. You can hear traces of future dream pop, slowcore, Elliott Smith, Radiohead, The Replacements, Pete Doherty, This Mortal Coil, even bits of British art-pop. Not because those things are being predicted, but because Chilton keeps making decisions later musicians would recognise as permission. The arrangements are extraordinary because they keep choosing what not to do. There are so many obvious ways these melodies could have been accompanied, and he swerves most of them. Kanga Roo turns guitar into weather. Dream Lover is full of lovely holes. Holocaust is almost unbearable because the cello and slide guitar seem to expose the fracture rather than decorate it. Blue Moon is woody and tender, gone before it can become sentimental. Take Care is loping and ungainly, like a torn butterfly’s wing. Even the roughness is carefully handled. The record is full of sounds that should not work but do: a gorgeously rotten piano, an off-kilter sax, a guitar on Till the End of the Day that sounds like it is being played down a telephone, yet sits perfectly in the band. This is not bad engineering. It is character placed exactly where it belongs. The lyrics often resist ordinary sense. O, Dana, You Can’t Have Me and Downs drift into associative, fragmentary language. I do not mind that. Bernard Sumner has made a career out of parataxis when it works. Here, the words often behave less like narrative and more like another instrument. You stop trying to solve them and start feeling the shape of the thought. The key track for me is probably Holocaust. Not because it is enjoyable. It is not. It is almost too much. But it proves the album’s central point: this is fracture, not collapse. The melody is intact. The beauty is intact. The person at the centre sounds damaged, but the song still stands. That is what makes Third so powerful. It is not a perfect album, and it is not coherent in the tidy sense. But it is emotionally coherent. It wanders, lurches, jokes, aches, remembers pop, forgets itself, finds beauty again, then ends up somewhere strange and ragged. A should’ve band made a shouldn’t album, and somehow it became a source code.

I’ve known this for years, own it on CD, and thought I understood why I loved it. Spending a morning with it proved I didn’t. I knew the history. I hadn’t fully appreciated the human consequences of that history. The obvious story is that this is the birth of modal jazz. That’s true, but it only tells you what changed on paper. The more interesting question is what changed for the musicians. Hard bop often asks the soloist to solve problems. The harmony continually presents new challenges and the improviser demonstrates their ability to navigate them. Chord changes abound. It’s breathless, like a car skidding around corners. Here, Miles removes much of that obligation. He hands another level of agency back to the soloist. The challenge is no longer to negotiate a harmonic maze. It’s to tell a story. That sounds liberating. I suspect, as a performer, it’s terrifying. Music exists in two different experiences of time. The listener compresses it. Three minutes vanish. The poor bloody performer lives every second. Every pause, every breath and every note has to be inhabited without the safety net of rapid harmonic movement. Suddenly one note becomes an eternity. That explains so much of what makes this album extraordinary. Miles isn’t interested in filling space. Bill Evans isn’t interested in answering every phrase. Paul Chambers doesn’t rush to reassure you that the pulse is still there. They leave enormous voids in the music, and those caverns become part of the composition. It’s the opposite of anxious music. It trusts the silence. The personnel are inspired. Evans opens “So What” with a harmonic world that owes as much to Debussy’s harmonic colour and Satie’s sparseness as it does to jazz. Chambers joins him, not as an accompanist but as a conversational partner. The famous bass motif and Evans’ answering chords don’t simply introduce a tune. They stage a world. Then, and only then, do the horns enter. Miles plays with astonishing veracity. His notes don’t merely feel economical, they feel inevitable. Coltrane retains that wonderful smear of notes, but now he is working with scales rather than a constantly shifting harmonic landscape. His authority comes from absolute certainty of tone. Cannonball Adderley, meanwhile, refuses to become Coltrane. He warms everything he touches. He sings. His solos feel less like demonstrations than conversations. What struck me throughout wasn’t the modal language itself but the ensemble’s generosity to the music and each other. This isn’t a sequence of solos with accompaniment. It’s six musicians continually creating the conditions for one another to succeed. Evans bridges. Chambers grounds. Cobb regulates the breathing of the room. The horns lock together when they need to. Miles understands instinctively when the stage is ready for the next player. “Blue in Green” became the emotional centre of the album for me. It resists the improviser’s curse of working towards an ending. It simply continues until there is no more music. That is a very different thing from arriving at a conclusion. “All Blues” reminded me that the modal revolution isn’t austere. It sways. It’s sensual. Nobody overplays. Nobody mistakes freedom for licence. Every player chooses exactly what the music requires, no more and no less. By the time “Flamenco Sketches” arrives, Miles has almost abandoned traditional form altogether. The players drift through modal colours rather than chord sequences. The spaces become vast. Evans thinks in chordal blocks rather than lines. Miles sings through the Harmon mute with breathtaking inevitability. Again, the piece doesn’t really end. Eventually, there is simply no more music. This album might have the reputational weight of innovation, but it resists the seductive allure of a manifesto. It sounds instead like a couple of days’ work by six musicians who happened to discover that jazz could breathe differently. Five stars, because that is as high as the scale goes. For this album, normal accounting fails.

One of the pleasures of revisiting this record is hearing Paul Simon stop trying to be one of the great songwriters of the 1960s and quietly become Paul Simon instead. That sounds harsher than I mean it. Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme is full of craft, but it still has a little too much writerly posture for me. Dylan is still in the bloodstream, even when Simon is taking the piss out of Dylan. Here, he watches more and announces less. This is the point where his mature method arrives. Rather than declaring what something means, he circles it. The songs approach their subjects from different angles, trusting observation over conclusion. America becomes an idea rather than a destination. Identity becomes something performed. Relationships become studies in hesitation rather than heartbreak. The songs don’t so much arrive at answers as orbit them. The album also shows how much Simon had absorbed from the post-Pepper world without imitating it. It isn’t really a concept album. I’d call it a concept suite and bits. The first side forms a beautifully shaped meditation on time, memory and ageing. The second gathers songs of different origins into the same emotional world. It shouldn’t feel this coherent, but it does. The arrangements are every bit as intelligent as the writing. They aren’t decoration, they’re argument. The studio broadens Simon’s palette without ever overwhelming his songs. Even the boldest production choices serve the ideas rather than drawing attention to themselves. I kept thinking of Simon and Garfunkel “at the office”. This doesn’t sound like an album that simply arrived. It sounds earned through writer’s block, label pressure, wrong turns, inspired decisions and, occasionally, perhaps a little too much time spent perfecting something slight. That’s not a criticism. It’s the sound of serious craftsmen solving difficult problems. Above all, Bookends has curiosity. It never mistakes a neat aphorism for an answer. Its narrators are often caught in time’s amber, pausing to describe when action might be easier. That instinct to circle rather than pronounce turns out to be Paul Simon’s great artistic breakthrough. A deeply satisfying record, and an easy five stars.

Ramones have always been one of those bands I admired more than loved. When I was younger they felt too American, too wilfully dumb, too interested in saying “Beat on the Brat” or “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue” and then wandering off before anyone could ask why. Compared with British punk, where even the provocations usually had a target, they could seem almost pointlessly shocking. I think I was listening for meaning in the wrong place. This time the penny dropped. Ramones isn’t just a masterpiece of brevity, it’s a masterpiece of form. One of the points of punk was to strip rock back to its essentials. The Ramones don’t just strip it down, they keep stripping. Middle eights? Gone. Instrumental indulgence? Gone. Elaborate arrangements? Gone. Even Please Please Me starts to sound faintly progressive by comparison. It’s almost as though someone asked, “What if every song was ‘I Saw Her Standing There’?” and the answer came back, “Every song. Ever.” The astonishing thing is that it never becomes boring. From a distance, everything sounds the same. Up close, it absolutely doesn’t. Once your ear adjusts to the album’s internal grammar, tiny changes become huge. “Beat on the Brat” becomes “the slow one”. A count to eight in “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue” suddenly feels dangerously self-indulgent. By the closing track, a tempo change lands like a plot twist. I also found myself appreciating just how skilful Johnny Ramone’s playing really is. The relentless downstrokes create what feels like a continuous wall of sound, but it’s his left hand that performs the miracle. Chord changes happen at impossible speed without the momentum ever faltering. It shouldn’t work. Yet the guitar becomes this immense sheet of harmonic texture, with crash cymbals simply punctuating the changes. The sweetness surprised me too. Beneath the leather jackets and horror-film titles is a band hopelessly in love with early Beatles, girl groups and bubblegum pop. The backing vocals are genuinely lovely. “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” and “Listen to My Heart” reveal a band whose emotional vocabulary is almost childlike in its directness. No introspection, no explanation, just declarations. What really unlocked the album for me, though, was thinking about Pop Art. The Ramones don’t seem to have formed a band so much as created a universe. Everyone is a Ramone. Everyone dresses the same. Every song lasts about two minutes. Every song begins with “1-2-3-4”. They don’t explain themselves any more than Warhol explained the soup cans. They simply present another one. Because we’re human, we can’t resist digging for hidden meaning anyway. That makes the occasional glimpse of reality, particularly “53rd & 3rd”, all the more striking. The comic-book world suddenly brushes against something that may actually have been lived, yet the band refuse to announce its importance. It’s simply another Ramones song. The biggest revelation, though, was that the apparent stupidity is anything but. The Ramones aren’t rejecting complexity. They’re rejecting options. They impose so many constraints on themselves that the only remaining complexity is in the execution. Any fool can be clever. It takes real confidence to know what not to do. The Ramones didn’t simplify rock. They found the point beyond which it couldn’t be simplified any further and still remain rock and roll.

I’ve never been entirely convinced by descriptions of Rid of Me as simply “abrasive” or “confrontational”. They’re true, but they only describe the surface. Underneath all the noise is something much older. This is a blues record. Not in the sense of twelve bars or familiar licks, but in its grammar. Polly Harvey takes the language of the blues, desire, boasting, religion, sex, betrayal, bodily experience, and sets it loose in a thoroughly modern emotional landscape. It’s the language of the blues applied to love gone odd. Or perhaps better still: curdled love. Every song explores another mutation. Love becomes possession in “Rid of Me”. It becomes spiritual yearning in “Missed”. Manipulation in “Rub ‘Til It Bleeds”. Swagger in “50ft Queenie”. Obsession in “Yuri-G”. Physical domination in “Me-Jane”. By the time “Snake” arrives, desire itself has become body horror. Harvey isn’t writing about relationships ending. She’s writing about what happens when love spoils but refuses to die. Steve Albini’s recording is a huge part of why it works. The trio sounds astonishingly alive. Every sound feels deliberate yet completely in the moment. Harvey’s voice frequently disappears into the ensemble, clipped, distorted and half-buried, because it isn’t always functioning as a narrator. Sometimes it’s simply another instrument. Nobody asks what Eric Clapton is “saying” during a solo. Harvey often treats the voice in exactly the same way. The album constantly surprised me. “Missed” slips into an elegant 11/4 that never once feels mathematical. “Man-Size Sextet” suddenly abandons the band altogether for a voice and string sextet, somewhere between Bartók and Bernard Herrmann. Harvey’s reconstruction of “Highway 61 Revisited” strips away Dylan’s grin and exposes the song’s biblical grotesquery underneath. Then “Dry”, after forty minutes of deconstruction, almost sounds mainstream. I genuinely caught myself thinking, “Good Lord, she could enter Eurovision with this.” That’s less a comment on the song than on how completely the album recalibrates your ears. One phrase kept returning while I listened. Harvey’s world is full of corporeal feedback and resonances. Everything eventually becomes physical. Bodies, instruments and emotions continually set one another vibrating. Even “Ecstasy” ends up there. That huge ringing opening chord followed by the most insolent slide guitar imaginable, and suddenly “I’m in E” seems to mean ecstasy, the key of E, and being inside the guitar itself all at once. What impressed me most was how little of this feels self-conscious. The odd metres, the chamber strings, the buried vocals, the Dylan cover, none of it exists to show how clever Harvey is. Every decision serves the emotional world she’s built. By the end, I wasn’t hearing an alternative rock classic. I was hearing a feral modern blues record. Harvey takes the blues, to half-quote the album, sets it alight and sets it free.

I knew almost nothing about this album beyond its reputation. That turned out to be an advantage, because I wasn’t listening for “Lana Del Rey”. I was listening for what Elizabeth Grant had written. That’s where the album gradually unlocked itself for me. I ended up thinking of it this way: Elizabeth Grant writes. Lana Del Rey performs. That’s an ingenious division of psychic labour. The writer creates a character capable of carrying celebrity. The trouble is that the character becomes real. Other people’s opinions become your story. The role starts leaking back into the person who invented it. Once I’d seen that, almost everything else fell into place. This isn’t really an album about fame. It’s about mediation. It keeps reaching for ordinary life: waitressing, country clubs, domestic love, touring that turns into airports and hotels, the possibility of simply disappearing into the background. The fantasy isn’t obscurity. It’s privacy. Musically, it’s far richer than I’d expected. The arrangements accumulate rather than announce themselves. The title track begins in crisp focus before gradually blurring until even the drum fills seem to recede into the distance. “Not All Who Wander Are Lost” is carried by beautifully intertwined guitars. On “Yosemite”, a filtered vocal briefly becomes an old television speaker, perfectly matching the lyric about static and How Green Was My Valley. The production rarely explains itself. It simply lets atmosphere gather. I was also struck by how often Lana writes through incidentals rather than grand statements. Places, names and memories appear without explanation, the way they do in real recollection. They’re emotional coordinates rather than plot points. The album’s emotional arc surprised me too. I expected a record preoccupied with celebrity. Instead I found one repeatedly asking whether ordinary companionship might be the greater luxury. Two famous people fall in love, and all they seem to want is the chance to stop being watched. One fascinating moment comes with “Breaking Up Slowly”. It’s the first song where the Lana Del Rey persona almost disappears. I think that’s because it’s a duet. Another consciousness enters the song, and suddenly the mythology has to share the stage. It just becomes two people. The closing cover of Joni Mitchell’s “For Free” is the perfect ending. By then, the album’s central question has become obvious. Who is actually freer? The famous musician, whose life has become everybody else’s story? Or the busker, still playing for himself? I don’t think Chemtrails over the Country Club quite became one of my absolute favourite records. It isn’t a five-star album for me. But it’s one of the strongest fours I’ve given in this project. Liz Grant is a fucking clever writer, and she’s lucky to have someone as expressive as Lana Del Rey living inside her

I finally got round to Rio. Yes, yes. I know. There are two lazy ways of talking about Duran Duran. One is to dismiss them as MTV pin-ups. The other is to overcompensate and pretend they secretly invented modern music. Neither is true. We must, however, talk about how accomplished they are as a band. John Taylor constantly changes his approach from song to song rather than imposing a single bass style. Roger Taylor is a far subtler drummer than he’s usually given credit for, often succeeding by leaving space rather than filling it. Andy Taylor shifts effortlessly between rock muscle, Chic-style rhythm work and atmospheric colour, while Nick Rhodes quietly orchestrates the whole affair. By the end I was thinking of him less as a keyboard player than as an arranger who happened to use synthesisers. The real revelation was how they divide the labour. Every instrument has a job. The arpeggiators aren’t there because synthesisers were fashionable; they’re given distinct functions from track to track. Sometimes they’re the rhythmic engine, sometimes they’re a moving pad, sometimes they simply animate the harmony. Nobody duplicates anyone else. You can hear all sorts flowing into the record: Chic’s bass philosophy, Bowie’s Low, the spacious thinking of Closer, the elegance of Japan, even Dave Ball’s electronic restraint. Rio isn’t so much a revolution as a confluence. It doesn’t invent a new musical language. It speaks several existing ones with remarkable fluency. And then there’s Simon. We can, and probably should, talk at length about Simon Le Bon and his unmistakable Drama Student from Harrow tendencies. The phrasing, the theatricality, the sense that every line is being delivered from somewhere just slightly above the stage lights. Sometimes it works beautifully, giving the songs a kind of heightened, romantic sheen. Sometimes it teeters on the brink of parody. But it’s never dull, and crucially, it fits the band’s sense of scale. These songs aren’t meant to be mumbled; they’re meant to be performed. And yes, occasionally it feels like he’d narrate the washing up with the same intensity he’d bring to a doomed love affair on a yacht in the Caribbean. But that’s part of the charm. The domestic and the exotic collapse into the same heightened register. And that’s probably why I admire it more than I love it. Given an infinite record shop and a finite allowance of 1001 albums, I’m not convinced Rio would be an obvious pick. I’d probably reach for the records that created those vocabularies first. But that doesn’t diminish what Duran Duran achieved. They distilled a remarkable amount of musical thinking into a set of immaculate pop records. It’s a happy confluence that made a lot of bedroom dancers very happy. And yes, I still have no bloody idea what “The Reflex” is about. But nor does Simon. So that’s OK.

I knew Blue Lines already, but Protection turned out to be a far more intriguing record than I’d expected. It doesn’t announce itself. It quietly changes the way you listen. One thing that struck me almost immediately is how coherent the album is. Not because the songs resemble one another, but because they all inhabit the same psychological landscape. They feel like different states of consciousness after dark. “Protection” is about mutual care rather than heroic protection. “Karmacoma” becomes a fragmented dub hallucination. “Three” has the propulsion of a night train, Nicolette sounding like someone watching the landscape drift past through a rain-streaked window. “Spying Glass” is dub unease, with Horace Andy embodying the original sense of being woke: alert, vigilant, aware that some people don’t have the luxury of relaxing. By the time “Heat Miser” arrives, the album has become a portrait of resentful wakefulness, the famous snore no longer an eccentric production touch but the infuriating sound of someone else’s effortless sleep. I found myself listening less to the songs than to the arrangements. Craig Armstrong’s piano on “Weather Storm” doesn’t simply play; it blooms. The clipped guitar samples scattered across “Eurochild” somehow both decorate and nag. The string pad underneath that groove gives it a nocturnal undertow of bad decisions. Throughout the album, Massive Attack place tiny elements inside otherwise sumptuous arrangements that quietly stop them becoming complacent. Beauty is never allowed to exist unchallenged. One phrase kept recurring in my notes: economy of expression. It suits this album perfectly. Nothing grandstands. The bass never tries to impress. The strings never become sentimental. Even Tracey Thorn, when she’s finally allowed to soar on “Better Things”, refuses to mistake emotional release for vocal display. That’s one of the reasons the guest appearances work so well. Tracey Thorn, Nicolette, Horace Andy and Tricky all remain completely themselves, yet the album is unmistakably Massive Attack. The project is simply large enough to absorb these very different personalities without losing its own identity. Perhaps my favourite discovery was “Weather Storm”. I described it in my notes as “trip-hop Debussy”. It meanders over a groove rather than developing conventionally, and somehow that works because the composition isn’t just in the notes. It’s composed as much at the mixing desk. The production isn’t documenting performances; it is the performance. Listening to Protection also made me realise how inadequate “trip hop” can be as a label. It tells you where the beats came from, but almost nothing about the experience of hearing the record. This felt less like a genre exercise than a nocturne: a sequence of songs concerned with how consciousness changes after dark. By the end I wasn’t thinking about Bristol, or trip hop, or even the guest vocalists. I was thinking about space. About how stereo width can become emotional width. About how a clipped guitar sample can alter the meaning of an entire arrangement. About how an album can trust silence, restraint and implication more than obvious hooks. Some records ask to be played loudly. Protection asks to be listened to carefully.

England and Norway had selfishly decided to take my Saturday night into extra time, so Sunday morning found me sitting in bed with a slight football hangover, a bottle of Coke left over from Monday’s Andy’s Man Club celebration and what turned out to be the perfect antidote. Some albums comfort you. Some wake you up. Parallel Lines somehow manages both. I was fourteen again within about thirty seconds. I’ve loved this record for nearly half a century. I played my cassette until the ferrous oxide gave up and decided to eat a bike. This morning reminded me why. One of the lazy stories about Parallel Lines is that Mike Chapman made Blondie commercial. I don’t think that’s what happened at all. He turned them from a disorganised sneer into a global menace. The wit, the omnivorous musical taste, the downtown cool and Debbie Harry’s charisma were already there. Chapman simply put the band through boot camp. Every guitar part now has purpose. Every harmony lands together. Every arrangement is edited to within an inch of its life. The songs become models of discipline. Yet somehow none of that discipline comes at the expense of fun. Chris Stein’s guitar playing struck me all over again. It’s George Harrison’s philosophy: find the line that works and stop. “Picture This” contains one of those solos that has lived in my head for decades because it isn’t a solo at all. It’s another tune. Clem Burke remains one of rock’s great joys. I’ve seen Blondie live twice, and you learn far more about drummers by watching than listening. Burke looks permanently on the verge of glorious collapse, all Keith Moon exuberance, but underneath it sits Ringo Starr’s judgement. His fills are exuberant without ever derailing the song. “Will Anything Happen?” is pure propulsion. Watching him at work, you realise the engine room of Blondie isn’t merely keeping time. It’s generating excitement. Debbie Harry, meanwhile, reminded me why I’ve always thought of her as a wildly intelligent vocalist. She doesn’t simply sing songs; she inhabits them. Every track is another character. One moment she has the inscrutable shimmer of Françoise Hardy on “Sunday Girl”, the next the lip curl is back for “Just Go Away”. She always seems to know exactly what emotional temperature the song requires. What also struck me was how deeply rooted this album is in pop history without ever sounding nostalgic. “Hanging on the Telephone” has a distinctly British ring. “Pretty Baby” feels like Lou Reed had wandered into the Brill Building. “Sunday Girl” is everything I love about yé-yé, but by New Yorkers. Then they relocate Buddy Holly to CBGB as though it’s the most natural thing in the world. Cheap Trick would have killed for “I’m Gonna Love You Too”. And then there’s “Heart of Glass”. I’ve been gleefully pointing this out to people since I was fourteen. After all that immaculate shimmer, the locked groove and the CR-78 pulse, Blondie casually throw in bars of 7/4. Nobody notices. Or rather, everyone notices that something exciting just happened without realising why. That’s the genius of Parallel Lines. Its eccentricity hides in plain sight. Why shouldn’t we be smuggling 7/4 into Studio 54? The album also has a wonderful sense of humour. After forty minutes of demonstrating astonishing compositional discipline, it suddenly decides to have a laugh. The “backing vocals” on “Just Go Away” aren’t harmonies at all. They’re joyous pub rabble. It sounds like a band that’s spent an entire album proving how clever it is finally deciding to stop being clever for twenty seconds and simply enjoy itself. That’s probably what makes Parallel Lines feel so alive nearly fifty years on. It’s an album made by musicians of frightening ability who never once forgot that pop music is supposed to be exhilarating

When Bowie released Low, a lot of people must have wondered whether he’d simply stopped writing songs. After some time inside it, I think the opposite is true. He’d stopped believing songs had to explain themselves. The first thing that struck me was how physical the record is. For an album with a reputation for introspection, it’s remarkably muscular. Dennis Davis, George Murray and Carlos Alomar are an astonishing band. These are tracks with shoulders. Visconti’s production bends the air around them while Eno’s interventions constantly interfere with your sense of certainty. What I heard on side one wasn’t so much “Berlin” as a consciousness having trouble parsing what it sees. Bowie’s narrators are damaged, accusatory, compulsive. They try to keep control of situations they don’t fully understand. The lyrics arrive as fragments rather than stories. Burroughs rather than Broadway. There isn’t an ounce of padding. Bowie says only what absolutely needs saying, leaving the music to carry everything else. “Sound and Vision” still has one of the most audacious intros in pop music. That extraordinary delay before Bowie even bothers to sing isn’t self-indulgence; it’s the album teaching you how to listen. The drums materialise through warped air, George Murray’s bass pops and struts through the haze, Carlos Alomar’s wonderfully restrained guitar quietly tells its own story, and somewhere in the middle a saxophone blooms into one of the ugliest beautiful sounds I’ve ever heard. By the time I reached “Warszawa”, I realised I’d stopped hearing this as an album about Berlin. I was hearing Europe. Not postcard Europe, but underlit stations, municipal architecture, new towns and a continent quietly rebuilding itself after exhausting its moral certainties. Warszawa was the masterpiece for me. It imagines a civilisation constructing a future because the alternative is glowing, smoking ruins. Modernity becomes an ethical choice because nostalgia has become dangerous. That thought coloured the rest of the second side. “Art Decade” became stately yet damaged, reminding me of the half-lit tunnels beneath București Nord - infrastructure built during an age of constrained ambition, where the future was still being constructed, just without enough money to illuminate all of it. “Weeping Wall” has a Reichian insistence, while Robert Fripp magnificently worries away at the tiny flaw in an otherwise immaculate surface. “Subterraneans” inhabits the world of insomnia: silence, inexplicable thoughts and a saxophone acting as nocturnal witness to the narrator’s hypnagogic mutterings. Calling Low “influential” almost undersells it. Predictive feels closer. Bowie isn’t simply inventing sounds that later artists borrowed; he’s imagining an entire way of thinking about pop music. Space becomes dramatic. Subtraction becomes expressive. Instruments stop behaving like themselves. The album doesn’t point towards the 1980s so much as quietly wait for them to arrive. And then it does something rather wonderful. It doesn’t end. It leaves.

Some albums impress you by being ahead of their time. Others impress you by simply being a great collection of songs. Done by the Forces of Nature does something rarer. It behaves like an invitation. It invites you into a worldview where Parliament sits happily alongside Blondie, Soul II Soul, Loose Ends, Pharoah Sanders, Hendrix, Osibisa, the Bee Gees and even The Simpsons. Every sample is another introduction. The crate digging isn’t there to prove how obscure the Jungle Brothers are; it’s there because they genuinely want you to hear the records that made them who they are. That’s what surprised me most. I’d expected a landmark Native Tongues album. I hadn’t expected something so generous. The production is astonishing. This isn’t just brilliant sampling, it’s composition through curation. Every fragment arrives for a reason, whether it’s the spiritual shimmer of Sanders, the communal joy of Parliament, the rubbery electro-funk of Cameo and Zapp, or a passing brass hook that feels like music drifting from a car window on a New York summer afternoon. It’s immensely polished while sounding completely relaxed. What also stands out is how free the album is from insecurity. There are no diss tracks, no obsession with rivals, no performative hardness. Instead it quietly proposes an alternative masculinity built around curiosity, friendship, dancing, learning and respect. Even its Afrocentric politics are invitational rather than confrontational. It asks you to know your history, not to weaponise it. As the album unfolded I found myself thinking less about songs and more about university reading lists. This feels like the paperwork you receive before term starts. Not because it’s academic, but because every track opens another door. “You like this? Wait until you hear Pharoah Sanders.” “Enjoying that groove? Here’s Parliament.” “That brass line? That’s the Bee Gees.” By the end I realised the Jungle Brothers weren’t simply making a hip-hop album. They were trying to define a musical civilisation. History, women, community, humour, spirituality, dancing and record collecting all belong to the same story. Then, after all that ambition, the album simply dissolves into a hazy jazz-inflected laugh. It’s a wonderfully human ending.

I loved Arular. It felt like M.I.A. inviting us into her world. Kala doesn’t bother with the invitation. It grabs you by the wrist, pulls you into the middle of a busy street and says, “Keep up.” That street became my recurring image while listening. Critics often describe Kala as “global”, but that word is so broad it almost loses meaning. This doesn’t sound like the globe. It sounds like a junction. A place where Tamil film music, dancehall, pirate radio, market traders, rave culture, London slang, Aboriginal Australian children and hip-hop all collide because, in the cities M.I.A. inhabits, they already do. The production is astonishing. Switch somehow constructs an entire world from beatboxes, weedy little synths, laptop edits and extraordinary percussion. It isn’t polished cosmopolitanism. It’s DIY globalism. At times it feels as though someone has built a city from whatever happened to be lying around. “Bamboo Banga” is one of those opening tracks that immediately tells you the rules have changed. It’s gloriously insolent. Then “Bird Flu” arrives and refuses to simplify anything. It’s noisy, busy and uncompromising, not because M.I.A. wants to impress you with complexity, but because she’s stopped translating. Arular often explained her perspective. Kala simply immerses you in it. Then comes “Boyz”, which I adored. I’d never really paid attention to the repeated “How many… not many…” before. It’s such an elegant little construction. The song acknowledges that wars are started by boys, but immediately undercuts the temptation to make boys themselves the problem. “How many? Not many.” It leaves room for the rest of us, who generally don’t get to decide whether wars begin but often end up living with the consequences. All that, wrapped inside one of the most danceable tracks on the album. And then “Jimmy”. What an extraordinary thing to include. It opens like some spectral Shangri-Las record before exploding into a Bollywood glitterball-spangled dancefest. It’s mad, beautiful and deeply affectionate. Plenty of artists borrow from other cultures. M.I.A. simply shares one of the songs she loves. It doesn’t feel like appropriation or cleverness. It feels like she’s quietly admitting, “I’m not that cool. I just love this.” That affection turns out to be one of the album’s defining qualities. Even when Kala is talking about migration, money or identity, it never loses sight of ordinary life. “Mango Pickle Down River” was the moment the whole record breathed. The compressed global city suddenly focused in. Children sing. People hang around. Life goes on. It’s remarkable how political that feels without making a political speech. By the time “20 Dollar” arrived, I realised the album wasn’t just about movement between countries. It’s about money, and what money does to people. “Money make me numb.” “When the money turns the world, your loving turns to less.” Those ideas keep resurfacing until “The Turn”, where M.I.A. suddenly sounds tired, almost strung out, while the beat simply lopes on without her. It’s a beautiful production decision. The world keeps turning whether the individual has the energy to keep pace or not. I also loved the way “20 Dollar” turns the Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?” into something completely different. In the original it’s a question of psychological dislocation. Here it becomes an anthem of the displaced. The harmonic roots even kept summoning the ghost of “Blue Monday” in my head. Not because of the rhythm, but because of the way the bass inhabits similar territory. It’s one of those moments where a sample stops being a quotation and becomes a haunting. “XR2” made me laugh with recognition. After all the internationalism, suddenly we’re in London. Not tourist London, but pirate-radio, ICQ, SL2, XR2 London. It’s memory through acronyms. You don’t analyse those references; you either remember them or you don’t. I hadn’t thought about ICQ in years. Then there’s “Paper Planes”. Like most people, I’d always admired it. This time I finally understood it. It’s less a song than a glorious confession. She hits you with music and takes your money. Literally. Bang-bang ker-ching! The song isn’t standing outside commerce mocking it. It’s participating in it with complete self-awareness. The cash register isn’t just a joke. It’s the sound of the transaction you’re participating in by listening. What really transformed my understanding of Kala, though, was discovering how much its shape owes to circumstance. Had M.I.A. secured her US work visa, this might have become a Timbaland-centred American crossover album. Instead, the Department of Homeland Security effectively said, “You can’t come here and work.” Her response? “Fine. I’ll have the rest of the world.” That’s why the closing “Come Around” is so fascinating. It doesn’t feel like the climax. It feels like that moment on Bullseye when Jim Bowen reveals the speedboat and says, “This is what you could’ve won.” It’s the ghost of another Kalathat never existed. And I’m glad it didn’t. Because Kala isn’t global because somebody sat down and decided to make a global album. It’s global because it was made under pressure. The obstacle became the engine. America stopped being the destination and became just another country among many. In retrospect, that’s probably why the album still feels so fresh. Long before streaming normalised the idea that pop could come from everywhere at once, M.I.A. had already arrived at a simple proposition: America isn’t the world. Kala sounds like someone proving it.

I’d always thought Skylarking was XTC’s psychedelic masterpiece. After spending a morning with it, I don’t think that’s quite right. I think it’s one of the most complete secular visions of the good life ever put on record. That sounds grandiose but, dear reader, stick with me through this. The first thing that struck me was how deeply English its imagination is. Not English in the nostalgic sense, but English in the literary sense. This is Blake, Lear, Carroll and Lennon sharing a village green. American psychedelia often seeks transcendence by escaping the ordinary. English psychedelia asks what happens if the ordinary turns out to be enchanted. The difference is surprisingly easy to illustrate. Ask yourself what sort of character Lovely Rita would be in each tradition. In the English version, she’s Rita. She has an inner life. She’s funny, lonely, exasperating, human. In the American version she’s more likely to become an archetype, an authority figure or a symbol. English psychedelia humanises. It gives personalities to rain, grass, traffic wardens and mermaids. That’s exactly what Skylarking does. Yet it isn’t really about psychedelia. It’s about how to live. That’s what gradually dawned on me as the album unfolded. Every song seemed to add another piece to an ethical vision. Not through sermons, but through ordinary experience. Teenagers meeting in fields. Someone worrying whether they’ll earn enough to build a life with another person. Marriage. Friendship. Mortality. Self-examination. Change. The revelation, for me, was Earn Enough for Us. I’d always loved it as a beautifully crafted pop song. This time I realised it sits at the moral centre of the album. It recognises something pop music rarely says out loud: before we can concern ourselves with transcendence, imagination and the soul, somebody has to earn enough to keep the lights on. That’s not anti-spiritual. It’s profoundly humanist. The practical and the visionary aren’t opponents. One enables the other. You don’t get to skip from unemployment to enlightenment. Once that thought occurred, the rest of the album reorganised itself. Grass isn’t simply nostalgic; it’s about the geography of first intimacy. The Meeting Place understands that young love creates its own territory, places where you can be seen without feeling watched. Big Day quietly dismantles romantic fantasy without dismantling marriage itself. Marriage, it suggests, exchanges excitement for friendship, and friendship turns out to be the deeper achievement. Another Satellite then asks whether companionship alone is enough. It isn’t really about jealousy. It’s about two competing ideas of intimacy. One accepts ordinary closeness. The other longs for those rare moments where two people seem to levitate together without abandoning ordinary life. Domesticity and transcendence are not opposites. The album insists on both. By the time Mermaid Smiled appears, it no longer feels whimsical. It feels inevitable. The imagination isn’t escaping reality; it’s revealing another dimension already present within it. Then comes Dying, perhaps the bravest song here. It isn’t simply about death. It’s about watching somebody you love die and thinking, “Please don’t let it happen to me like that.” The fear isn’t extinction so much as the loss of agency. It’s one of the few songs I know that confronts mortality without either sentimentality or false consolation. Which makes Sacrificial Bonfire such a remarkable ending. It left me with a phrase I’d happily have framed on the wall: Change must be earned. The song understands that renewal isn’t magic. It asks something of us. You have to decide what you’re prepared to throw into the fire. Oddly enough, it reminded me of Andy’s Man Club. A good meeting resembles a sacrificial bonfire. Men bring thoughts they’re tired of carrying and, if they’re fortunate, gradually become able to relinquish them. Speaking doesn’t magically solve anything, but it changes your relationship with the burden. If you arrive carrying exactly the same thing every week, perhaps the next question becomes: what are you still unwilling to throw into the flames? Musically, Todd Rundgren’s contribution is astonishing. This really is “American XTC”, but not because the songs become American. Rather, Rundgren hears them through a different musical grammar. The arrangements increasingly behave like jazz. Not jazz as mood music, nor as sophisticated decoration, but jazz as function. The ensemble gathers around Andy Partridge’s voice the way a great small jazz group gathers around a soloist. Instruments answer him, support him and breathe with him. It’s closer to Zappa’s understanding of jazz than to rock with a few seventh chords sprinkled on top. Dave Gregory deserves equal praise. His strings on 1000 Umbrellas don’t merely descend; they enact psychological collapse. His brass on The Man Who Sailed Around His Soul thinks like a jazz section while remaining perfectly at home inside English pastoral pop. Every arrangement advances the emotional argument of the song. I still think Dear God works better a couple of tracks earlier. Powerful though it is, it asks one of humanity’s oldest questions: if there’s an all-powerful God, why is the world like this? It’s a fine song, but by then I’d realised the album itself had been asking a different question all along. How should we live? Its answer is quietly extraordinary. Earn enough. Love well. Become friends. Keep your imagination alive. Face death honestly. Accept that change asks something of you. Find wonder in ordinary things. Whether or not anyone is listening from above almost becomes beside the point. I’d started the morning expecting one of the great psychedelic albums. I finished it convinced I’d been listening to one of the great humanist albums. One that argues ordinary human life, fully attended to, is already miraculous.

I’d somehow reached my sixties without ever sitting down with The Chronic. That almost felt perverse. It’s one of those records whose reputation precedes it to such an extent that you start hearing the mythology before you hear the music. What struck me first wasn’t the gangsta rap. It was the luxury. This is an extraordinarily beautiful-sounding album. Dre doesn’t just make beats; he builds environments. The mixes are immaculate, the grooves unhurried, the sense of space remarkable. Even thirty years on, it sounds uncannily modern. His real instrument isn’t the microphone. It’s the mixing desk. But the more I listened, the more I realised there was a tension running through the record that I’d never really heard discussed. Beneath all that velvet is a constant shimmer of unease. Angular, high-register bass lines keep antagonising the ear. Harmonies refuse to settle completely. The grooves constantly invite you to relax, while tiny musical irritants quietly ensure you never quite do. That feels like Dre’s real genius. Listening over the course of a day also changed the way I thought about G-funk itself. I’ve always lazily filed it under “Parliament with rap”, but that doesn’t really explain what’s happening here. P-Funk always felt like a commune to me: anarchic, inclusive, forever inventing another character and inviting them aboard the Mothership. The Chronic borrows much of that musical language, but puts it to a completely different purpose. It’s the loose language of the commune with the approach of a warlord. Or, if you prefer: P-Funk is a commune. G-funk is a corporation. The grooves remain expansive, but the social imagination contracts. Again and again the songs return to territory, hierarchy, loyalty, reputation and power. Dre has appropriated P-Funk’s communal vocabulary for a fiefdom. That’s not a criticism so much as the album’s defining artistic move. It explains why tracks like “Rat-Tat-Tat-Tat” sound simultaneously welcoming and forbidding. Snoop Dogg turns out to be the masterstroke. Dre is the architect. Snoop is the Lord of Misrule. Every time Dre risks becoming monumental, Snoop wanders in, permanently amused, spilling syllables across the beat with an ease that somehow reminded me of Ringo Starr’s drumming: apparently careless, actually exquisitely controlled. The album also reminded me how broad Dre’s ears are. Parliament is obviously central, but Led Zeppelin, early electro, Buffalo Gals, dancehall and soul all quietly drift through the record. Underneath G-funk is someone with an enormous record collection. Where I struggled was with the lyrical imagination. It’s not the violence that bothered me. It’s the repetition. By the second half I’d understood the code. Territory. Reputation. Weed. Women. Repeat. Lil’ Ghetto Boy briefly hints at a deeper emotional register and, because of that, makes the surrounding material feel even narrower. That’s ultimately where I landed. The musical imagination is vastly larger than the social imagination. Dre creates one of the richest sonic landscapes in popular music, but populates it with a surprisingly limited range of ideas and people. The production keeps discovering new territory long after the lyrics have settled into familiar routines. I completely understand why The Chronic changed hip-hop. It deserved to. I just came away admiring it more than loving it.

I’ve always admired Nick Cave more than I’ve loved him. The early records are astonishing feats of imagination, but they can also feel like performances in the grand theatrical sense. The biblical fury, the Southern Gothic, the murder ballads; Cave rarely entered a room quietly. Then I reached The Boatman’s Call and found him doing something infinitely more difficult. He shuts up. This isn’t really a breakup album. It’s an album about transition. Specifically, it’s about the bewildering moment when someone you love has already crossed into a new reality while you’re still trying to understand how yesterday’s world disappeared overnight. What impressed me most is that Cave refuses almost every easy explanation. He briefly blames himself. He briefly blames her. He questions God, destiny, human nature and memory. None of them quite fit. Every song is another attempt to walk around the same crater, hoping one angle will finally make sense of it. That’s why I found “Where Do We Go Now But Nowhere?” so devastating. It’s not mourning the relationship so much as the collapse of possibility. All those futures that existed yesterday simply vanish. The grief isn’t only for what was; it’s for everything that now can never be. Crucially, Cave never turns anyone into a villain. “People Ain’t No Good” initially sounds like a cynical slogan, but by the end it has quietly dismantled its own thesis. People aren’t wicked so much as limited. Relationships don’t always fail because somebody is monstrous. Sometimes two flawed people simply can’t continue. That’s a much sadder conclusion. Musically, the restraint is extraordinary. This is the same Bad Seeds that once sounded capable of bringing down industrial buildings. Blixa Bargeld, the existentially suffering German from Kollaps, is somehow transformed into a master of understatement. Mick Harvey arranges with astonishing confidence, Thomas Wydler barely disturbs the surface, and everyone seems to ask the same question before playing a note: “Does this song actually need me?” Usually the answer is “only just.” The result is an album that seems to breathe. At one point I realised it sounded like an old wooden boat under load. The arrangements creak almost imperceptibly, like timbers flexing against the swell. Nothing is rigid. Everything yields slightly. For a record called The Boatman’s Call, it feels entirely appropriate. There are beautiful formal ideas throughout. “West Country Girl” has the air of an English folk ballad, built as a litany rather than a conventional narrative. “Idiot Prayer” speaks in the language of a condemned man on his way to the gallows, praying not because he expects an answer but because silence would be even worse. Then “Green Eyes” quietly pulls off one of the loveliest production ideas on the record. Cave overlays a spoken reading of a verse on top of the simultaneously sung version. It feels like an iteration of the old Elvis spoken-song device, but internalised. The singing and speaking aren’t alternatives; they’re two states of consciousness existing at once. That restraint extends to every corner of the record. Nobody announces their cleverness. Even the most sophisticated ideas arrive almost apologetically. By the end, Cave hasn’t solved the breakup. He hasn’t discovered the meaning of suffering or reached some hard-earned spiritual certainty. He’s simply managed to narrate what happened. The relationship has ceased to be an emergency and become a story. There’s something deeply moving about that. I came expecting the Cave of grand gestures and operatic emotion. Instead I found an artist discovering that whispering, or sometimes simply speaking, can carry infinitely further.

I came to Crocodiles having already heard and reviewed Ocean Rain, an album I admired rather more than I loved. It was handsome, atmospheric and often impressive, but I found myself wondering how much of its supposed profundity was actually being supplied by Ian McCulloch’s magnificent voice and the band’s accumulated mythology. It frequently seemed to be aiming for revelation and landing on a very good-looking record. Crocodiles has rather overturned my understanding of Echo and the Bunnymen. This does not sound like a band tentatively introducing itself. “Going Up” arrives with astonishing assurance: Will Sergeant’s guitar shimmers but also hits, Les Pattinson’s bass moves independently beneath it, and Pete de Freitas plays with the authority of someone composing the song from the drum stool. McCulloch declaims over the whole thing as though he has climbed onto a table midway through a conversation and decided everyone ought to hear this bit. The band are locked and hungry. That distinction matters. Plenty of debut albums are hungry but still searching for a form. The Bunnymen already appear to know precisely what each member contributes. What they have not yet acquired is complacency. They sound as though every song might be the one that establishes their right to exist. The great surprise is how intellectually active the album is. I had expected gothic weather and post-punk grandeur. Instead, I found a record crowded with observations, arguments and unfinished thoughts. Mac is not presenting himself as a prophet. His position throughout is closer to: I don’t know, but I have thoughts. That makes Crocodiles feel like an album assembled from late-night conversations. Not polished political discussions or coherent philosophical programmes, but the sort of sprawling exchanges in which young people try to settle family, masculinity, religion, drugs, politics, identity and the general state of the world before somebody notices it is three in the morning. There is something particularly Liverpudlian about that. Scousers love to talk, but not merely to exchange information. Conversation becomes a means of constructing the self: storytelling, argument, exaggeration, wit, contradiction and the testing of ideas in company. These songs often feel like the condensed residue of such nights. “Pride” examines the way families can live vicariously through their children, taking ownership of their achievements while remaining equally capable of enjoying their failures. “Monkeys” worries at masculinity and spiritual authority without arriving at a neat conclusion. “Pictures on My Wall” seems ruefully amused that all the talking has failed to solve anything. “We should have got it right,” Mac observes, but the merry-go-round continues. The music on “Pictures on My Wall” enacts that circularity beautifully. It lurches and sways harmonically, carrying an almost Eastern atmosphere without settling into any obvious borrowed idiom. It feels like a travelogue from somewhere imagined rather than visited, another example of Sergeant’s ability to suggest geography without drawing a map. Sergeant may be the album’s defining instrumental voice. He plainly loves melody, but he does not merely decorate it. He refracts it. His playing has the chordal attack of Lennon, Wilko Johnson and Paul Weller, but also the post-Magazine understanding that a guitar can create architecture, weather and psychological disturbance without resorting to the usual vocabulary of rock soloing. On “Do It Clean”, the band sound like an angular 13th Floor Elevators, particularly “You’re Gonna Miss Me”. “Stars Are Stars” suggests the Byrds with Manchester next door: second-wave psychedelia aware of both American garage music and the hard, modernist possibilities opened by post-punk. It is psychedelic music made by people who have retained their suspicion of hippiedom. That selective puritanism runs through the album. The band seem fascinated by altered perception while remaining deeply wary of surrender. “Villiers Terrace” is the clearest example. Mac visits a drug scene and finds people rolling on carpets, biting wool and pulling at strings. He is not delivering a sermon about the wickedness of drugs. He is looking at people within his own world, recognising what could become of him, and deciding that he does not like what he sees. The horror is not intoxication. It is the abandonment of agency masquerading as transcendence. That makes “Villiers Terrace” the one place where Mac sounds almost certain. Elsewhere, he investigates. Here, he judges. The conclusion is personal rather than moralistic: I don’t want to become that. “Read It in Books” is the album’s one slight stumble. The song belongs to the shared prehistory of McCulloch and Julian Cope, and both Echo and the Teardrop Explodes recorded it. I slightly prefer the Teardrops’ version. They understand its circularity as incantation, while Echo sound as though they are still deciding what to do with it. That hesitation is revealing. Most of Crocodiles feels collectively generated by this particular combination of musicians. Pattinson establishes the emotional geometry, de Freitas gives it bodily force, Sergeant finds the angle and Mac supplies the words and projection. “Read It in Books” arrives with more of its identity already fixed. It is historically at home on the album but aesthetically something of an interloper. “All That Jazz” introduces revolutionary imagery into this conversational world. “See you at the barricades, babe” sounds at first like fashionable insurrection, young men dressed in their best suits and waiting for History to notice them. There is humour in the pose, but the anxiety beneath it is real. Liverpool in 1980 was not merely borrowing the iconography of civil disorder. Thatcherism had struck Merseyside with vulgar, hurried clarity, accelerating the collapse of a city already damaged by unemployment, deindustrialisation, institutional neglect and antagonistic policing. The major uprising in Liverpool 8 would come the following year, but the pressure was hardly invisible beforehand. Mac does not offer a political programme. He admits that the imagery appeals because it corresponds to something he feels. The lights are going down, the wheels are turning and the sky may yet turn black. It is less a protest song than an expression of historical apprehension: young people sensing that the ground beneath them has begun to move. Then the album ends with “Happy Death Men”, perhaps its most extraordinary piece. The lyric initially appears to describe contentment with endings, but the men are treated impersonally. They stand in line. They polish and shine. They are “no regret men” and “last breath men”. Read as a military image, the language becomes chilling. These are individuals converted into a category, polished and disciplined so that the state may employ them as instruments of violence. The state claims a monopoly on legitimate violence, and it can only exercise that violence efficiently by dehumanising both its targets and its agents. Men become ranks, units, casualties and functions. Personal moral uncertainty must be replaced by duty, procedure and the manufactured absence of regret. Yet “Happy Death Men” does not make that case persuasively in the conventional sense. It does not proceed through argument. It is intensely expressionistic, almost a popped-up Kokoschka. The repeated phrases function more like brushstrokes than propositions, turning the men into distorted types under emotional pressure. Dave Balfe’s keyboards are crucial. His tumbling, hammered piano does not clarify the scene; it agitates it. The military imagery promises straight lines and polished order, while the music keeps buckling out of shape. Sergeant’s guitar begins to freak, fists seem to descend on the keyboards, and the whole song ascends into a swirl of echo and reverb. It ascends rather than collapses. Sound turns to flame and smoke. That psychedelic freakout is a magnificent way to end the album because it reveals the chaos concealed by the polished surface of organised violence. This is not the tidy, clipped world associated with much post-punk. The instruments lose their separate identities and become heat, distortion and psychological combustion. The treatment is the argument. By the end of Crocodiles, my earlier idea of Echo and the Bunnymen had been comprehensively rearranged. This is not merely the promising opening chapter before the band reaches the grandeur of Ocean Rain. It is a bold and assertive statement in its own right, one that makes the later album feel like a retreat and a missed opportunity by comparison. Crocodiles already possesses grandeur, but it generates that grandeur through performance, enquiry and collective force. It does not need to drape itself in myth. It has too much curiosity for that. These are young men who have not worked out the world, but have no intention of leaving it unexamined. That may sound heretical. But, like Mac, I don’t claim certainty. I also have thoughts.

There are albums you admire, albums you love, and albums that quietly recalibrate the way you think about music. I'd always assumed Bryter Layter belonged in the second category. After spending an entire morning listening to it with real concentration, I've come to the conclusion that it belongs firmly in the third. This isn't simply Nick Drake's "brighter" album. It's one of the most intelligently arranged records I've ever heard. The revelation wasn't Drake himself so much as the musicians surrounding him. Joe Boyd assembled an astonishing cast, including John Cale, Richard Thompson, Chris McGregor, Dave Pegg, Dave Mattacks, P. P. Arnold and Doris Troy, yet this never feels like a parade of guest stars. Instead, it sounds like a room full of exceptionally curious musicians listening to one another with absolute concentration. John Cale, in particular, is extraordinary. His viola on "Fly" behaves almost like a second consciousness, occasionally shadowing Drake before drifting off into its own thoughts. On "Northern Sky", he transforms the celesta by overlaying it with organ until the instrument loses its familiar sparkle and becomes something far stranger: a luminous harmonic wash. It's a simple idea, but one that changes the emotional temperature of the entire song. That sense of invention runs throughout the album. Chris McGregor's piano on "Poor Boy" refuses every obvious solution, punctuating the arrangement with wonderfully awkward, almost abrasive chords that somehow make everything around them sound richer. P. P. Arnold and Doris Troy provide backing vocals of astonishing restraint. Lesser arrangers would have unleashed them. Here they're woven into the fabric of the music, another colour on an already remarkable palette. I found myself thinking about the difference between craft and intelligence. Craft reaches for familiar techniques. Call and response. Tasteful string pads. A solo because it's time for one. Bryter Layter seems almost to reject that entire vocabulary. Every instrument is freed from its expected role. The viola isn't accompaniment. The celesta isn't fairy dust. The backing singers aren't decoration. Every musical decision feels as though it has been made specifically for that moment and no other. That intelligence extends to the songs themselves. "Fly" now strikes me as one of the finest songs I've heard about social awkwardness; those tiny conversational misjudgements everyone else forgets in seconds but which can replay in your own head for days. "Northern Sky" emerged as an even greater revelation. As someone who grew up in the Midlands, I couldn't help hearing the title not as geography but as quality of light. The beloved doesn't rescue Drake from darkness; they simply brighten an already clear northern sky. It's one of the most quietly profound love songs I know. The comparison that kept returning wasn't another folk record but Pet Sounds. Not because they sound alike, but because both records delight in distributing melody around the ensemble, inviting the listener to decide which musical line deserves their attention. The difference is that Bryter Layter makes this astonishing sophistication seem completely natural. Nothing ever sounds clever for the sake of it. Perhaps that's what impressed me most. The complexity disappears into beauty. There's also something wonderfully humbling about imagining the sessions themselves. The right producer, the right musicians, the right studio, the right collection of instruments sitting in the corner waiting to be discovered. We often think of genius as flashes of inspiration. Increasingly, I suspect it's also a matter of putting remarkable people in the same room and giving them the freedom to ask unexpected questions. More than fifty years on, Bryter Layter still reveals fresh ideas with every careful listen. Not production tricks. Not historical curiosities. Ways of thinking about music itself. That's the mark of a truly great record.

There are albums that ask "What if?" and albums that ask "Why?" Something/Anything? spends much of its eighty-nine minute running time asking the first question while repeatedly dodging the second. That's frustrating, because Rundgren's talent is never in doubt. As a musician, arranger, producer and engineer he's astonishing. The first three sides are packed with melodic ideas, key changes, structural left turns and dazzling studio craft. Yet I found myself becoming increasingly detached. Songs begin, mutate, wander off somewhere else, and too often never justify where they've ended up. The result feels less like listening to finished songs than eavesdropping on an exceptionally gifted mind thinking out loud. My background is in theatre, and one question sits at the heart of every rehearsal: why? Why is this character saying this? Why does this prop matter? Why is this moment here? Good songwriting asks exactly the same question. Every chorus, every modulation, every lyrical image should earn its place. Then, on the fourth side, something changes. A band appears. The transformation isn't miraculous, but it's unmistakable. Suddenly the songs breathe. They have grooves. They return to choruses. They develop rather than merely accumulate ideas. It dawned on me that Rundgren doesn't simply benefit from other musicians; he benefits from writing *to* them. A band has to understand where the song is going and why they're being asked to play what they're play. That simple act of communication imposes a discipline missing from much of the preceding hour. Even fairly ordinary songs become oddly comforting because they possess utility. They know what they're trying to do. After three sides of being asked to admire Rundgren's imagination, hearing songs simply function felt almost like a relief. The lyrics proved a separate stumbling block. Rundgren often reaches for profundity without quite finding it. He's a considerably stronger musical thinker than lyrical one, and when the words strain for significance they can become self-conscious rather than illuminating. There's a remarkable album hiding inside Something/Anything?, and there are moments where its reputation makes complete sense. But at nearly an hour and a half, I couldn't escape the feeling that it needed someone in the room asking the one question Rundgren too rarely asks himself. Why?

There is a tendency to approach every album in this book as though it must have broken new ground, rewritten the rules or permanently altered the direction of popular music. The Cars did none of those things. What it did was almost perfect the crossover between New Wave and American rock radio, which is a less dramatic achievement but a very considerable one. This is not the work of callow youth. Ric Ocasek was approaching his mid-thirties, while he and Benjamin Orr had already spent years in unsuccessful bands together. Punk and New Wave offered experienced musicians as much of an opportunity as they did spotty teenagers. They allowed people who had learned the old rules to discard the unnecessary ones and become more direct. The Cars sound like a band who have finally discovered what to retain, what to remove and, crucially, how they should look while doing it. Close your eyes and you can see the wraparound sunglasses, spiky hair and black leather jackets. The sound and the image arrived together. The opening run is extraordinarily assured. “Good Times Roll” establishes the method immediately: clipped rhythms, synthesizers sharing equal billing with the guitars, and Ocasek producing the act of singing rather than appearing to experience the song himself. There is always a slightly petulant lip protruding from the vocal. “My Best Friend’s Girl” sounds like a band in love with rock and roll but equally attracted to the detachment of Talking Heads, without any desire to turn the song into an art-school lecture. Then there is “Just What I Needed”, which is simply sublime. Its slightly roughened synthesizer glides into place with portamento before Elliot Easton’s guitar joins it, and the two sounds become inseparable. The harmonies are held back just enough to stop the song blooming into conventional power pop. That restraint makes the excitement feel contained and therefore more potent. I can imagine the chords being transferred to an acoustic guitar, because I am not an imbecile, but I do not really hear it as a song awaiting arrangement. It exists in my head as a fully formed New Wave combo performance. “I’m in Touch with Your World” is where the album becomes properly odd. It limps. It sounds slightly broken. Ocasek declaims from somewhere across the room while the arrangement embraces an angularity that recalls early XTC. It never feels derivative, however. When the chorus briefly hardens, it becomes unmistakably The Cars again. This is anti-rock made by musicians who remain entirely capable of playing rock whenever they choose. “Don’t Cha Stop” demonstrates how neatly The Cars could compress the signifiers of American New Wave into three minutes: clipped rhythm, forward propulsion, wobbly treated guitars and an aloof but declarative lead vocal. I can see American teenagers swivelling to one side, clicking their fingers, swivelling to the other and clicking again, all while attempting to appear as though dancing has occurred accidentally. The Cars were not interested in reinventing the relationship between the song, the band and the audience in the manner of Wire, Gang of Four or Talking Heads. They wanted to get on the radio. They took the textures of New Wave, kept the hooks and made the whole thing acceptable between Foreigner and Fleetwood Mac. That commercial instinct occasionally reveals the limitations of the material. “You’re All I’ve Got Tonight” has phased toms that initially threaten to break into “Making Plans for Nigel”, before Easton’s guitar pulls it firmly back towards Cheap Trick and American power rock. The stomp and Roy Thomas Baker’s block harmonies manufacture plenty of excitement, but they disguise a fairly ordinary song. It works best when felt rather than inspected, and at 4:13 it stays a little longer than its ideas warrant. “Bye Bye Love”, also 4:13, earns the same duration more comfortably. Its lyrics are delivered conversationally, with Lou Reed’s deadpan transplanted into immaculate crossover pop. The music possesses the frenzy of American New Wave, while Ocasek responds to emotional calamity with a glorious “Yeah, well, see ya.” This is one of the defining tensions within The Cars: the band is permanently in motion while the singer appears determined not to give anyone the satisfaction of seeing him react. “Moving in Stereo” is the album’s most interesting departure. It is useful to hear it as a Greg Hawkes instrumental decorated by occasional vocals rather than as a conventional Ocasek song. The spacious, atmospheric possibilities opened by Bowie’s Low seem to have been studied and translated into The Cars’ own language. They are not making their own “Warszawa”; they are asking what such a piece might sound like within their vocabulary. The answer retains a rock pulse and pop arranger’s instinct while allowing duration and atmosphere to become the point. Two conspicuous production devices appear. One works beautifully; the other deserves confiscation. Moving Ocasek’s voice across the stereo soundstage because the song is called “Moving in Stereo” is daft literalism. Stop it. Giving the chorus a telephone-like notch filter, however, is inspired. It changes the emotional perspective of the track and makes the vocal feel transmitted from somewhere outside the arrangement. At 4:43, the song never outstays its welcome because it needs the slower tempo and the room to breathe. The closing “All Mixed Up” may be the strangest construction on an already peculiar debut. Benjamin Orr sings with such natural American warmth that I can hear him performing “A Horse with No Name” all day. Underneath him, Hawkes refuses to allow the song to settle into soft rock, filling it with angular “ba-ba-ba-ba” synth patterns before one keyboard sound begins parping like a bloody tuba. Baker then piles Queen-like stacked vocals on top. It feels as though every member of the band asked Ocasek whether they could do something peculiar to his song and he shrugged, said “Yeah, whatever,” and let them get on with it. That generosity is central to the album. Ocasek supplies the songs and the public persona, but this never sounds like a frontman supported by anonymous musicians. Hawkes’ synthesizers frequently act as commentary from just outside the song. Easton plays nothing wildly groundbreaking, but repeatedly supplies exactly the right amount of American guitar muscle. Orr offers a warmer and more inviting alternative to Ocasek, while David Robinson keeps the whole machine taut and propulsive. Baker gives it scale, sheen and startling clarity, occasionally becoming too pleased with his own cleverness but generally understanding exactly what the band requires. The Cars does not alter the grammar of popular music like Bringing It All Back Home, nor does it sound astoundingly different in the manner of Remain in Light. It brings a new voice to American radio by absorbing power pop, art rock and New Wave into an identity so complete that the band seems unmistakable from its first few seconds. It is not earth-shattering or dramatically out of the ordinary. It is just a bloody good album, and bloody good albums are rarer than we like to think.

This one took some finding. Apple Music had plenty of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, but not this album. Spotify had hidden it as the second disc of _Love and Devotion_, with the final track unavailable. I eventually assembled the correct six tracks into a playlist, substituting the same performance of “Ni Main Jogi De Naal” under a slightly different title and with a hotter master. Nothing says spiritual enlightenment quite like catalogue administration. I had heard Nusrat before, back in the pre-streaming era, and “Allah Hoo Allah Hoo” was already lurking in my library. Even so, I began this listen conscious that I lacked fundamental access to the language, theology and conventions of qawwali. There is only so much attentive listening can compensate for when you cannot follow the poetry or recognise the associations carried by repeated names and phrases. What remained immediately available, however, was the music’s underlying method: repetition, call and response, and ecstatic build. “Allah Hoo Allah Hoo” initially feels slightly inaccessible and sacred. The rhythm is tightly locked and circular, while Nusrat stretches single syllables across long, winding runs and sends sudden cries above the communal chorus. Those cries are extraordinarily affecting: flashes of individual rapture breaking through collective discipline. The repetition does not feel static. Each return carries greater urgency until the track creates something close to a trance state. “Yaad-e-Nabi Gulshan Mehka” is more obviously melodic. It turns on a chord sequence that could sit quite comfortably inside a Western pop song, while the guitars bring light and air to the arrangement. Before learning what the title meant, I described the track as pastoral and said it had the freshness of a garden. It turns out the title itself evokes a fragrant garden, which was one of those startling moments when musical atmosphere seems to cross a linguistic barrier intact. There are moments when Nusrat seems to vanish into a mass of syllables, as though ordinary speech can no longer bear the intensity being placed upon it. The effect recalls glossolalia and other forms of ecstatic utterance, not because the traditions are interchangeable, but because language appears to give way under emotional pressure. Beckett achieved something related in _Not I_, driving language so hard and fast that meaning begins to spill beyond orderly speech. Nusrat’s singing is highly controlled musical virtuosity, but both evoke language reaching the edge of its usefulness. The ending of “Yaad-e-Nabi Gulshan Mehka” is lovely. The tempo slackens and the ensemble comes down in a slightly ramshackle coda, as though everyone has returned to the room relieved to find themselves emotionally intact. I could imagine laughter after the tape stopped. “Haq Ali Ali Haq” begins with Nusrat alone and seems unable to settle on a tempo. Gradually the pulse reveals itself and the performance begins to accelerate, almost imperceptibly at first. By the end, the intensity has become quite extraordinary. The track turns into a joyous circle of voices, claps and rhythm, and the fade catches it still spinning rather than bringing it to a conclusion. That circularity is central to the album. It develops vertically rather than narratively. The music does not necessarily travel through a succession of contrasting sections. Instead, it keeps returning to the same phrase and finding greater emotional weight inside it. “Ali Maula Ali Maula Ali Dam Dam” begins with a descending figure that briefly sounds almost Harrison-like, settles into a firm beat, flashes past something almost flamenco-like, changes tempo again and returns to call and response. The communal chorus is so direct and memorable that I found myself singing along almost immediately. The mechanism reminded me of Buddhist chanting and of a dervish performance I once witnessed. The theology is different in each case, but the bodily process has similarities: repeated phrase, regulated breathing, communal voice, narrowing attention and the point at which the performance begins to carry the participant. “Mast Nazron Se Allah Bachaye” shifts the emotional temperature. It is minor-key but jaunty, with nimble harmonium playing and bright guitar and mandolin. It feels less sacred, more upfront and more entertaining. I felt less as though I were being carried into ecstasy and more as though I were simply having a marvellous time. It would be tremendous music for drinks and nibbles, which is not a conclusion I expected to reach about a devotional album. The closing “Ni Main Jogi De Naal” is impossibly catchy. Its modal melody and quick strummed instruments brush against Greek and Celtic folk music in the ear. These traditions are not governed by identical rules, but they share ways of organising melody around tonal centres, ornament and repeated figures rather than constant harmonic progression. The loose handclaps against the nearly machine-like rhythm are especially joyous. They roughen the edges of the pulse and keep the precision human. The strummed instruments coalesce around the rhythm beautifully, while Nusrat launches into astounding ascending figures in which the melody climbs and the lyrics dissolve into spills of syllables. By this point I was lying with my eyes closed and smiling. The Generator’s current average of 2.59 is startlingly low, although aggregate scores combine attentive listening with bafflement, genre prejudice, drive-by ratings and assorted internet oddities. The subreddit itself often seems considerably more open-minded than the wider voting pool. This is precisely the sort of album for which facile listening fails. Repetition is not evidence that nothing is happening. It is the mechanism by which everything happens: the communal refrain tightens, the pulse accelerates, the voice grows freer, and recurrence becomes transformation. I still do not understand qawwali from inside its language or faith, but I discovered that I can be carried by it. More importantly, I now have an album I genuinely want to hear again, and a reason to go further into Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s work.

This is one of those albums that becomes so familiar, you stop hearing quite how strange it really is. It arrived in my life through the BBC in 1973, when I was nine years old, and has stayed with me ever since. What struck me this time was not simply how inventive it is, but how carefully that invention is organised. “Chameleon” is not built like a conventional jazz performance. There are no obvious signposts announcing the theme, the soloist or the return. Instead, the music mutates. One idea quietly becomes another until you have travelled a remarkable distance without quite noticing how you got there. It feels less like a planned American city than an old European one, where districts bleed into each other and functions overlap. It has several distinct musical neighbourhoods, but no zoning committee has erected signs between them. The band’s great trick is making this complexity feel effortless. The synthesiser occupies the bottom end while Paul Jackson’s bass frequently moves into a higher register. The clavinet assumes much of the role traditionally given to a guitar. Bennie Maupin’s reeds drift between melody, texture and atmosphere. Harvey Mason, meanwhile, produces one of the great understated drum performances. His fills are tiny, beautifully judged interventions, sometimes almost resembling momentary stumbles, yet they never disturb the groove. Hancock’s synthesiser playing is equally physical. He is not merely playing notes on a keyboard with an unusual sound. He bends pitch, alters timbre and manipulates the instrument while playing it. The synthesiser becomes something pliable and expressive rather than a novelty machine. “Watermelon Man” perfectly embodies the album’s central idea: discovery. Hancock does not simply update one of his own compositions. He rediscovers it, almost as though asking what it might sound like if it were new to him. Bill Summers’ bottle introduction, derived from Ba-Benzélé music, immediately changes the frame through which the familiar melody is heard. Nothing on this record is treated as fixed. Everything is available for reinvention. Then comes “Sly”, which feels less like an imitation of Sly Stone than a tribute to the fertility of his imagination by attempting to become even more fertile. The final minute is extraordinary: cosmic, exuberant and forever threatening to fly apart without ever losing its balance. It reminded me of Phyllida Barlow’s sculpture dock, which I saw at Tate Britain. It was ramshackle yet composed, full of energy and apparently unpredictable mess. Both works provoke the same question: how on earth is this still standing? The answer is that the disorder is not accidental. It is composed unpredictability. The recording method helps explain that balance. This is not a purist jazz document in which the studio merely captures a performance, but nor is it an aggressively cut-and-spliced construction in the manner of Teo Macero’s work with Miles Davis. The core performances remain performances. Their long developments and gradual mutations are played rather than manufactured with a razor blade. What Hancock and producer David Rubinson then do is closer to the methodology of a rock, soul or funk record: overdubbing, layering and embellishing the basic performance until it becomes the finished record. The musical language is jazz, but the production language is rock. The studio does not replace the band or reconstruct it into something painterly. It reinforces and colours what the musicians have already discovered together. The emotional surprise comes with “Vein Melter”. Up to this point, the album has been driven by joy, curiosity and invention. Suddenly those impulses stop. The music becomes controlled, grieving and deeply respectful. It says, in effect: enough dicking around. This is the time for respect. But they would not want us to stop playing. The piece is three things simultaneously. It evokes the opiate state, from the shock of the syringe to the peacefulness afterwards. It is a requiem for a friend lost to heroin. And those two things together perform the critique. Hancock does not moralise or interrupt the music to explain that heroin is destructive. He allows you to experience its seductive tranquillity while making that tranquillity inseparable from the death it caused. Harvey Mason’s repeated snare rolls are especially moving. They are beautifully funereal, almost processional, less dramatic than dignified. They do not announce grief. They accompany it. That gives the album an elegant three-act structure. “Chameleon” and “Watermelon Man” form an act of discovery. “Sly” turns discovery into boundless imagination. “Vein Melter” introduces responsibility, remembrance and compassion. The answer to grief is not silence. It is playing with purpose. Listening again after all these years, I realised that Head Hunters has been listening to different versions of me for more than half a century. As a child, I heard excitement and possibility. Today I hear architecture, sculpture, grief and moral restraint. Some albums survive because they are timeless. Others survive because they are large enough to contain the different people we become. Head Hunters is one of the latter.

This is what happens when a rock band stops treating guitars as instruments and starts treating them as systems. Sonic Youth’s alternate tunings are often described as though they were simply a route to strangeness, a way of making the familiar sound wrong. That undersells what is happening here. The tunings are not decoration. They are not an effect applied to otherwise conventional songs. They are the foundations of an entirely different musical architecture, one in which every string, fret, amplifier and speaker becomes part of a negotiated system. The electric guitar is already an imperfect instrument. What is in tune at the twelfth fret is almost never quite in tune at the nut. The bridge can be adjusted for upper-fret gymnastics or for stable open chords, but not perfectly for both. Rhythm guitar and lead guitar are, in that sense, minutely different instruments. Every setup is a compromise involving string length, tension, action, pressure and temperament. Sonic Youth do not try to eliminate those instabilities. They compose with them. That is why the dissonance on _Daydream Nation_ has such physical presence. When two notes sit fractionally against one another, the amplifier brings out the beating between them. The sound does not merely shimmer. It pulses, grinds, brightens and roughens according to the frequencies colliding inside it. The guitar is not simply producing a note; it is entering into a relationship with its wiring, the amplifier and the room. Anybody can make noise with an electric guitar. The difficult part is deciding which noises belong together. Sonic Youth approach that problem with something close to conservatoire-level rigour in wraparound shades. Their music may present itself as insolent, casual and half-disassembled, but the thinking behind it is painstaking. These songs often sound like freakouts. They are not. “Teen Age Riot” begins by disguising the scale of the album’s ambition. Its opening has some of the looseness and brightness people associate with C86, perhaps closer to the idea of C86 than much of the actual music, before the band begins widening the frame. The guitars ring and overlap rather than falling neatly into rhythm and lead roles. From the outset, the music seems less concerned with a single dominant line than with the behaviour of several lines occupying the same space. “Silver Rocket” makes the method more explicit. Its groove feels almost like a sample sliced slightly incorrectly, repeating with a small internal lurch. Then the song appears to dissolve into pure feedback, only to re-emerge from the noise with its structure intact. That return is the point. Sonic Youth have not abandoned the song. They have stretched its boundaries until it appears to have disappeared, then shown that the underlying system was still operating all along. “The Sprawl” takes that principle and turns it into an environment. Kim Gordon’s vocal inhabits the track rather than commanding it, while the guitars move through long, circular patterns that seem to contain their own weather. There is no obvious moment when the song becomes expansive. It simply keeps accumulating space until you realise that you are no longer listening to a sequence of sections. You are inside an ecology. That is where _Daydream Nation_ begins to resemble something like “Sly” from Herbie Hancock’s _Head Hunters_. The records sound nothing alike, but both understand that repetition can create depth rather than stasis. A groove becomes a habitat. Duration allows details to move between foreground and background. The music is not merely travelling through time; it is building a place in which time behaves differently. This is also where the influence of Glenn Branca and No Wave becomes most apparent, particularly on “‘Cross the Breeze”. Its opening is not so much an introduction as an overture, announcing the harmonic forces that the rest of the track will set against one another. The song is both impressionistic and expressionistic. It evokes an atmosphere while simultaneously deforming it through pressure. Yet even at its most abrasive, it remains organised. The violence is architectural. Lee Ranaldo’s songs add another dimension. “Eric’s Trip” and “Hey Joni” feel like skewed reportage, dispatches from the chemically altered front. The lyrics do not explain experience so much as preserve its distortions. Details arrive with the blunt specificity of documentary, but their relationships have been unsettled. It recalls the Velvet Underground’s street-level observation, although Sonic Youth widen the field. The Velvet Underground often sound as though they are reporting from one room or one street corner. Sonic Youth can make the whole city block seem audible at once. The result is music that evokes the organised chaos of a city. Every instrument seems to inhabit its own street, rhythm and purpose, yet everything coexists within a coherent whole. Traffic flows. Trains arrive. Conversations cross. Buildings impose geometry. Sirens and engines introduce frequencies nobody has asked for. None of these systems is controlled by a single conductor, but together they produce the identity of the place. Steve Shelley is crucial to that effect. His drumming is not merely a foundation beneath the guitar experiments. It is the transport network that allows them to happen. On “Rain King” his toms produce a thunderous gallop, less a tidy rock beat than a dubbadubbadubbadubba surge that drives the music forward. Elsewhere he provides the steady momentum that permits the guitars to scrape, hover, diverge and interfere without the songs losing all sense of direction. That tension between disintegration and song is one of the album’s greatest pleasures. “Candle” begins with deceptive jangle, then opens into driving dissonance. “Total Trash” initially appears almost conventional, but its repetition gradually becomes a study in time and tuning deconstruction, like leaving an arpeggiator running while somebody quietly interferes with its intonation. Even when the music approaches abstraction, it never quite abandons song structure. God knows it threatens it. Kim Gordon’s “Kissability” brings the same method to satire. She throws the language of flattery and seduction back at the men who use it, delivering the words with a coolness that makes them sound faintly predatory and absurd. The music gives her exactly the right setting: high-register jangle, angular scrape and another tom-driven gallop. It is confrontational without becoming didactic, funny without losing its hostility. By the time the closing _Trilogy_ arrives, the album has established its full vocabulary. “The Wonder”, “Hyperstation” and “Eliminator Jr.” do not feel like three bonus pieces added to an already long record. They are the thesis of the album writ large. The guitars intermesh with almost orchestral density, individual parts remaining audible while the total sound exceeds anything one musician appears to be doing. “Hyperstation” in particular feels less like a destination than an interchange, a place where routes cross and continue elsewhere. The trilogy gathers everything that has come before: alternate tunings, harmonic beating, urban density, skewed reportage, tom-driven momentum, controlled collapse and the refusal to distinguish cleanly between song and experiment. It does not summarise those ideas politely. It allows them to operate at full scale. By the end, I was no longer hearing riffs or solos so much as relationships: between strings, tunings, amplifiers, players and space. The album had quietly recalibrated my ears. What initially sounded like angular guitar music revealed itself as something much more ambitious, an exercise in emergence where complexity arises not from virtuosity but from interaction. Every part is intelligible on its own; the real music happens between them. That is why _Daydream Nation_ feels less like a collection of songs than a model of how independent systems can coexist without surrendering their identity. It is intellectually exhilarating and frequently beautiful. I never quite crossed the final threshold from admiration into love, and that is the only reason it remains a four-star record rather than a five-star one.

Rod Stewart annoys me. Partly because he spent much of the 1980s looking like a boozy lech upholstered in leopard print. More seriously, because Every Picture Tells A Story proves that beneath the hair and trousers was a musician of enormous intelligence: singer, producer, arranger, songwriter, interpreter and expert judge of when other people should enter the room. The album’s defining quality is unshowy virtuosity in the service of social warmth. Its players possess frightening ability, but nobody uses technique to establish hierarchy. They use it to make the room more habitable. You can hear the beer being spilled. It is being spilled on cue. The title track establishes the method, travelling from a solitary acoustic guitar in the left channel to an enormous rowdy mess through accretion. Rod’s narrative phrases have irregular dimensions, the pulse keeps shifting and there is no proper chorus until everybody discovers the title at the end. Micky Waller’s drumming is magnificent. His kit has just enough room around it to be genuinely alive, and he doesn’t stabilise the performance so much as weaponise its instability. It sounds close to falling downstairs while Waller decides which stair everybody will land on. Then Maggie Bell arrives. The conventional arrangement would add sweetness or contrast; Rod adds more of the same. Another torn, blues-saturated voice makes him plural and turns private narration into public uproar. The sleeve calls the backing singers “vocal abrasives,” which is unusually accurate. This should not work. It works magnificently. “Seems Like a Long Time” reveals that the album’s companionability is not merely about having fun. Yes, wars end, nights become mornings and bad times pass. That knowledge is no comfort while you are trapped inside them. “This too shall pass” jumps from suffering to recovery, but somebody must still make the hellish interval bearable. Don’t merely point to the other side; make the bridge weight-bearing. That is what the gospel arrangement does. The supporting voices do not sing Rod’s suffering away; they gather around him and make the waiting survivable. Rod makes this recent Theodore Anderson song sound fifty years old. He repeatedly forges provenance: new material emerges sounding as though several generations have already needed it. “That’s All Right” makes the pub-session quality explicit. Sam Mitchell’s slide guitar rambles towards a song it appears not to recognise, with little interest in recreating Elvis. Pete Sears’s piano sounds as though it is being poured downstairs from a bucket. Then the performance falls into “Amazing Grace,” and the album suddenly acquires moral seriousness. Rod does not milk it. The pub becomes a congregation without anybody announcing that church has begun. Mitchell bosses the transition, but Rod’s arrangement understands that the change of material carries enough drama. The music gets simpler rather than larger. “Tomorrow Is a Long Time” proves the same point through restraint. Rod resists the temptation to cover Dylan and teases out the song underneath. No impersonation, strangulation or grandstanding. It arrives, establishes its emotional weather and leaves. I would call it good enough without snobbery. Albums need breathing spaces. Shelves do not require breathtaking filigree; they need to be level and capable of holding the books. Side two begins with Martin Quittenton’s “Henry,” thirty seconds of counterfeit English folk that everybody knows without knowing they know. The album invents a folk memory, then enters a song about a man trying to understand a memory of his own. “Maggie May” is sonically peculiar: compressed, boxy and concentrated in the middle. But that boxiness is made for 247 metres, Wonderful Radio One. Its important information sits where a kitchen transistor can reproduce it. I can hear Tony Blackburn arriving after the final chord with “…aaand good morning!” When somebody heard it on the radio and bought the single, that strange midrange preserved the original Oh, I like thatmoment. No surprise it escaped the clutches of its designated A-side, “Reason to Believe,” and became the radio single. Its single-ness was discovered through transmission. Lyrically, it is odd hit material: wistful, damaged and unresolved. The narrator is angry, grateful, boastful, humiliated and affectionate. Ronnie Wood’s guitar solo is as stumblingly unreliable as the narrator, while Pete Sears’s celesta places a trace of childhood inside the adult grievance. Then Ray Jackson’s mandolin emerges from the compressed middle like sunlight from behind clouds. Nothing has been resolved, but the memory becomes beautiful. In a sparkling mix, the mandolin would be decoration. Here it is sunlight the record has earned by remaining overcast. “Mandolin Wind” is where Rod becomes actively infuriating. It is a tremendous composition, written by Stewart alone. He constructs an entire relationship through weather, work and endurance. Love is not declared; it is demonstrated by somebody remaining when remaining is materially difficult. The music bears the same burden, beginning exposed, acquiring shelter instrument by instrument and rising into electric force without ceasing to be a folk ballad. This is also where Ronnie Wood’s extended audition for the Rolling Stones becomes obvious. The song could grace Sticky Fingers. Wood knows how to enter a ballad without violating it and make it rock while preserving its vulnerability. He doesn’t merely play alongside people; he plays with people. He reads the room, reinforces singers and makes performance feel like conspiracy. A social Stone in waiting. Rod wrote “Mandolin Wind” alone. This annoys me further. You cannot excuse the leopard-printed twat by claiming he lacked depth or judgement. The profound interpreter and the pillock are simultaneous operating systems. Then “(I Know) I’m Losing You” arrives and the album develops muscles. The full Faces translate the Temptations onto a British football terrace. Kenney Jones supplies the stomp of boots, Ronnie Lane gives the chant physical insistence, and Wood and Ian McLagan create the sensation of bodies accumulating behind Rod. Anything might break out: a singalong, fight, embrace or pitch invasion. The performance remains soul because terrace singing, gospel and Motown share a mechanism. One voice makes private feeling public; the crowd returns it as force. Its coda doesn’t conclude; it leaves evidence that an event occurred. It has the What the hell just happened? quality of the Beatles’ “Long, Long, Long.” The Beatles leave us in a dark room where something has begun vibrating by itself. The Faces leave us on a terrace after the chant has disintegrated, unsure whether the crowd is dispersing or something worse is beginning. Finally, “Reason to Believe” returns us to the pub band at last orders. Pete Sears’s piano, McLagan’s organ and Danny Thompson’s double bass make the players feel gathered rather than professionally assembled. There is a false ending at which somebody surely always claps. Rod returns alone and allows the ensemble to reform around him, casting both spotlight and hat around the room before the landlord calls time. The emotional problem remains unresolved; the social occasion has simply ended. This is one of the most companionable albums I have evaluated. Blues, gospel, folk, country, soul and rock are not displayed as influences; they behave like shared social languages. Leave space. Listen. Enter when useful. Carry weight without advertising the effort. Stay through the difficult interval. Pub, football, music: possibly the best distillation of that British social trinity. Rowdy without being emotionally mute, accomplished without becoming hierarchical, sentimental without requiring everybody to stop taking the piss. Tony Parsons chose this as his favourite British album. My aesthetic is different: my pinnacle remains four Scousers and a former Fleet Air Arm man turning the studio into a playbox. But Parsons’s choice is entirely defensible. The Beatles turn virtuosity into play. Sonic Youth turn it into research. Rod Stewart and company turn it into hospitality. It may be the finest British album of its particular social type. And the leopard-printed twat made it.

London Calling is what happens when a garrulous band is finally given enough room to finish a sentence. The Clash had already made a wonderfully rough and urgent debut, but they were never going to remain confined by punk’s approved vocabulary. Here, the band becomes a bucket for everything its members are hearing, reading, watching and arguing about. Reggae, rockabilly, soul, ska, funk, pop, cinema, advertising, policing, war, consumerism and romantic disappointment are all thrown in together. This should sound like an identity crisis. Instead, it sounds unmistakably like The Clash. The record’s unity comes from personality rather than style. Joe Strummer’s moral urgency, Mick Jones’s pop instincts, Paul Simonon’s absorption of Jamaican music and Topper Headon’s understanding of groove remain constant while the scenery changes. They do not imitate genres so much as pull them into their orbit. It is an immensely Ladbroke Grove album, from before Ladbroke Grove became posh: culturally mixed, politically restless and uninterested in musicological boundaries of race or ethnicity. Reggae is not treated as an exotic diversion from proper rock music. Rockabilly is not approached as a museum exhibit. The Clash behave as though all these traditions naturally belong in the same neighbourhood because, in their London, they did. That openness is as important to the album’s politics as any lyric. The Clash are not simply describing a different society; they are demonstrating one through the music they choose to play. Politics is not enough. Culture follows. Free your mind and your arse will follow. The deeper thread running through the record is integrity. Again and again, it examines the bargains people make with the world. Consumer culture offers a personality. Employment offers security. Institutions offer purpose. Authority offers certainty. Promiscuity offers freedom. Rebellion offers glory. The question is always what must be surrendered in return—and who pays when the bargain fails. This is where the album becomes more than a collection of political positions. It is suspicious not only of governments, employers, police and advertisers, but of the ways people internalise power and reproduce it themselves. The rebel can become a domestic tyrant. The radical can grow comfortable. The person who once resisted authority can begin enforcing its assumptions upon everyone else. You grow up and you get Foucault. Or, less academically, you grow up and you get fuck all. The Clash do not exempt themselves from this scrutiny. They are already aware of becoming a successful rock institution, complete with mythology, appetites and expectations. Their self-mockery matters because it prevents the album becoming a sermon. They are willing to ask whether they are being absorbed by the same machinery they criticise. For all the talk of apocalypse and the nation state, however, The Clash never forget their actual job: entertainment. London Calling is funny, melodic, physical and frequently joyous. Its politics work because the band understands that pleasure is not a distraction from culture. It is one of the ways culture operates. That is why the album’s sprawl feels generous rather than self-indulgent. The old claim that every double album ought to have been a single one is largely a circular argument imposed by the capacity of slabs of black plastic. Why should forty minutes represent the natural length of an artistic statement? Because that was approximately what fitted on an LP. This record lasts around sixty-five minutes. In the streaming era, nobody would consider that remarkable. The Clash also fought to prevent their audience being charged the usual double-album price. They had more music to offer and did not believe listeners should be financially penalised for hearing it. So let them speak. London Calling is not a perfectly ordered manifesto and would be diminished if forced into becoming one. It is a transmission from a band with too much curiosity to stay in its lane and too much personality to disappear inside its influences. Tune in. They have plenty to say.

Santana are one of those bands it would be difficult to invent from first principles. A blues guitarist with a warm, blooming tone, an organist rooted in garage psychedelia and soul, and a rhythm section built around Afro-Cuban percussion: Tito Puente meets The Doors. It sounds like a formula assembled by somebody in a record-company office, yet Abraxas never sounds assembled. Its various musical languages have become so completely integrated that the joins disappear. That is why this works when so much nominally ambitious rock leaves me cold. The music is harmonically rich, rhythmically intricate and frequently virtuosic, but its complexity never points back at itself demanding admiration. “Incident at Neshabur” has the structure of jazz—establish a groove, then move the spotlight—along with gorgeous polychords, abrupt changes of mood and several distinct instrumental voices. Yet it remains physical music. The Cuban polyrhythms keep all that harmonic sophistication attached to the body. If this were prog, I would probably be losing patience; Santana never forget that intelligence is there to deepen the experience, not become the experience. The central tension is between Carlos Santana and Gregg Rolie. Carlos pulls the band towards modal harmony, Afro-Cuban rhythm and an almost devotional kind of instrumental expression. Rolie brings Hammond organ, blues rock, garage psychedelia and direct songs such as “Mother’s Daughter” and “Hope You’re Feeling Better”. Those tracks are the least Latin things here, and the latter sounds like four minutes spent inside the Fillmore West: one can smell the patchouli and visualise the oil wheel. The two sides of the band do not always blend evenly, but they appear entirely at home with the contradiction. The record gains strength by being able to move between them. Holding it all together is an extraordinary rhythm section. The percussionists do not insist on turning every composition into a Latin showcase. They serve the song. On “Oye Como Va” they create that timeless lope over the simple but endlessly fertile Am7–D7 vamp. On “Se a Cabo” they drive a psychedelic rush with congas and timbales, packing an improbable amount of movement into two minutes and fifty-four seconds. On “Samba Pa Ti” they loosen almost completely, establishing a pulse and allowing Carlos to ramble freely across it. Even on Rolie’s rock songs, the congas and timbales simply do rock things because that is what the music requires. Carlos himself is less a conventional guitar hero than B.B. King placed inside Cuban rhythms. The fingers can move quickly, but speed never displaces expression. His sound is lazy, warm and saturated rather than fully distorted; each note arrives, blooms and is allowed to finish speaking. The segue from Peter Green’s “Black Magic Woman” into Gábor Szabó’s “Gypsy Queen” is masterful. The tempo tightens, the percussion gathers force and British blues turns almost imperceptibly into a psychedelic rush transposed to Havana. “Samba Pa Ti” takes that vocal quality furthest. The guitar phrases keep tumbling into one another until the music reaches something close to ecstasy. It reminded me, perhaps perversely, of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan—not stylistically, but in the way a melodic line can keep flowering until technique is overtaken by expression. The track lasts nearly five minutes and simply comes and goes. “Se a Cabo”, almost two minutes shorter, seems to contain an entire evening. Abraxas repeatedly bends experienced time because the musicians know when to inhabit an idea and when to leave it alone. The album begins with “Singing Winds, Crying Beasts”, a shimmering overture that introduces its world before Carlos enters, and ends with the 88-second “El Nicoya”, giving the percussion section one final spotlight before everyone departs. That framing feels appropriate. Abraxas may carry one guitarist’s name, but it is not the work of a star and his accompanists. It is a locked, democratic band discovering what happens when blues, jazz, psychedelia and Afro-Cuban rhythm stop behaving like separate genres. I might have found all this oppressively patchouli-scented a few years ago. Now I simply take it as it comes, man.

This is one of those albums whose significance outweighs its reputation. It isn’t the finished psychedelic article that Surrealistic Pillow or Forever Changes would become. It is something more revealing: a record made while psychedelia was still discovering what psychedelia could be. You can hear older musical languages being bent into new shapes. “Love” draws on the organ-driven, white-boy soul groove of the Beatles’ “The Word”, while the wandering blues guitar belongs to the same transitional vocabulary as early Jefferson Airplane. Country Joe & the Fish have not abandoned folk, blues or R&B; acid has simply caused those forms to behave differently. Grooves become incantations, instrumental passages become environments, and songs follow an idea because it seems interesting rather than because conventional structure demands it. The record also speaks from inside the emerging San Francisco counterculture rather than explaining it to outsiders. Drug references move from implication to complete openness. By “Bass Strings”, LSD is not a coded subject or a daring metaphor but part of the community’s ordinary vocabulary, whispered at the end as though the listener is already in on the conversation. For an American teenager in 1967, this must have offered exactly what good youth music often provides: a language that parents could hear but not fully understand. “Section 43” is the album’s great achievement, seven minutes of organ, texture and atmosphere that feels like one of psychedelic rock’s foundational instrumental texts. It is not merely a blues jam with some unusual decoration. The band are trying to reproduce altered consciousness through sound, anticipating both early Pink Floyd and the exploratory side of Jefferson Airplane without having an established model to follow. It is like watching someone write the manual while simultaneously testing the machine. That freedom also produces “The Masked Marauder”, a cheerfully batshit piece that abruptly becomes a waltz while Country Joe sings “la-la-la”. Searching for deep symbolic meaning rather misses the point. Psychedelia was not only revelation and mysticism; it was permission to experiment, to follow associations and to keep an idea simply because it amused everyone in the room. The song has the playful illogic of Syd Barrett, translated from English nursery rooms into American cowboy serials. The closing “Grace” shows another possible future. Its doubled vocals, gently jangling guitar and inevitable wind chimes create an impressionistic portrait of the early psychedelic uprush. It reads like a love song, but possibly in the same way that “Got to Get You Into My Life” does: romantic vocabulary redirected towards intoxication and altered perception. Rather than telling us about the experience, the music attempts to recreate its bloom and afterglow. The album is scruffy, uneven and occasionally ridiculous. That is part of its value. Later psychedelic records would refine this vocabulary, polish it and turn it into a recognisable genre. Country Joe & the Fish sound as though they have opened a manual explaining how psychedelic music works — except no such manual existed. They were writing it.

Some albums sound simple because they are simple. The La’s sounds simple because an extraordinary amount of imagination and judgement has been used to make it feel inevitable. The songs seem to have been whistled into existence: eminently singable, apparently performable and almost impossible to improve. The prohibitive factor is not musicianship. Plenty of decent players could reproduce the notes. The difficulty lies in having thought of them. That distinction runs through the entire record. The guitars rarely do anything conventionally spectacular, yet they constantly interlock, answer and reshape one another. Acoustic and electric parts mesh so closely that removing any one of them leaves the song perceptibly diminished. “There She Goes” survives perfectly well on one acoustic guitar, but the joy of the record lies in its wildly organised campfire arrangement: the chiming figures, the rhythmic lift and the understated ensemble performance captured by Steve Lillywhite. The same meticulousness is everywhere. “Son of a Gun” has spectral harmonies that deepen an otherwise beautifully direct song. “I Can’t Sleep” uses overlapping voices and a perfectly placed tom thump to give depressive insomnia physical shape. “Dole Drum” turns economic precarity into a jangling dockside blues, complete with resonator guitar, remarkable percussion and a slowdown in which the voices briefly become the arrangement. These are not virtuoso displays. They are acts of virtuoso judgement. Lee Mavers’ lyrics work on several levels at once. They contain recognisable subjects — sleeplessness, escape, dependence, failure, the grinder of making do — but they also function musically. A phrase may remain elusive as prose while being exactly the right set of syllables at that point in the melody. Meaning matters, but so do vowel, consonant, attack and rhythm. The words are part of the percussion. The result is an album that is as obtrusive as the listener wants it to be. It can remain a collection of irresistible, compact guitar songs, or it can reward close attention to every harmony, drum accent and exchange between instruments. Its apparent simplicity is an invitation rather than a limitation. It also occupies a fascinating position in British pop. Behind it are Merseybeat, folk song, the Kinks’ more introspective moments, XTC’s ability to disguise sophistication as pop and Liverpool post-punk. “Liberty Ship” could almost be an Andy Partridge song, while its loping psychedelia anticipates The Coral. The attack and eventual dissolution of “Looking Glass” recall Echo & the Bunnymen’s “Happy Death Men”. This is not revivalism. It is a wonderfully economical form of Merseydelia, built from an entire local and national musical memory. Its shadow falls just as heavily forward. Noel Gallagher must have heard permission to trust a melody absolutely, while Richard Ashcroft heard permission to let repetition become introspection and transcendence. The spacious final passage of “Looking Glass” contains the germ of “Champagne Supernova” and some of The Verve’s more contemplative psychedelia. Oasis made the scale larger, The Verve made it more expansive and The Coral made it stranger, but The La’s had already demonstrated the possibilities. “Looking Glass” is a wonderfully odd way to finish. After half an hour of breathless, economical pop, the album finally sprawls. Mavers enters firm singer-songwriter territory, although it is a kind of singer-songwriter music that could not really have existed before punk and post-punk had stripped away the entitlement to indulgence. The guitars accelerate into a reverb-bathed freakout and the record seems to disappear rather than conclude. It feels as though Mavers is slowly backing out of the room: we can do length if we want to. Goodbye. For all Mavers’ dissatisfaction, Lillywhite captured something remarkably complete: a well-rehearsed band playing with enough space to expose the performance underneath, every texture audible and every choice serving the song. The La’s remains one of British pop’s great simple objects of depth — thirty-five minutes of music whose craft is so thoroughly absorbed that it sounds like nature.

You can hear the room before you fully hear the record. A thousand men are listening—not merely waiting for an excuse to cheer, but absorbing every word—and their bodies become part of the acoustics. The band sounds close, dry and surrounded; even the audience’s silence has a sound. Then Cash tears into “Folsom Prison Blues” at a terrific clip and the whole place comes alive. From there, At Folsom Prison is 45 minutes of barely contained joy. “Cocaine Blues” turns murder, flight and a 99-year sentence into a back-of-the-bus singalong. “25 Minutes to Go” makes execution into black comedy without lessening its horror. “Orange Blossom Special” sends a train rattling through the mess hall, with W.S. Holland’s broken press rolls hammering the rail joints beneath Cash’s harmonica. The band continually sounds as though it might leave the tracks while quietly ensuring it never does. This is a gloriously ragged performance. Cash forgets lines, laughs at himself and carries on. During “Long Black Veil”, his low E is somewhere around D-and-three-quarters, but stopping to retune would be the least musical thing he could do. The tuning is wrong; the performance is right. Cash understands the troubadour’s hierarchy: the guitar serves the voice, the voice serves the story and the story serves the truth. That truth does not require relentless solemnity. Cash announces “a couple of love songs” and gives the prisoners “Dirty Old Egg-Sucking Dog” and “Flushed from the Bathroom of Your Heart”. It is barrack-room humour: coarse, childish, sociable and perfectly judged. He does not patronise the men with an evening of worthy songs explaining imprisonment to them. He treats them as an audience to entertain. The jokes make the sentiment hit harder. “Send a Picture of Mother” is pure prison corn—home, shame, separation and the sacred maternal photograph—but Cash’s plainness saves it. Prison confiscates not only liberty but rooms, routines, family and horizon. I once knew a young man who, after coming out, spent his days pushing his son around Pontefract because he said he had never been able to look at the sky. He was not walking anywhere in particular. He was exercising the freedom to keep moving beneath it. Then June Carter arrives for “Jackson” and throws open every window in the place. The studio recording is a polished artefact; here, Johnny and June set fire to the song for sport. She almost cackles her replies, he urges her further, and the band hangs on behind them while both singers enjoy the quarrel slightly too much. It is raw, flirtatious and fractionally overexcited. The enjoyment is the performance. That tremendous reception seems to settle Cash. On “Give My Love to Rose”, his voice may be at its best on the album: deep, rounded and wonderfully sonorous. He stops pushing and simply tells the story. “I Got Stripes” follows as another cracking communal performance, ending with an inspired plunge into the depths of his bass register, as though a trapdoor has opened beneath the song. “Green, Green Grass of Home” is easy to murder. I know this from having performed a fucking dreadful version on a Casio VL-Tone in the Bretton Hall bar as interval entertainment for Mark Gatiss and Steve Pemberton. Cash’s slow country swing restores it to what it is: not a sentimental homecoming with a clever twist, but a condemned prisoner dreaming of freedom. There can be no better room in which to sing it. Finally, Cash introduces “Greystone Chapel”, written by Folsom inmate Glen Sherley, who is sitting in the audience unaware that his song is about to be performed. The room understands the magnitude of hearing one of its own named and honoured. It is also a superb country song, worked into a convincing full-band arrangement at extraordinary speed. Knowing the sadness of Sherley’s later life complicates the moment, but cannot diminish it. For those few minutes, redemption sounds possible. Yes, the album was constructed from two performances. All live albums are constructed. The question is whether the editing manufactures excitement or concentrates something that genuinely happened, and no producer invented this room. The prison announcements, cracked notes, fluffed words, laughter and terrible tuning all belong to the event. When the concert ends, the tape continues running and prison administration resumes. Cash can leave; his audience returns to instructions, numbers and confinement. Jerry Lee Lewis at the Star Club sets fire to the room. Johnny Cash at Folsom learns how to play the room itself. Five stars, and possibly the second-best live album ever recorded. Play loud.

There are albums that announce themselves as masterpieces, and there are albums that simply get on with the job. C’est Chic belongs firmly in the second category. The sleeve even lists the tracks on the front, as though Chic weren’t entirely convinced anyone would notice them otherwise. The irony is that this quietly confident record has become one of the defining statements of disco. What struck me most is how purposeful everything is. This isn’t disco minimalism; it’s disco with purpose. Strings, horns, keyboards, guitar, percussion and vocals all have clearly defined roles, but none of them are there simply because late-’70s disco was supposed to sound lush. Every part earns its place. Forty-two minutes of purpose. The opening “Chic Cheer” is an intriguing piece of sequencing. It doesn’t try to overwhelm you. Instead it introduces the Chic Organisation almost from first principles, patiently laying out the ingredients before “Le Freak” arrives and turns them into one of the great dance records. The famous backstory is well known, but what’s remarkable is the generosity of the finished song. Rather than dwelling on the insult of being turned away from Studio 54, Rodgers and Edwards create the soundtrack that would become inseparable from the club itself. The interlopers colonise. I’d forgotten just how astonishing “Le Freak” really is. That rising figure in the middle section has the psychological effect of a Shepard tone, creating the illusion of endless ascent. It remains one of the most hypnotic passages in music, not simply disco. The song doesn’t tell you how to dance; it simply makes standing still seem irrational. “Savoir Faire” is the album’s one moment of, “Oh, by the way, we can really play.” The syncopation continually wrong-foots the ear. I found myself counting it through several times, convinced the bar must have shifted, only to discover it remained stubbornly in 4/4. It feels almost like Chic answering every lazy criticism ever levelled at disco musicians. The clever part is that they make their point once and move on. Even their brief flirtation with showing off refuses to outstay its welcome. Nile Rodgers’ rhythm guitar is extraordinary throughout. Listening closely, you realise that much of his brilliance lies in placement rather than complexity. On “I Want Your Love” his guitar and the keyboard pads become so integrated that they effectively function as a single instrument, only for him to emerge from the texture with a beautifully judged shift in register. Bernard Edwards is equally remarkable, particularly in his ability to know exactly what not to play. Sometimes the most memorable bass line is the one that steps aside. The second half of the record quietly dismantles another misconception about Chic. Alfa Anderson’s vocal on “At Last I Am Free” is so understated that it almost disappears into the arrangement. Bernard Edwards’ singing on “Happy Man” and “Sometimes You Win” has the same conversational quality. Nobody oversells the material. The emotion comes from observation rather than performance, and the album is all the stronger for trusting the listener. Even the closer, “(Funny) Bone”, feels exactly right. It has the easy confidence of one of those great Philly soul instrumentals that could happily soundtrack the end credits of Soul Train. It doesn’t attempt one final statement because the album has already said everything it needed to. The greatest compliment I can pay C’est Chic is that it ended about ten minutes too soon. In an era where so many records mistake duration for importance, Chic understand something much rarer: knowing when you’ve made your point.

I suspect this album’s reputation owes as much to timing as to music. After a decade of deconstructing themselves through Achtung Baby, Zooropa and Pop, U2 blinked. All That You Can’t Leave Behind isn’t the next chapter. It’s the band putting the old clothes back on and discovering they still fit. That doesn’t make it a bad album. It makes it a remarkably successful act of artistic retreat. The interesting thing is that the 1990s haven’t vanished. Larry Mullen Jr. has clearly absorbed breakbeats and loop culture, his drumming full of ghost notes and restless internal movement. The Edge occasionally swaps canyon-wide delay for repeated ostinati that think more like Eno than stadium rock. Tracks like “Elevation” genuinely integrate those lessons, producing a nagging, melodically unresolved groove that’s the most interesting thing on the record. Everywhere else, though, the lessons of the previous decade are mostly cosmetic. Underneath sits the original product: broad emotional uplift, chiming guitars, private feelings inflated into public ceremony, and Bono once again standing on the metaphorical cliff edge while the wind machine does its work. The surprise is Bono himself. I’d expected peak Messianic Bono. Instead, he repeatedly resists the temptation. “Peace On Earth” spends its entire running time threatening to become unbearable, only to pull back every single time. “When I Look At The World” avoids the obvious soaring climax in favour of a restrained vocal crack that says far more than another stadium note would have. The Bono who emerges is chastened rather than triumphant. Less prophet, more flawed preacher. Ironically, the album gets better as it becomes less important. “Wild Honey” ditches the iconography completely. The rough harmonies are less Everly Brothers than Please Please Me, sounding like people singing around a beach fire rather than saving civilisation. “New York” is a curious sketchbook whose chorus contributes almost nothing except repeatedly informing us where we are. (“Where are we again, Bono?” “NEW YORK!”) It shouldn’t work, but somehow does, because the verses are conversational rather than rhetorical. Listening in 2026, “New York” has acquired a melancholy the band could never have intended. It comes from the last confident New York before history intervened. The city that never slept became, for a while, the city that couldn’t. What frustrates me most is not that U2 became conservative. It’s that they became so extraordinarily good at it. This album knows exactly how to be U2. Every emotional beat has been tested. Every arrangement knows where it’s heading. Every gesture lands precisely where millions of listeners wanted it to land. The result is a record that communicates brilliantly while discovering almost nothing. That’s why I’d take the gloriously awkward failures of Kevin Rowland’s Don’t Stand Me Down or My Beauty over this every time. Those albums risk careers in pursuit of ideas. All That You Can’t Leave Behind risks almost nothing except disappointing fans by not sounding enough like classic U2—and it solves that problem by becoming classic U2 again. The final irony is that the album’s finest moments are the ones where it briefly forgets its own mission. When Bono stops preaching. When the harmonies get scruffy. When the drums think like breakbeats. When The Edge loops instead of echoing. When the band simply sounds like four musicians rather than a global institution. An enormously successful day at the office. A commercially flawless restoration. And a retreat into certainty after a decade of deconstruction.

For me, this is the Velvet Underground’s most permissive album. Not because it’s their most experimental. The banana album still holds that title. Rather, this is the record that quietly told later musicians, “You’re allowed.” You’re allowed to leave the joins visible. You’re allowed to sound unfinished. You’re allowed to trust a repeated groove over a verse-chorus-bridge structure. You’re allowed to make records that capture who you are rather than demonstrate what the studio can do. Listening to it, I kept thinking of cinéma vérité. While many of its contemporaries were turning the recording studio into a playground, the Velvet Underground use it like a camera. The object isn’t to improve reality but simply to witness it. The dry, scratchy Stratocasters, the lack of obvious ambience, the conversational vocals and the remarkable precision of the playing all point in the same direction. This isn’t a band who can’t play. It’s a band who refuse to adorn. That distinction matters. Lou Reed’s performance on “Pale Blue Eyes” is one of the great examples of microphone technique in rock music. His pitching is deliberately uncertain, his delivery hesitant, creating a constructive fiction that only works because of the intimacy of the microphone capsule. Meanwhile, “Jesus” abandons conventional songwriting altogether, becoming a threefold incantation rather than a narrative song, while “Some Kinda Love” simply lets a circular riff exist while the narrator notices things. By the time “That’s the Story of My Life” arrives, it feels as though the Brill Building is still standing but all the windows have been broken. Reed keeps the language of American popular song while quietly dismantling many of its assumptions. Then “After Hours” reaches even further back, evoking the informal Tin Pan Alley and ukulele songs of an America where sheet music travelled more readily than records. Moe Tucker’s unaffected vocal is perfect. I’m sure she could sing “better”. That would entirely miss the point. What struck me most, though, was how deeply this album echoes through British indie, particularly the real C86 rather than the sanitised retrospective version. Not simply the jangly bands, but the whole awkward, diverse tape with Bogshed, Age of Chance and all the other glorious misfits. The Reid brothers, early Primal Scream, Glasgow indie and countless others inherited something more valuable than a guitar sound. They inherited permission. The banana album changed what rock music could contain. This album changed what later musicians felt they were allowed to do.

I almost got this one completely wrong. For the first half hour I thought I was listening to a beautifully produced, impeccably tasteful sophisti-pop album. The DX7s are everywhere. Ben Watt has left the retrospective musical world of Eden behind and embraced 1988 completely. Then I realised the lyrics had done exactly the same thing. This isn’t an album looking backwards. It’s about two people in their late twenties taking stock of where they are now. Friends are becoming parents. They’re wondering whether they should. Home has become something more complicated than an address. Jealousy hasn’t disappeared simply because they’ve become adults. Relationships still contain tenderness, compromise, insecurity and the occasional red mist. What impressed me was that the album refuses to confuse maturity with emotional perfection. These are decent people, but they aren’t idealised people. They admit to things most of us spend years pretending aren’t there. The songs don’t flatter their writers. They simply tell the truth as they understand it. Ben Watt deserves enormous credit. At first I heard tasteful arrangements. By the end I heard an arranger with the confidence to stay out of the way. Too many records from this period ask you to admire the production. Here, the production simply creates space for the songs. For a self-produced album, it’s astonishingly assured. The Night I Heard Caruso Sing is the emotional centre of the record. Ben’s own song, and quite possibly the only album in the 1001 Albums canon to mention Montrose, manages to be about fatherhood, inheritance, beauty and fear without ever becoming grandiose. The album kept reminding me of Philip Larkin. Not musically, but philosophically. Both are fascinated by ordinary adulthood, by the strange business of becoming yourself while life quietly accumulates around you. The difference is that Larkin often stood outside life looking in. Thorn and Watt stay inside it. I’ve been thinking recently about albums that gave other artists permission. The Velvet Underground gave permission to leave the joins showing. McCartney gave permission to write about everything and nothing simultaneously. Everything But The Girl give permission simply to write about being: about adulthood not as a destination but as an ongoing negotiation with yourself and with the people you love. When I started listening, I wondered why this album belonged in the canon. By the end, I couldn’t imagine it not belonging there.

I came to this expecting the usual historical obligation: one of the records that helped codify heavy rock, enormously influential, probably rather heavier and more ponderous than anything I would choose to hear for pleasure. Instead, it swings. That was the first surprise, and it remained the central one. Deep Purple are much lighter on their feet than their reputation had allowed me to imagine. Highway Star does not lumber towards you in iron boots; it tears off with a lovely bass opening, Bach-influenced runs from guitar and Hammond, and the forward momentum of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal before that was a thing. It is closer in spirit to Silver Machine than to the oppressive gravity of Black Sabbath. Maybe I’m a Leo then lopes along with Ian Paice applying exactly the right amount of swing. It does not chug. Had it been Southern rock, it might have cheugled, but this has a slightly stranger gait. Paice seems to understand immediately what every song needs in order to move. I already knew how well he drove McCartney’s Run Devil Run, but here he is the man preventing Deep Purple from becoming the leaden band I had expected. Pictures of Home manages to contain a terrific drum opening, mystical mountains-and-crows lyrics, guitar, Hammond and a genuinely astounding bass solo, all within five minutes. Deep Purple have most of the raw materials of progressive rock—classical influence, conspicuous virtuosity, tempo changes, extended instrumental passages—but they compress them into economical songs. Prog compressed. The songs do what they came to do and then get out of the way. That economy matters because these musicians could clearly have spent twenty minutes demonstrating how clever they were. Jon Lord alone has enough ideas to sustain a lesser band. His distorted Hammond is the secret weapon of the album: not background colour, not a substitute rhythm guitar, but a second lead instrument that can swell, smear, roar and alter its identity in ways a guitar cannot. On Lazy he spends the enormous introduction trying on many costumes rather than merely putting on a cape, moving through jazz, blues, church and R&B before the band settles into another hard-rock groove. Never Before simply struts. It has enough R&B drive that a good bar band could dress it slightly differently and make it absolutely slap. That became another useful way of hearing the album. Beneath the canonical status and Marshall stacks is the instinct of a working band that understands rooms, sets and audiences. Lazy is the sort of number that could take however much time remained before “Time, gentlemen, please”: shorten the instrumental passages if the set has overrun, or let everyone have another chorus if you have ten minutes to fill. It is modular, flexible and plainly tremendous fun to play. Then there is Smoke on the Water, a riff so ubiquitous that they teach it to first-year secondary pupils at Montrose Academy, producing generations of twelve-year-olds who come home disconsolate because thirty beginners playing it together sounds nothing like the record. What survived that familiarity for me was the lyric. It is astonishingly documentary. They arrived in Montreux to record an album, some pillock in Frank Zappa’s audience fired a flare gun, the casino burned down and the entire plan became an absolute balls-ache. Later heavy metal might have filled the scene with flames, screaming crowds and infernal symbolism. Deep Purple merely report what happened. The event itself—turning up to make a hard-rock album and discovering that someone has burned down your venue—is already one of the most heavy-metal things imaginable. It needs no embellishment. Space Truckin’ finally reveals the branch that leads to Bad News and This Is Spinal Tap, not because Deep Purple are bad or unaware, but because the idea is magnificently ridiculous and delivered with total conviction. It sounds like something conceived through clouds of herbal smoke and giggles: ordinary haulage, but through the Solar System. The Expanse if James Holden were a comedy character, Alex Kamal came in hot while blasting Deep Purple instead of dreadful Martian country, Amos shouted “YEAH!”, and Naomi Nagata spent every episode trying to make the men behave sensibly. Somewhere between the compressed intensity of the Canterbury disaster and the complete lunacy of Red Dwarf, there is a rollicking blue-collar space series soundtracked by this song. Machine Head sounds less like the birth of heavy metal than an outrageously accomplished R&B band discovering how loud it can become without losing its groove. Every song has a gait: it hurtles, lopes, struts and swings. The virtuosity serves the songs, the songs remain usable, and the band sounds as though playing them is the most enjoyable job imaginable. I can absolutely understand some grebo in Northampton taking this home, hearing the riffs, the musicianship, the mystical imagery and the girls gathering around the band, and deciding that this was precisely the life for him. Far too much fun for a Wednesday morning.

I came to The Black Album expecting to endure it. My mental image of Metallica remains two men in a pawn shop shouting at each other while occasionally throwing guitars. What I wasn’t expecting was an album largely concerned with making itself understood. The word I kept coming back to was legibility. This is the record where Metallica simplify, but simplicity isn’t necessarily the same thing as dumbing down. One dominant riff can give an actual song room to emerge. The vocals are front and centre. The structures are clear. There’s an almost pop instinct at work: if you’ve got something to say, don’t hide it behind another six riffs. And they do have something to say. Sad But True is about the shadow self, the psychological permissions we construct to do things we’d rather not admit to ourselves. Holier Than Thou turns towards judgement, gossip and received certainty. Then The Unforgiven does something particularly clever: the verses are oppressive and heavy while the chorus opens out. It reverses the usual rock-ballad grammar. Once you’ve decoded it, it seems obvious, but somebody had to think of it. Gradually I began hearing the album as a journey towards self-determination. Don’t Tread on Me nearly derailed the whole thing for me. I cannot stand that strain of Boys’ Own metal: heroic individualism, flags, slogans and the conviction that having a very large sense of yourself constitutes a philosophy. My rating briefly plunged. Then Through the Never comes along and almost acts as a corrective. It reminded me of Powers of Ten: zoom out and this heroic individual is an infinitesimal dot in an incomprehensibly large universe; zoom sufficiently far in and he’s mostly interatomic space anyway. Get over yourself. Then Nothing Else Matters brings everything back to the personal. For all the songs metal has produced about women, there’s something unexpectedly affecting about a man simply admitting that another person matters to him. The road towards being comfortable with yourself sometimes includes admitting that you need somebody else. At this point I started thinking that Metallica had been through therapy. The God That Failed makes that particularly explicit once you know about James Hetfield losing his mother, a Christian Scientist who refused medical treatment for cancer. The lyric stops sounding like an articulate teenager berating religious parents and becomes something much more specific: someone trying to make sense of a loss he believes needn’t have happened. My Friend of Misery may contain the most interesting idea on the album. People can become evangelical about their suffering. Misery can become identity. I’ve encountered versions of that in peer-support work: when everything eventually becomes okay, what happens if you’ve become emotionally dependent upon the response you receive for telling everyone how badly things are going? Recovery eventually asks the awkward question: who are you when misery is no longer your defining characteristic? Even Of Wolf and Man, which I initially filed under “mandatory metal song about how cool werewolves are”, eventually made more sense. The wolf is the elemental self, the instinctive human underneath civilisation. Myth being used to examine psychology rather than merely because wolves are cool. Although wolves are cool. The album also clarified something I find difficult about metal itself. It frequently heightens everything until the effect becomes strangely flat. It reminds me of driving through the Cascades from the Willamette Valley into the high desert of Oregon. You’re suddenly four or five thousand feet above sea level, yet the landscape can look almost as flat as Lincolnshire. Everything has been elevated, so nothing feels elevated. Metal sometimes mistakes altitude for relief. Every riff is enormous. Every drum hit is enormous. Every guitar solo announces that an enormous emotion is occurring. But if grief, anger, triumph and crossing the road successfully all receive essentially the same intricate distorted-guitar vocabulary, emotional distinction starts disappearing. Compare that with Maggot Brain, where Eddie Hazel’s guitar develops a specific emotional argument rather than merely announcing “guitar solo expressing strong feelings”. The Black Album is at its best when Metallica escape that limitation. They create valleys as well as summits. They leave space. They let Hetfield sing. They allow the words to carry meaning rather than asking volume to do all the work. And the final The Struggle Within brings the argument somewhere useful. Struggle is not something to externalise indefinitely and make everyone else’s problem. Part of the dignity of struggling is recognising that the struggle is yours, while still allowing other people to help you through it. So I ended somewhere I absolutely didn’t expect. At its best, The Black Album is Metallica doing therapy in public. At its worst, it’s mythic comfort food and werewolves. Sometimes the apparent mythic comfort food turns out to be part of the therapy anyway. I won’t be listening to it every day, and Don’t Tread on Me can get in the sea on its own, but this is a very well-made album that succeeds at what it attempts. Four stars. And it taught me something I probably needed teaching. Metal can think.

This may be THE British album of 1985. Not simply because it is magnificent, but because it represents something extraordinary about British popular culture at that particular moment. This was a number-one album. Kate Bush returned to public view performing Running Up That Hill on Wogan. Bloody Terry Wogan. People bought the record, turned it over, and found a psychologically cinematic suite about a woman drowning. Running Up That Hill remains astonishing: the pulse, those speed-treated Fairlight wails, the refusal to provide conventional resolution, and that lyrical premise of two people wanting to exchange their lived experience because ordinary communication cannot bridge the distance between them. Hounds of Love takes desire somewhere more animal. For me, it captures the distinction between desire and the desire for desire: wanting to be wanted while simultaneously being frightened of being pursued. The fox doesn’t reason about the hounds. Its body reacts. Fear and attraction become inseparable because they have the same source. The Big Sky then blows the doors open. Its final ninety seconds remind you that almost nobody uses the non-verbal human voice quite like Kate Bush. Yoko Ono, Bush, Björk: singers for whom the voice can cease to be a vehicle for words and become raw sonic material. Mother Stands for Comfort is essentially We Need to Talk About Kevin as a song. That bass, the sampled noises, high liquid synth lines, distant cries and extraordinary use of space surround a deeply disturbing idea: maternal love continuing beyond morality. Then Cloudbusting. Masterpiece. I still believe in Organon. Kate doesn’t require us to decide whether Wilhelm Reich was a visionary or a crank. She becomes his son. Dad made the weather. Childhood hasn’t yet had its wonder explained away. And then there is the line which has followed me through much of my life: Just saying it could even make it happen. Speak. Manifest. Give permission. Saying a possibility aloud changes its status. It becomes something that can be wanted and acted upon. At the end, Kate gradually stops saying it and makes the sound of it happening. Those radiant backing vocals become a raindance. The sun comes out and the rain pours simultaneously. Dad is gone. The cloudbuster works. Then you turn the record over. The Ninth Wave is one of the most complete pieces of psychological storytelling I’ve heard in music. And Dream of Sheep starts with an exhausted woman in freezing water who knows she must stay awake while her body desperately wants to sleep. That hits me particularly hard. I’ve been seriously ill in hospital and remember that physical contradiction: God, I want to sleep. God, I want to live. Under Ice turns sleep into nightmare. Voices operate almost as a Greek chorus as she gradually recognises the figure trapped beneath the ice. It’s me. Waking the Witch may be one of the most evocative pseudo-streams of consciousness ever recorded. Friendly voices telling her to wake become digitally chopped fragments which the dreaming brain transforms into accusation, witch trial and drowning. The harsh edges of early sampling aren’t technical shortcomings to be disguised. Bush makes them the dramatic language. It’s psychologically cinematic. Images as music. An extraordinary evocation of what the brain feels like when it is out of control. Watching You Without Me uses similar technology for something quite different. She’s apparently home, watching people she loves, but they cannot perceive her. Her voice fragments and language almost emerges before collapsing. Aphasia as sound. Then The Jig of Life changes the argument again. I don’t hear its folk music primarily as ancestry or nostalgia. The folk music is the future expressed as continuity. A jig existed before this individual life and will continue afterwards. Her future self reaches backwards and insists upon her own existence. There are years and memories ahead which require this woman to survive now. That struck something personal again. When my mother was hospitalised with catastrophic kidney cancer, the devoutly Catholic mother of an ex-girlfriend said something I’ve never forgotten: There must still be plans for your mother. Years earlier, at 23 or 24, I had lain alone in a hospital bed while a doctor handed me a consent form and explained that I might not survive the operation, but without it I might not live another five years. I signed it. That signature unlocked my voice talking about this record today. Hello Earth then pulls the camera impossibly far back. One drowning person becomes infinitesimal against the scale of the planet and the universe. Yet smallness isn’t meaninglessness. There aren’t merely eight billion people looking at one universe. There are eight billion experienced universes, each created by a particular consciousness observing, remembering and acting within reality. Through the genius of communication, we pass pieces of those individual universes between one another. Language, art and science accumulate into an understanding larger than any individual life contributing to it. It’s a thought I sometimes carry quietly into my Monday evenings volunteering with a men’s mental-health group, although it would be far too large a thing to say to somebody in crisis: Suicide collapses universes. Then comes The Morning Fog. The sonic relief is palpable. The fretless bass bounces and plays across the song. Fairlight-sampled guitar notes provide little flashes of upper-register pleasure. The same technology that has spent half an album creating fragmentation, nightmare and aphasia is suddenly being used for joy. And after everything, there is no grand philosophical conclusion. She’s alive. She wants to go home. She wants to tell people she loves them. That’s enough. The Britishness of the whole thing struck me forcefully this time. It’s the Britain of Bagpuss, Alan Garner and The Wicker Man: a damp, verdant, faintly creepy place where woods, water and landscape retain old memories and something ancient can still be waiting behind an ordinary tree. It’s also the Britain of the BBC: Radios 1, 2, 3 and 4 sitting beside one another on the dial, built on the assumption that pop, folk tradition, drama, experimentation, philosophy and entertainment don’t need to inhabit separate cultural universes. In 1985 they could apparently inhabit the same number-one album. Hounds of Love begins with the impossible desire to experience another person’s existence and ends with someone overwhelmingly grateful simply to have an existence of her own, among other people. The sun comes out. The rain pours. The morning fog lifts. She gets to go home.

I’d somehow managed never to sit down and properly listen to this album before, despite knowing plenty of its cultural after-effects. It was an ur-text for one of my old musical collaborators, and Barry Godber’s screaming-face artwork fed directly into the visual language of Falling Apart-era Soft Cell. So I knew something of its consequences without really knowing the source. The first thing I had to do was stop thinking of it as “prog”. That word is useless here. This is October 1969. The clichés don’t exist yet. 21st Century Schizoid Man is astonishing. It’s abrasive, physical and almost feral: Lake’s mangled vocal, Fripp apparently off his nut, Ian McDonald’s sax screaming alongside the guitar until the two almost become one instrument, and Michael Giles drumming like a machine programmed by Thom Yorke. This is a band who watch each other. You can hear it. The virtuosity is collective rather than individual: people responding, leaving space, taking it, changing direction together. Even at their most violent they sound like an ensemble, not four musicians demonstrating their chops. Then I Talk to the Wind arrives and almost everything disappears. Flute, tiny percussion, space, Greg Lake being improbably winsome. The contrast reveals that Schizoid Man wasn’t simply “what King Crimson sound like”. They chose to make that racket, and they can choose not to. Epitaph then demonstrates another strength: scale. The Mellotron isn’t accompaniment so much as architecture. At one point it sounds as though the London Philharmonic has been swallowed by a haunted wardrobe. And then Moonchild, which may actually have been my favourite phase of the album. Phase rather than track, because eventually the song gives up being a song. Rhythm almost disappears. Conventional forward motion disappears. Tiny sounds occur, hang in the air and receive equally tiny replies. It’s Watch with Mother deconstructed: bells, little wooden knocks and delicate plunks that ought to accompany a knitted creature completing some modest domestic task, except somebody has removed the reassuring grammar. It amused me enormously. More importantly, it makes the title track work. Moonchild reduces the record almost to particles, then The Court of the Crimson King rebuilds the entire thing at cathedral scale. The Mellotron briefly drops into that familiar toy-like flute register and then the whole synthetic orchestra comes back through the wall, with Giles seemingly carrying the drums in on a hod. And then it simply takes off. Silence. At that point I realised I hadn’t really been listening to five songs in the normal album sense. It felt more like a 44-minute happening: assault, delicacy, apocalypse, dissolution and reconstruction. The record repeatedly changes the apparent dimensions of the room. That’s also why I’m increasingly unconvinced by the familiar description of it as “the beginning of prog”. It feels more important than that. It feels like permission. Sgt. Pepper had already demonstrated that a rock album could invent its own rules. King Crimson seem to have taken that permission and asked how far it could actually go. Jazz ensemble playing, chamber music, noise, pastoralism, free improvisation, abandoning the beat altogether, synthetic orchestration and near-silence are all available. You can hear the possibilities subsequently exploited by Canterbury, Fred Frith, Henry Cow and plenty of other odd corners of experimental rock. And because this is 1969, none of it is cliché. The clichés haven’t been invented yet. Which leads me to the monstrously unfair thought that much of subsequent prog consists of people attempting to remake this album while copying the nouns and missing the grammar: Mellotron, virtuosity, long tracks, portent. Here those things aren’t the point. They’re simply tools available to an astonishingly responsive band. I’m not sure I’d want to live with In the Court of the Crimson King. That keeps it at four stars rather than five for me. But as a single artistic event, it’s extraordinary. Four musicians, a bloke with a pen, and apparently no conception whatsoever of where the permissible boundaries are.

Twenty minutes. That’s roughly how long it took me to learn how to listen to Lightning Bolt. I knew nothing about them before this morning. When Wonderful Rainbow started, my response was simply, “Oh good lord.” Two men – Brian Gibson on a spectacularly abused bass guitar and Brian Chippendale on drums and muffled vocals – were producing so much information that I couldn’t find anywhere to put my attention. I’m not completely unfamiliar with extreme sound. Sleaford Mods led me towards some interesting places: I’ve seen Consumer Electronics and enjoyed them, and Russell Haswell performing solo. So sheer abrasion wasn’t the problem. The problem was that I couldn’t initially identify the language. Then I started noticing things. For music delivered with the physical vocabulary of noise and extreme rock, Gibson plays some remarkably peculiar intervals. Little nursery-rhyme patterns. Bright sing-song figures. Chattering phrases. Things that would sound almost childlike if played cleanly, except they’re coming through amplification capable of removing masonry. The drums presented the opposite problem. Chippendale sometimes plays with such density that rhythm appears to become continuous sound. And yet Gibson remains with him. They accelerate together, turn together, arrive together. That became the question I couldn’t stop thinking about: how do they know where they are? There is unmistakable structure in this music. “Crown of Storms” in particular is plainly a composition, not an interesting accident preserved on tape. But I couldn’t imagine what a useful written representation of it would look like. Eventually I realised I was probably asking the wrong question. These two have a language. It might consist of riffs, fills, gestures, movements, tiny cues and physical memories that would be almost meaningless to anybody else. Perhaps Chippendale himself is part of Gibson’s notation, and Gibson part of Chippendale’s. They don’t need to explain the structure to each other because they inhabit it. And, rather unexpectedly, I began to inhabit it too. At the beginning, everything seemed to happen simultaneously. Twenty minutes later I could distinguish the melodic figures, structural returns, changes of density and ridiculous little flourishes. The record hadn’t become any simpler. My brain had apparently constructed a Lightning Bolt decoder. That was when the playfulness became obvious. Not comedy. Not a joke. Calling it that would diminish what they’re doing. I thought instead about Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy”. That creates a fantastical musical world without standing outside it and winking at the audience. Its playfulness is completely sincere. Lightning Bolt’s world happens to contain nursery-rhyme melodies played through grotesquely amplified bass, percussion filling almost every available millisecond and a vocalist who occasionally sounds like Kenny from South Park. But they inhabit that world just as sincerely. Once I understood that, the apparent absurdity became coherent. The closing “Duel in the Deep” clinched it for me. It backs away from some of the hyperactivity into twanging notes, spring reverb, feedback and space. Suddenly the kinship I heard wasn’t Consumer Electronics but Sunn O))). Not because they sound alike, but because both understand that sound has physical properties which recordings only partly reproduce. And that led to the most unexpected conclusion of the morning. I would go and see Lightning Bolt tomorrow. I’d take hearing protection. Obviously. But I want to know what this music does to a room. I want to feel that bass rather than merely hear it. Most of all, I want to watch these two people and see how the communication works. Wonderful Rainbow probably isn’t going into regular rotation. But I’ve already got plenty of records I know how to listen to. It’s much rarer to find one that teaches me how.

There’s a problem with hearing Thelonious Monk in 2026: we already know what Thelonious Monk sounds like. Those dissonant piano chords, the angular horn writing, the rhythmic dislocations, the hat, the whole visual and musical vocabulary have spent nearly seventy years becoming cultural shorthand for a particular idea of modern jazz. Put _Brilliant Corners_ on and it’s terribly easy to think, “Ooh, jazz,” settle into the historical importance of it all and stop hearing how peculiar this music actually is. I tried to listen past that this morning, and somewhere during the title track the whole record changed shape for me. Monk doesn’t sound like an elegant pianist. He stabs and paws at the keyboard. Individual notes seem to require separate negotiations. Chords are sometimes less played than deposited. A run can sound as though it has caught its foot on something and had to recover. Then I realised what it reminded me of: Jacques Tati. Specifically, Monsieur Hulot trying to operate a gate. Hulot knows perfectly well what a gate is, but somehow it squeaks, the return spring pings, something catches, he prods it, looks mildly surprised by the result and makes everything worse. The genius is that Tati has choreographed every apparently incompetent movement. Monk plays piano like clowning. Once I heard that, _Brilliant Corners_ stopped sounding like an imposing monument to difficult jazz and became an extremely funny, playful and eventually rather touching record. The title track is the most extreme example. It’s an irregular hexagon of a composition which constantly changes its gait. It stutters. It ambles. It struts. Then, with almost no warning, it breaks into a genuine sprint. Just as abruptly, everybody slows down again. At first it sounds chaotic. Then repeated figures start acquiring meaning. An arpeggio becomes a starting pistol: when Monk plays it, everybody runs. Max Roach takes essentially the same shape and turns it into rhythm. A blunt three-note figure slows everything down. The band reforms. The theme returns. By the end, you’ve learned how the monster walks. The famous fact that the musicians never managed a single faultless studio take suddenly makes perfect sense. The released master had to be assembled from different performances. But these are Sonny Rollins, Oscar Pettiford and Max Roach. Monk hasn’t exposed inadequate musicianship; he has created conditions difficult enough to make extraordinary musicians uncomfortable. That distinction matters to me because I have a fairly profound aversion to difficulty presented as a virtue in itself. Displayed virtuosity leaves me cold. “Look how complicated this is” is not an artistic argument. Monk does something quite different. Here are the conditions. Good luck. It occurred to me that _Brilliant Corners_ works rather like _Giant Steps_ in that the title describes the route through the music. Coltrane gives you those enormous harmonic strides. Monk gives you corners. Some of them have to be taken at a dead sprint. Then the album starts showing what else can be done with the same awkwardness. “Ba-Lue Bolivar Ba-Lues-Are” is almost avuncular. The ensemble passages climb through intervals that make the band sound as though it’s clambering uphill, then the saxophones are released and suddenly glide effortlessly around the changes. That contrast is important. These musicians can play beautifully and fluently whenever they like. Monk has deliberately made fluent musicians walk funny. The improvisational spaces are enormous. Rollins and Monk don’t sound as though they’re obediently taking their allotted bars; they sound like they’re having a conversation. Melody and counterpoint emerge from the improvisation itself. One idea changes another. Monk sometimes contributes a crooked little comment and then simply shuts up. Pettiford gets enough solo space to run out of easy ideas and trap himself, but doesn’t. Roach gets the same opportunity. There’s jeopardy in giving musicians that much room. A short solo lets a great player deploy vocabulary. Keep the door open long enough and eventually they have to find another sentence. Then the awkward unison motif returns and, wonderfully, it feels like an old friend. The tune hasn’t become less peculiar. You’ve become fluent in its peculiarity. “Pannonica” takes the same ungainliness somewhere completely different. It’s tenderness in clown shoes. The celesta pings where Monk’s piano normally thunks. The horns carry this sweet melody while Monk worries away at it underneath, picking at its edges. It reminded me of Cyrano de Bergerac: genuine romance and sweetness which cannot be separated from the enormous conspicuous protuberance attached to it. OH GOD THAT NOSE. But remove the nose and Cyrano isn’t Cyrano. Monk even becomes comparatively smooth during the soloing, but he never becomes conventionally graceful. He stumbles sweetly. During the quieter piano-and-celesta passages, the instruments seem to ramble around one another like two people dancing who occasionally step on each other’s toes. It’s touching because the clumsiness remains. He doesn’t adopt somebody else’s musical language in order to express tenderness. “I Surrender, Dear” strips everything back to Monk alone with a standard he clearly knows inside out. He handles it like one of those enormous Rubik’s cubes with 16 or 25 squares on each face. The song gets dismantled in real time. A phrase appears. Monk seems to inspect it. Nah-ah. That ain’t it. Turn the cube. Try something else. There you go. And then dismantle it again. Yet the remarkable thing is that “I Surrender, Dear” never actually disappears. You can see the song lying in pieces across the workbench throughout. Monk seems to make the process of thinking audible. Finally there’s “Bemsha Swing”, with one of the catchiest motifs on the record. The horns get it. They swagger through it. Monk throws planks at it. The track swings like hell, but Monk spends half his time playing what I can only describe as anti-swing: square attacks, awkward emphases, little gaps and blunt chords placed across all that forward momentum. He plainly knows exactly where the swing is. He just refuses to take the easy ride. “This would be more interesting if we had to ride a bike over a see-saw.” “Monk, you can do that. I got a solo to play.” And somehow that imaginary exchange gets closer to what I hear in this album than all the language about angularity and harmonic sophistication. Those things are certainly there. The music is fiendishly difficult. But they don’t explain the spirit of it. Clowning does. Clowning takes an action everybody understands and introduces unnecessary difficulty. Walking becomes falling over. Opening a gate becomes a mechanical catastrophe. Riding a bicycle acquires a see-saw. The apparent incompetence is only possible because the performer has extraordinary control. Monk does that to music. Want to play a blues? Put corners in it. Want to swing? Put obstacles across the groove. Want to play a beautiful melody? Make it stumble. Want to photograph the band for the album cover? Sit everybody in a ridiculous back-to-back circle so almost nobody faces the camera. And there’s Monk, looking out at us, amused as all hell. That cover suddenly made complete sense after hearing the record this way. It doesn’t say “important modern jazz masterpiece”. It says: you do realise this isn’t going to be a normal record, don’t you? Then “Bemsha Swing” ends with a triumphant unison chorus. After an entire album of deliberately awkward movement, everybody locks together. Of course they can. That’s the final joke. The thing nearly seventy years of reverence risks obscuring about _Brilliant Corners_ is the grin. The complexity is real, the musicianship is phenomenal and Monk’s musical thinking is extraordinary. But none of that requires solemnity. Sometimes the most interesting thing you can do with a perfectly functioning gate is make the bloody thing squeak.

This was almost completely unknown territory for me. Khaled, yes. Raï, vaguely. But I came into Kenza with very little idea what I was actually going to hear. Fifteen tracks later, I’m left with an odd question: why do I feel I’ve learned rather less about raï than I wanted to? That isn’t Khaled’s fault. By 1999 he was a huge star in France, living and working there, collaborating internationally and making exactly the sort of cosmopolitan crossover record he apparently wanted to make. Expecting an Algerian musician to demonstrate the authenticity of his local musical tradition for my benefit would be absurd. It would be like demanding U2 get the bodhráns out. But as a choice for 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, Kenza left me slightly frustrated. The problem isn’t Algeria. It’s Parisian studios. There is a lot of extremely polished Francophone pop here. Tasteful keyboards, tasteful grooves, excellent musicians, funk, disco, Indian percussion, Latin pop and enough late-90s studio sheen to buff out almost any rough edge. And I don’t particularly like polished French adult pop. Not French pop generally. Give me yé-yé. Jacques Dutronc’s “Et moi, et moi, et moi” is a fantastic record. The problem is a particular strain of tasteful, cosmopolitan pop where everything has been made extremely legible. That gradually became my problem with Kenza. It’s a coat of many colours, but the colours are too legible and too tasteful. There’s the funk bit. There’s the Indian bit. There’s the French-pop bit. There’s the Latin-pop bit. There’s Khaled. Everybody has been introduced and everybody is getting along beautifully. Sometimes rather too beautifully. I started calling it restaurant music. That isn’t necessarily an insult. Restaurant music can be lovely. You notice a nice percussion part, admire the accordion, think the bass player is doing something interesting, and then have an entire conversation without the music once demanding your attention back. “Melha” runs for 6:08. During it I managed to disappear into a lengthy digression about Washington go-go, Tommy Boy Records, Selectadisc in Nottingham and Graeme Park playing saxophone in Grantham because he loved X-Ray Spex. Khaled carried on underneath me. I could still hear the clinking of glasses. Then, nine tracks in, “Raba-Raba” happened. OH. FOR FUCK’S SAKE. WHERE HAS THIS BEEN? The glossy keyboards largely disappeared. The Western handrails disappeared. Suddenly I didn’t feel as though anyone was translating the music for me. I had to go towards it. And I loved that. “Meli H’bibti” produced a similar reaction later: hypnotic circularity, accordion, North African melodic language and percussion that sounds almost Indian, but without everything being strapped onto a reassuring funk bass line. This was the crossover I wanted. Not different musical traditions being placed politely beside one another, but musical languages actually negotiating. “Derwiche Tourneur” gets somewhere interesting too. It’s still polished and slightly contrived, but neither side completely swamps the other. Ironically it’s a Jean-Jacques Goldman composition, which complicated my developing theory that Jean-Jacques Goldman was personally responsible for everything I disliked about the record. He performed above expectations. He was not acquitted. Because Goldman returns for the closing “Laila (C’est la nuit)”, a slow bilingual reprise with glossy electric piano which triggered what I have previously diagnosed as Baaba Maal Last Track Syndrome: the sudden urge to end an interesting African album with something terribly tasteful and internationally comprehensible. And fucking Goldman again. There’s also a version of “Imagine”, sung with Israeli singer Noa. Musically? Beige. Politically? Considerably more interesting. An Algerian star publicly singing a hymn to coexistence with an Israeli singer was hardly a neutral gesture, particularly given Khaled’s history of upsetting conservative voices at home. And you have to put your head back into 1999, when quite a lot of us were still living in that strange end-of-history bubble where globalisation was apparently going to sort everything out and people could seriously suggest that countries containing McDonald’s restaurants wouldn’t go to war with one another. The 2020s would like a word. But the most useful thing Kenza did was gradually eliminate my easy explanations for why it wasn’t connecting. I don’t dislike Khaled’s voice. In fact, I came to really enjoy his attack, particularly the way he uses Arabic consonants almost percussively. I don’t dislike Arabic or North African musical language. I don’t dislike French lyrics. I don’t dislike crossover. Apparently I don’t even automatically dislike Jean-Jacques Goldman. What I dislike is crossover whose method is homogenisation. Compare my reaction to Ali Farka Touré. When I first encountered desert blues, it was intoxicating precisely because the music didn’t come and fetch me. I had to travel towards it. The circularity, space, repetition and relationship with the blues were the proposition. I had to learn how to listen. Or Lightning Bolt’s Wonderful Rainbow, which I heard for the first time only a couple of days ago. Almost no conventional handholds whatsoever, yet the bloody thing followed me out of the album. I was still talking about it the following evening because I wanted to grab a bassist I know and say, “Believe it or not, THAT IS A BASS.” Kenza gives me handholds everywhere and rarely creates that sort of compulsion. Which brings me back to the 1001 selection. Khaled owes me absolutely no education in raï. Sitting here demanding “educate me, Algerian musician” would be an extraordinary piece of entitlement. But the book does owe us interesting choices. If this is one of its relatively scarce opportunities to introduce a listener to one of the major figures in raï, I’m not convinced Kenza is the album I’d have wanted it to choose. It introduced me very effectively to Khaled the international pop star. I’m still waiting to be properly introduced to raï. And yet perhaps that’s also why it belongs. Kenza put my head somewhere inside France and Algeria in 1999: immigration, post-colonial identity, raï becoming international pop, musical borders dissolving and that extraordinary burst of millennial optimism. A French listener might hear “Raba-Raba” and think, “Did he really have to do this?” I hear it and think, “WHY DIDN’T YOU DO MORE OF THIS?” Neither of us is wrong. There aren’t universally experienced albums any more than there’s one universally experienced world. There are eight billion little universes observing the same things differently, and communication occasionally lets us peek into somebody else’s. I don’t particularly care for Kenza as an album. But I care about several tracks on it. And it has made me want to hear more raï. That’s not nothing.

A completely new one for me, and I’m rather glad it came along. I went in expecting psych-prog. Prog is unfair. This is late-period psychedelia: twelve oddball little songs, under 40 minutes, the longest only 5:37. Spirit can plainly play, and play extremely well, but nobody seems interested in making virtuosity the subject. The production is similarly unobtrusive: there’s loads going on, but it generally gets out of the songs’ way. And I do mean twelve songs. The original vinyl ends with “Soldier”. Streaming editions have helpfully supplied four more tracks, thereby turning Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus into Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus and Then He Went Back to Sleep for a Bit. I stopped at track twelve. If somebody discovered four extra chapters of Mansfield Park, I wouldn’t automatically assume Jane Austen had forgotten to include them. That compactness matters. This is a band with enough musical ability and studio imagination to disappear into 1970s acreage at any moment, and they mostly refuse to. Find an idea, make it interesting, occasionally make it very strange, get out. The simplicity tends to turn up elsewhere: Randy California’s lyrics. Randy appears almost completely devoid of conventional irony. Nature is trying to tell us something. Love is good. War is bad. Freedom is important. Life has just begun. He’ll sometimes get three or four lines into one of these enormous propositions and apparently decide that’s probably enough philosophy for now. “Nature’s Way” is an eco-ballad reduced almost entirely to an insistence. Nature is telling you something’s wrong. Nature continues telling you something’s wrong. Everyone gets slightly overexcited. Then there are timpani and coughing at the end in case you haven’t understood that pollution is bad. “Why Can’t I Be Free?” lasts 65 seconds and contains roughly one thought. That’s about one-sixtieth of the time it takes a non-stop train to get from Grantham to London, fact fans. Spirit have discovered the opposite of prog. Jay Ferguson is the stronger lyricist, although this doesn’t necessarily mean he should be trusted unsupervised. “Animal Zoo” is a jaunty country-rock hippie singalong about the misery of being a straight. “Street Worm” is essentially CHECK ME OUT, I’M FREE, BABY, unfortunately including “never born to wear no collar”, which as a double negative makes Jay technically pro-collar. Then there’s “Mr. Skin”, in which some white Californian boys have very clearly been listening to Sly Stone. It’s a surprisingly big production: punchy brass, groove, layered vocals and a lovely bit where lead guitar and voice occupy almost exactly the same pitch and position in the mix until they briefly seem to become one sound. The lyrical revelation is that everybody has sex. Yes, yes, Jay. How do you think we got here? That combination of musical sophistication and wide-eyed lyrical simplicity is a huge part of the album’s charm. Spirit keep looking at society as though everything is both mildly ridiculous and tremendously interesting. People have sex! Aren’t conventional people strange! The trees are trying to tell us something! I’M FREE! I remember substances that had me thinking similar things back in the day. <sighs wistfully> It reminded me unexpectedly of Eugene, Oregon: Earth Day, Saturday Market, the Oregon Country Fair, that particular strand of American counterculture that isn’t especially aggressive or suspicious, just ecological, communal, self-referential and perfectly happy to be a bit silly. This album fundamentally doesn’t want to hurt anybody. I can also hear why some of this grammar became so irresistible to the 80s psychedelic revival. It is extraordinarily ripe for affectionate parody because it already sits perilously close to camp while remaining utterly sincere: beautiful close harmonies, space-age titles, psychedelic noises, enormous sentiments delivered without a wink, and an apparently constitutional inability to reach a fade-out without somebody doing something daft. “Space Child” — yes, really — may be my favourite example. It begins portentously, wanders into this lovely patch of space-age lounge jazz, with piano underneath little waspy synthesizers wibbling around the melody, then returns to its portentous beginning. It’s as though they’ve embarked on a great cosmic journey, stopped for a cocktail at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, then remembered they have to fly home again. “When I Touch You” is the one occasion where they properly hang around, and it earns its 5:37. Full psychedelic echo, guitars moving around the stereo field, an initially restrained conversational vocal which suddenly rises through “more, more, more” into a strangulated wail, then drops back again. Eventually the song stops behaving like a song and becomes a big heavy psychedelic environment. Then it finishes. Nobody requires another eight minutes to prove the point. I don’t think the twelve tracks hang together as a concept in any conventional sense. Apparently Dr. Sardonicus was the band’s nickname for the mixing desk, which actually makes much more sense: twelve dreams passing through the same studio apparatus, rather than twelve chapters advancing some grand narrative. The unity is temperament, not subject matter. And as a historical object it’s fascinating. It feels like a snapshot of American rock in 1970 before everything hardened into departments: psychedelia, pop, country-rock, funk, jazz, ecological concern, horns and studio experimentation all cheerfully coexisting. Britain was moving incredibly quickly in other directions by then; Spirit are still standing at the junction saying, quite happily, we like all of these. Endearing, faintly ridiculous, beautifully played, tightly edited and musically considerably better than the lyrics deserve.

There is a version of Radiohead history which goes roughly: decent guitar band, The Bends, masterpiece in OK Computer, then they suddenly went completely fucking strange with Kid A. I don’t think that works. If anything, The Bends is fascinating because this is the point where Radiohead become one of the best alternative-rock bands in the world, then almost immediately decide that being one of the best alternative-rock bands in the world isn’t a particularly interesting thing to remain. It may also be their last album as an MTV band. Not the last Radiohead album with important videos — God, no — but the last where the basic machinery still makes sense. Here are five blokes with guitars. Here is Thom Yorke. Here are singles. Here is “Just” with its wonderfully irritating pavement mystery. Compare the way The Bends opens with some of its contemporaries. Parklife starts with “Girls & Boys”, bouncing straight into its Euro-disco social world. Definitely Maybe starts with the sonic assault of “Rock ’n’ Roll Star”. Different Class raises the curtain with “Mis-Shapes”, almost a warped musical-theatre overture for nerd outsiders. Radiohead could easily have opened with “The Bends”. It’s huge. It arrives making precisely the sort of statement an ambitious guitar band ought to make. Instead, “Planet Telex” seems to hove into view. It feels as if the band started without us and we’ve had to walk towards them. Then the song eventually disappears into drowned modem noise. The transmission fails. And there’s the album. Everything is broken. “The Bends” gives us the alienated wannabe rock star who has apparently arrived where he wanted to be and discovered that success feels horrible. “High and Dry” takes recognition and turns it back onto the self: pursue it hard enough and you risk becoming whatever version of yourself everybody else has recognised. That became an important idea for me while listening. Public identity is necessarily partial. Somebody sees one refraction of a person and starts treating it as the whole person. Worse, visibility gets confused with resilience. If you’re capable of doing something publicly, people assume you’re also equipped to absorb everything that comes with being seen. You aren’t. Nobody is bulletproof. Then “Fake Plastic Trees” arrives, and I think this is the first proper glimpse of future Radiohead. They cease simply to be a guitar band talking about rock-star alienation. Suddenly the whole environment is sick. Fake plants, fake earth, cosmetic reconstruction, people trying desperately to hold decay at bay. Even decoration gathers dust. That’s a magnificent little image. Plastic doesn’t wilt, but it still acquires time. The surgeon can correct and tighten and fight gravity, but gravity keeps coming back. Everything designed to conceal entropy eventually becomes evidence of entropy itself. And crucially, the song doesn’t sneer at anybody for trying. It sounds exhausted on their behalf. That happened repeatedly during this listen. The Bends kept making me kinder. Vanity, ambition, dependency, weakness, the desire to be recognised: all extremely easy things to mock until you ask what fear or need might be underneath them. “Bones” kicks the guitars back in and reminds you that this band could absolutely still provide MTV with a walloping rock song. Except now the unreliable system is the body itself. “(Nice Dream)” then opens one of those grand Radiohead vistas of pretty emptiness. People care. Friends exist. The good angel would like to help. Everybody is somewhere else. That’s more painful than simple abandonment. Nobody has to be cruel. People can love one another enormously and still exist in separate universes which never intersect at the point where contact is needed. Then “Just”, where the reproach is so intense that I’m not sure whether the narrator is berating another person or himself. Perhaps that’s why it works. And then “My Iron Lung”, which is where Radiohead become meta. The thing which saved you has become the thing keeping you trapped. Here is our new song, just like the old one. The successful formula is available. Everybody would quite like you to use it again. You hate it, but you also know it works. An iron lung is the perfect metaphor because you can’t simply tear yourself away from life support because you resent needing it. Success becomes dependence. Dependence becomes confinement. From here Radiohead’s career becomes increasingly recursive. Every new version of Radiohead has to deal with the previous version of Radiohead. Eventually even refusing to sound like Radiohead becomes one of the things Radiohead are expected to do. They’re almost the first band to be Bob Dylan. Forever changing, forever Radiohead. There’s something of The Fall in that too. The Fall could change personnel, production, decade, virtually everything, and remain unmistakably The Fall. Radiohead can transform their vocabulary completely and still remain recognisably themselves because the continuity isn’t stylistic. It’s a way of thinking. Unease. Systems under strain. Beauty with something wrong inside it. Hard ’n Phirm accidentally demonstrated this brilliantly with “Rodeohead”, their bluegrass medley which folds a ridiculous number of Radiohead songs into one another. It should be a novelty record and nothing more. Instead it’s a tiny masterpiece. Everything is put into the right keys. Songs are modulated so they actually join. “Paranoid Android” becomes duelling banjos. Bits of songs from different periods suddenly reveal how strangely compatible their underlying melodic and harmonic language is. Strip away the production, the Greenwood noises and the Yorke atmosphere, and Radiohead are still weird. Appropriately, the whole thing begins with “Planet Telex”. “Bullet Proof..I Wish I Was” makes the album’s vulnerability explicit. Doing something publicly does not magically provide the protective layer required to survive everything attached to doing it publicly. Then “Black Star” turns the same expectation therapy onto love and care. What happens when someone you love is breaking apart and you begin breaking under the strain of trying to hold them together? We have an extraordinarily nasty cultural assumption that love and compassion provide infinite reserves. Partners are supposed to remain patient enough, strong enough, loving enough, endlessly. People aren’t infinite. Someone can desperately need care while the person providing that care is being destroyed by the effort. Neither person’s suffering invalidates the other’s. And if love ultimately fails beneath that weight, it doesn’t mean the love was fraudulent. Sometimes things break because their load exceeds their capacity. That may be the central therapeutic action of The Bends. It keeps taking expectations and discovering they were badly designed. Success will make you secure. No. Recognition will tell you who you are. No. Love will always reach the other person. No. Care will make you inexhaustible. No. Your body will cooperate. No. If you’re visible, you must be strong enough to withstand visibility. No. The game is rigged. “Sulk” gives us another huge guitar track with absolutely no corresponding sense of triumph, which gets to something I’ve realised about Radiohead: they may be the least comforting enormous mainstream band I can think of. Oasis give you communion. U2 can give you transcendence. Pulp can turn alienation into collective theatre. Radiohead just give you alienation. They rarely tell you we’re all in this together. They make the space between us enormous and beautiful. They don’t tell you the void isn’t there. They make the void magnificent. And finally “Street Spirit (Fade Out)”. God knows what original thing you’re meant to say about “Street Spirit” after thirty years. But heard at the end of this album, one line suddenly seemed to complete the circuit: the machine cannot communicate the thoughts or the strain. We began with “Planet Telex”, with a broken transmission disappearing into electronic murk. Now the failure of communication has become completely personal. You can speak. You can sing. People can hear you. They can see you, recognise you, perhaps even love you. None of that means they can know what it feels like to be inside you. Then, at the end of an album which has systematically dismantled almost every possible reassurance, comes that strange final incantation, printed as though even typography itself has malfunctioned: “.iMMerse your soUL in LOVE” That absolutely did me in. Because it doesn’t say love will fix everything. This album has spent forty-odd minutes explaining why it won’t. It says choose love anyway. Everything is broken. Be kind. That’s why it’s five stars. Not because every second is perfect, or because Radiohead have already become the band that will make OK Computer and Kid A. Quite the opposite. The Bends deserves five stars because it is a fully realised achievement by a band which has just become magnificent at being this particular thing. And then refuses to stay there. The album almost deserves a Bond-film caption after “Street Spirit” fades away: RADIOHEAD WILL RETURN. Next time, “Airbag” will begin with cello and guitar moving together and an entire audience will wonder what the hell that sound is. They had no idea what would follow.

There is something wonderfully absurd about the fact that one of the defining sounds of early-60s American sophistication appears to have been invented almost by accident on a Tuesday afternoon in a church hall. Charlie Byrd had encountered bossa nova during a South American tour, came home enthused by this new musical language, got Stan Getz involved, and on 13 February 1962 they gathered a small group of musicians at All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington DC. There was very little rehearsal. They played for a few hours. And then America apparently decided this was what being sophisticated sounded like. That, for me, is the way into Jazz Samba. Not primarily as a lesson in the Brazilian origins of bossa nova, important though those obviously are, but as the point where America hears this music and immediately begins constructing an entire aesthetic around it. You can practically see the teak stereogram. Pan Am. Smart suits. One-piece dresses. Clean lines. Bright plastic. Cigarettes used as punctuation. Ice moving around a vodka martini while somebody has a surprisingly deep conversation without allowing their tie to become crooked. The world of North by Northwest, slipping almost imperceptibly towards Mad Men. The Soviets may be moving missiles into Cuba, but somebody has remembered the drinks trolley. The problem with hearing Jazz Samba sixty-four years later is that we already know what happened to this sound. We have heard decades of lounge music, easy listening, hotel bars, test cards, bachelor-pad records, advertising music and elevators. The vocabulary became so completely associated with manufactured sophistication that it is difficult to remember that in 1962 the cliché did not yet exist. And that is what makes the record so endearing. You can hear the joins. “Desafinado”, the big breakthrough, is beautiful, but it still has corners. The percussion is noticeably rougher and more exposed than the smoothed-out bossa-derived sound that would soon be reproduced by the acre. There are moments where the rhythm section seems almost to be negotiating the language in real time. The texture thins, everybody becomes more sensitive, and when the ensemble rebuilds it feels more settled than it did at the beginning. It is accidental lounge jazz in embryo form. The lounge has not yet been upholstered. And underneath it all is Charlie Byrd, who increasingly struck me as the real engine of this record. Getz is inevitably the glamorous voice. That tenor sound is extraordinary: breathy, easy, apparently unforced, as though difficult harmonic navigation is simply something his lungs happen to do. But Byrd is doing an absurd amount of work. Rhythm, harmony, propulsion, responses, little movements underneath the saxophone: he gives Getz a floor secure enough for him to float over. Again and again I found myself abandoning the obvious thing to listen to and concentrating on the guitar instead. Getz gets the glamour. Byrd builds the machine. “Samba Dees Days” also demonstrates how different this still is from the later industrialised version of the sound. It moves. Quickly. There is something in its musical logic that reminds me of the more conservative end of hard bop. Getz is certainly not Coltrane: there is none of that density or pressure in his tone. He remains cool, breathy and almost ridiculously relaxed. But listen to the speed at which he negotiates the chord changes. He is dancing around them. The track feels playful. Even the dreadful pun in the title gives the game away. This is not reverential genre tourism. It is jazz musicians being handed a new toy and discovering what they can do with it. “O Pato” gets closer to the world that America would eventually seize upon. It has that peculiar pre-Beatles, Kennedy-era optimism: jet travel, hi-fi, modern furniture, cocktails, atomic testing somewhere safely beyond the picture window. But what struck me most was the playing near the end. The ensemble falls into this gorgeous pianissimo and effectively fades itself out without anyone reaching for a fader. As someone used to rock music, I tend to regard bands executing a really controlled collective diminuendo as somewhere between impressive and miraculous. Jazz musicians apparently do this for fucking breakfast. Then “Samba Triste” walks into the room and the lights go down. This is the minor-key version of the future industrial product. The ice is moving around the martini glass. There are wisps of cigarette smoke. Somebody is having a serious conversation but remaining immaculately dressed throughout. And the rhythm section is absurdly composed. At the slower tempo there is nowhere to hide, yet everything ticks away like a Swiss watch. Byrd is navigating some genuinely rich harmony while Getz just seems to breathe through it. Nothing is hurried. Nothing is laboured. There is an enormous amount happening, but nobody seems remotely interested in telling you how difficult it is. Where “Desafinado” had corners, “Samba Triste” sounds fluent. I have no idea where it actually fell in the recording order, but as a listening experience it feels like hearing musicians who have stopped translating the language and started speaking it. And then we get “Samba de Uma Nota Só”. “One Note Samba”. One note my arse. What is delightful about this performance is how enthusiastically they refuse to honour the premise. Getz rolls and smears notes around the harmony, skipping through changes with that same apparent lack of effort. The title suggests severe economy; Getz seems to regard that as a personal provocation. Byrd is much more restrained. And that is exactly why the performance works. He stays closer to the central compositional joke, deliberately limiting his range while Getz dances around him. If both musicians had gone wandering off simultaneously, it would have been exhausting. Instead, Byrd anchors the conceit while Getz plays with it. Later, the two move into a quick call-and-response passage that reminded me, oddly, of Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli. Not stylistically. Obviously. The similarity is in the behaviour of the musicians: two highly fluent players handing momentum backwards and forwards, provoking each other, responding, dodging, throwing little ideas into the other man’s path. Hot Club de France translated across the Atlantic into Brazilian rhythm and American jazz harmony. And then, for the final few bars, they finally return properly to the one-note premise. Until Getz sticks in one cheeky extra note at the end. Perfect. By the closing “Bahia”, the future is almost completely visible. I can see the fucking BBC test card, and my pre-school days are returning to me with devastating clarity. The smoothness, the restraint, the internationalism, the sophisticated surfaces: everything that would subsequently be extracted from this music and turned into atmosphere is sitting there. Except Jazz Samba itself still refuses to become wallpaper because the musicians are doing far too much interesting stuff. That is the great comedy of the album. Nobody here appears to be attempting to invent lounge jazz. They are making a lovely little jazz experiment, playing with a rhythmic and harmonic language that interests them. The experiment works so spectacularly that the market immediately understands the easiest bits of it and starts stripping them for parts. Keep the softness. Keep the Brazilian rhythmic signifiers. Keep the nylon-string guitar. Keep the sense of cosmopolitan sophistication. Lose some of the improvisation, the risk, the rough edges and the musicians actually listening to each other. Excellent! We will need forty thousand yards of that for hotels. So Jazz Samba feels like one of those peculiar artistic moments where the original is retrospectively blamed for all the terrible things people subsequently did with its ideas. But the cliché isn’t here yet. This is the Please Please Me moment, or the “That’s All Right” moment: not necessarily the final or most refined statement of what follows, but the point where you can hear a whole vocabulary suddenly becoming possible. A bunch of musicians dicking about in a church hall with microphones and unwittingly giving permission to an entire genre and a gazillion imitators. History in hindsight. Tuesday in the room. And all of that would merely make Jazz Samba fascinating if the record itself weren’t so bloody beautiful. But it is. I could put this on while working and happily let it run all day. I could equally sit down and listen closely to Byrd’s guitar, Getz moving through those changes, the rhythm section adjusting itself by tiny degrees, and find more to enjoy every time. It does not need historical importance to earn five stars. It gets five stars because I fucking love it. Although one of those stars is definitely giving you a wink.

The more closely I listen to Urban Hymns, the less convinced I am that its greatness lies principally in its songs. That sounds odd for an album containing “Bitter Sweet Symphony”, “The Drugs Don’t Work”, “Lucky Man” and “Sonnet”, but several become surprisingly slight when reduced to voice and acoustic guitar. Anyone who has played “Sonnet” knows the feeling: remove the strings, the scale and Richard Ashcroft’s conviction, and suddenly you wonder whether the underlying song can really support all the emotional weight we attach to it. The answer is that it doesn’t have to. With The Verve, the song is the armature around which the recording is constructed. Backwards guitars, strings, slide, delay, reverb, tiny electronic transmissions and Ashcroft’s ghostly double-tracking are not decoration; they are part of the composition. Urban Hymns is an album where production becomes meaning. That is why I think of it as an impressionist record. It doesn’t have the intellectual architecture of OK Computer, or even The Bends, and it doesn’t particularly want it. Radiohead make you consider propositions; The Verve create weather. Ashcroft’s lyrics often mean something and don’t mean something at the same time, assembling roads, heavens, tears, butterflies, corridors, love, medication and dreams until emotional recognition takes the place of literal interpretation. Nick McCabe then creates the environment in which those images shimmer and change colour. This also resolves what can look like the album’s great structural problem. It appears to contain two records: the accessible Verve Britain fell catastrophically in love with during 1997, and the old psychedelic Verve, full of repetition, altered states and vast washes of guitar, fronted by a man practising what can only really be described as Wigan quasi-Rosicrucianism. I now think those are not two competing albums at all. Ashcroft needs both languages. The quieter songs seek connection; the psychedelic songs seek transcendence. One asks whether another person can inhabit your experience; the other asks whether you can briefly escape the boundaries of experience itself. “Space and Time” may be where the two meet most completely. It is one of the stronger conventional songs here, but the backwards guitars quietly unmoor it while Ashcroft arrives at one of his simplest and best formulations: “we have existence and it’s all we share”. The mystical Ashcroft keeps searching for transcendence; the human Ashcroft keeps searching for companionship. Here he seems to realise they might be the same search. Ashcroft himself is crucial to why any of this works. Around 1997 he acquired a strangely iconographic quality: all cheekbones, upward gaze, private suffering and apparent revelation, something between a secular Sacred Heart and Saint Sebastian with the arrows still in him. “Eyes open wide, looking at the heavens with a tear in my eyes” from “Sonnet” feels less like a lyric than the passport photograph for the whole album. At times Urban Hymns resembles stained glass more than narrative. Ashcroft is the fixed icon and the production is sunlight passing through him, forever changing colour. McCabe prevents all this from becoming unbearable. His guitar continually introduces friction, ambiguity and physical pleasure. “The Rolling People” has a seductive loping gait, layers of delay and reverb, delicate picked filigree and then a great pharmaceutical onslaught in which the band seems determined to dissolve its own boundaries. For a few minutes The Verve sound like the psychedelic Rolling Stones the Rolling Stones themselves never quite managed to become: not Their Satanic Majesties Request, but the filthy momentum of Exile on Main St. projected into a cosmic dreamscape. That psychedelic side matters because it prevents the reflective half of Urban Hymns from settling into tasteful adult rock. Had the album consisted entirely of variations on “Lucky Man”, “Sonnet” and “The Drugs Don’t Work”, it might have become a late-90s The Seldom Seen Kid: beautifully made, humane and slightly too respectable. Instead, “The Rolling People”, “Catching the Butterfly”, “Neon Wilderness” and the final swampy dissolution of “Come On” keep opening trapdoors beneath the polished surface. The acoustic songs made The Verve legible to millions; the psychedelic songs ensured that what those millions encountered was still The Verve. Britain happened to be unusually receptive to that contradiction. Britpop had plenty of drawbacks and ultimately hardened into formula, but its great achievement was not necessarily what it sounded like; it was what it aspired to. The ambition was not simply to recreate 1966, but to insist that contemporary popular music should possess the cultural ambition of 1966. By 1997 that idea had escaped Britpop itself. Radio 1 could put the Spice Girls beside Babybird and nobody thought it strange. OK Computer, Spiritualized, The Chemical Brothers, Cornershop, Fatboy Slim and The Verve could all inhabit the mainstream. Britpop could be conservative in vocabulary, but its consequences were expansive: it restored the idea that interesting music was entitled to be culturally enormous. Into that environment came “Bitter Sweet Symphony”. Cultural overexposure has somehow failed to kill it. The string motif supplies relentless forward motion while tubular bells, odd electronic tweets and Ashcroft’s ghostly self-harmonising suggest another frequency operating around it. “I’m a million different people from one day to the next” still seems central to his worldview, and by the final great cry about taking you down the only road he has ever been down, reflection has become manifesto. Then, at the end of August 1997, Britain’s emotional climate changed abruptly with the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. I mean the subsequent national grief strictly as a sociological observation, not something I personally shared; from outside it, the sudden transformation of tabloid gossip into national mourning seemed febrile and deeply strange. Nevertheless, the cultural phenomenon was unmistakable. “The Drugs Don’t Work” arrived on 1 September and the coincidence was almost grotesquely exact. “Bitter Sweet Symphony” had spent the summer gradually becoming ubiquitous; “The Drugs Don’t Work” went from zero to number one immediately. A new record about death, helplessness and necessary medicine finally being unable to save somebody appeared at precisely the moment when much of Britain was searching for a language of grief, and the country absorbed it almost instantly. Nobody could possibly have engineered that fit. For roughly a year, The Verve occupied that strange position where success becomes symbolic importance. I saw the apotheosis at Haigh Hall in May 1998, when around 30,000 people gathered in Wigan for what felt like a small Woodstock for Greater Manchester. Beck was supporting, the BBC treated the main set as a national event, the egress afterwards was almost biblical, and during “The Drugs Don’t Work” the field became so astonishingly herbal that one half-expected the Grateful Dead to emerge through the smoke. When Ashcroft sang “I just can’t make it alone” during “Space and Time”, tens of thousands of people answered him. Sometimes the language of transcendence is justified because sometimes the thing actually happens. That same impulse explains why “Come On” is the perfect ending. After all the bruised ballads and stained-glass mysticism, The Verve refuse a tasteful conclusion. Ashcroft moves through God, spirit, pills, pain and exhortation until “come on” stops functioning as language at all. It means yes, keep going, everyone in, let go, fuck it, this is happening, beautiful. The band disappears into a swampy psychedelic freakout while Ashcroft howls that there is only one life and offers one enormous “fuck you” to whatever requires one. That is why Urban Hymns remains a five-star album for me. Not because every composition is equally strong, and not because its two musical personalities fit together neatly, but because those apparent weaknesses are inseparable from its achievement. Slight songs become enormous environments; contradictions become a coherent worldview; simple language acquires weight through performance; production becomes meaning. The historical moment explains why Urban Hymns became a phenomenon. It does not explain why the record still works once that moment has gone. The stained glass remains, and Urban Hymns still makes its own weather.

David Bowie was never much of a memoirist. Even when drawing on his own experience, he tended to abstract it, displace it, put it into somebody else’s mouth or send it through enough theatrical machinery that by the time it reached us it had become Bowie material rather than David Jones telling us about his life. That makes The Next Day an unusually interesting late record, because at 65 he seems finally prepared to let quite a lot of his past back into the room. Not sentimentally, and certainly not as heritage management. He takes old places, old musical vocabularies, old social worlds and perhaps old memories, then treats them with the same suspicion he would have brought to any other source material. David Jones may supply some of the memories, but David Bowie still does the processing. There is an obvious temptation to hear all of this through the knowledge that Bowie would be dead less than three years after the album appeared. That needs resisting only up to a point. In 2013 nobody knew he had cancer, and his death at 69 came as a genuine rupture, so The Next Day should not be turned retrospectively into a coded farewell album. But the opposite move is just as lazy. When the title track gives us “here I am, not quite dying” followed by a body left to rot and the shadow of the gallows, hindsight does not invent the mortality; it changes its voltage. Bowie did not need to know he was dying to know that life was finite. By your mid-sixties you do not require a diagnosis to understand that there is more road behind you than there was at 25, and one of the fascinating things here is hearing an artist who spent much of his career inventing futures begin to look backwards without allowing the past to become cosy. That is why the title track is such a terrific opening statement. It is brutal, abrasive and completely unsentimental, with something of Scary Monsters in its serrated attack and something older and more theatrical underneath it. The younger Bowie who played Baal still has Brechtian instincts: show us the body, the decay, the gallows and the machinery of power, but do not tell us how to feel about them. The contrast with late Leonard Cohen is illuminating. Cohen could approach mortality as something quietly admitted into the room, frightening but increasingly negotiable. Bowie here has not come to terms with a bloody thing. There is no wisdom bestowed by age, no consoling glow, just anger, persistence and the astonishing economy of getting an entire dramatic argument done in 3:27. That theatrical instinct runs through the album in stranger ways than I remembered. “Dirty Boys” rolls into view like some contemporary Kurt Weill number that has taken a wrong turn through Laurie Anderson’s Big Science, its saxophones staggering and lurching rather than decorating anything. It feels impressionistic rather than autobiographical: the texture of running with some youthful gang which probably felt enormously important at the time and, viewed across half a century, may have been neither here nor there. Bowie does not polish the memory. He makes it crooked, grubby and slightly ridiculous, then lets the song lope and tumble away as if the boys themselves have disappeared around the corner. It is a good example of what The Next Day repeatedly does with the past: not nostalgia, but estrangement. The record is equally suspicious of celebrity. “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)” treats famous people less as individuals than as a pack, a club, almost a separate species: watching us while we watch them, glamorous and predatory and faintly ridiculous. It sounds at times like a public information film warning about the dangers of encountering stars in the wild, which is particularly funny coming from someone who had spent decades as one of the most famous people alive. Bowie was unusually privileged as a celebrity because he eventually acquired something most famous people never have: agency. He could withdraw, stop feeding the machine and decide when David Bowie was available for public consumption. It also now sounds uncannily applicable to social media, where celebrity culture has exported its behavioural logic to everybody else and invited us all to become little stars of our own construction. Elsewhere, the album is fascinated by people trapped inside structures. “Love Is Lost” addresses someone who is only 22 but appears already to have amassed an entire life: country, friends, house, accent, identity. Not simply possessions, but architecture. You can ossify surprisingly young, and Bowie understands the horror of discovering that the life you have constructed may already be enclosing you. “Where Are We Now?” approaches the same problem through place. Bowie’s frail voice hovers over synth pads carrying a faint memory of Low, while he walks mentally through a Berlin whose coordinates still exist but whose meaning has moved. Berlin in 2013 must have been a lively ghost of Berlin in 1977: you can return to the street, the station, the square, but the world which once made those places yours has become somebody else’s present. Not every idea earns its weight. “Valentine’s Day” takes the imagined mind of a school shooter and turns it into a neat, disturbing sketch built around a brutally black pun. It is not exploitative, but the lyric does not penetrate deeply enough into its enormous subject to make the song much more than that. “If You Can See Me”, by contrast, is the kind of Bowie I find irresistible: language tumbling over itself, identities appearing and dissolving, syntax apparently losing control while the writer behind it plainly has control. Bad stream of consciousness is looseness; good stream of consciousness is engineered instability. The same attraction to instability gives the middle of the album some of its best musical moments: the odd chord changes and rhythmic unease of “I’d Rather Be High”, the beguiling saxophones on “Boss of Me”, and the doubled vocals and rootless groove of “Dancing Out in Space”, which sounds like dancing with the floor removed. The final third becomes stranger still because Bowie starts looking east. “How Does the Grass Grow?” constructs a scarred European landscape from mopeds, sandals, stations, young people and graveyards, then corrupts a nursery-rhyme form into a grotesque military chant. The kids meet in the graveyard only to become the sort of people history eventually puts there. “You Feel So Lonely You Could Die” is musically huge and emotionally expansive in a form that might ordinarily suggest bereavement or romantic catastrophe, except Bowie points all that machinery towards guilt, treachery, paranoia and someone condemned to spend the rest of their life looking over their shoulder. The Cold War may have ended, but the people formed or brutalised by it did not disappear when the flags came down. Bowie was writing this in 2011–12, shortly before the post-Cold-War settlement in Europe began visibly coming apart again. I would not call any of this prophecy, but this was also the man who looked at the internet in 1999 and understood that its important consequences would be behavioural rather than technical. He had a good eye for systems everyone else had prematurely decided were stable. Then “Heat” empties the room and wanders straight into Scott Walker territory. “My father ran the prison” is far more interesting if we resist turning it into autobiography and instead hear the father as authority itself: the person who controls confinement and release, the first regime under which the narrator exists. Family becomes institution; love and hatred become ways of negotiating power. Eventually Bowie arrives at “I don’t know who I am”, and that may be the perfect line on which to leave this album. Who is David Bowie, artistically? Who was David Bowie? Like Peter Sellers, he can sometimes appear to consist of voices, characters and performed identities, but with Bowie I do not think that means there was nothing underneath. The instability itself seems to have been the principle. Identity was provisional, assembled, revised, discarded and reconstructed. That is where The Next Day finally comes together for me. Bowie has spent an album taking things down from the shelves: Berlin, youth, celebrity, old musical languages, European history, former selves. But he does not put those shelves neatly back in order and offer us the completed catalogue of David Bowie. He can tell us where he was, tell us what he remembers, and turn David Jones’s past into extraordinary material, but he still refuses to tell us who he is. There is an enormous amount here to admire: an intelligent, abrasive, frequently strange record by an artist deeply suspicious of sentimentality and of his own mythology. Its weaker moments are not bad so much as too smooth or too slight for the ideas they carry, and somewhere in the later stages some of the dangerous edges get rubbed down. Perhaps that is why this took me almost an entire day to finish. The Next Day has given me a remarkable amount to think about, but the distinction matters: it has engaged me, surprised me and repeatedly impressed me without ever quite taking possession of this listener.

There is a particular trap in reviewing albums this old: it becomes very easy to spend your time finding cheap gotchas against records that other people have loved for seventy years. Louis Prima’s The Wildest! is especially vulnerable. It is emphatically 1956, emphatically showbusiness, and full of Italian-American shtick, nightclub patter and little bits of business that can look horribly dated if you arrive determined to prove that 1956 was, indeed, not 2026. I prefer to start from the opposite assumption: these people probably knew what they were doing. It’s in the fucking book for a reason. That doesn’t grant anybody immunity from hubris, overreach, coldness or excess, but merely sounding like the age in which you were recorded is not grounds for a conviction. And The Wildest! rewards that bit of generosity almost immediately, because beneath all the showmanship is a seriously good swing band. Prima’s great trick on “Just a Gigolo / I Ain’t Got Nobody” is to set the floor before he starts removing the floorboards. He begins by demonstrating that he can really sing, then gradually introduces the interjections, the mugging, the dialogue with the band and finally the full theatrical performance. The apparent disorder works because the musicians underneath it remain completely secure. This is not really a comedy record so much as superb musicianship performed with comic brio. Keely Smith is essential to that equation. She has a gorgeous lower register and wonderful jazz timing, sitting inside the swing rather than trying to dominate it. On “Nothing’s Too Good for My Baby”, her poise gives Prima something to bounce against: he adds little interjections, close harmonies and quasi-scat responses without disturbing the shape of her vocal, and the little joke at the end about the pair apparently being unable to stand one another is funny precisely because the musical intimacy beforehand has been so convincing. It is old variety grammar: establish the straight performance properly before you start messing with it. A lot of Prima’s supposed comedy works in much the same way as McCartney’s excited screams on early Beatles records. The “woo!” at the end of “Twist and Shout” isn’t really a gag; it’s audience permission. It tells you that this is exciting and you are allowed to behave accordingly. Prima’s relationship with the Witnesses often has that function. He prods the band, they answer, he pretends they are struggling to keep up, and the whole performance acquires personality without ceasing to be music. “The Lip” takes this into gently surreal vaudeville territory, while “Body and Soul” begins with beautifully restrained trumpet before wandering into a smart-arse little medley of musical quotations: aren’t we clever, don’t we know a lot of tunes, and don’t you enjoy recognising them too? It’s the same pleasure the Beatles would later exploit in the coda of “All You Need Is Love”. But it would be a mistake to oversell the jokes, because the musicianship repeatedly pushes them into the background. There is gorgeous restrained trumpet playing, lovely piano on “Jump, Jive an’ Wail”, and Sam Butera’s saxophone is tremendous. “Buona Sera” is one of the highlights: the Witnesses absolutely slap, and the arrangement eventually tilts into an almost tango-like rhythm without ever sounding as though somebody has bolted a different song onto the end. Then “Night Train” gives the band the spotlight. Prima continues to mug as though he is pushing the Witnesses beyond their ability to keep up, except they are negotiating stop-time passages where everybody has to hit the breaks and re-entries together without losing the groove. You could still, at this point, wonder whether all the showmanship has been disguising the limitations of a very good cabaret band. The answer is no, these are serious players. “Night Train” is basically their employment reference. That also helps explain why The Wildest! belongs in this particular canon. The usual history of the 1950s can become suspiciously tidy: swing and jazz over here, then along comes rock and roll and everything changes. Prima makes those borders look much messier. “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South” develops a wonderfully breathless momentum that at times approaches a rock-and-roll register, while the hard sax attack and rhythmic propulsion elsewhere aren’t a million miles from Bill Haley and the Comets. Prima is still firmly rooted in swing, jump blues, nightclub entertainment and variety, but you can hear some of the energy of the next era already running through the band. “Jump, Jive an’ Wail” in particular feels almost chemically Eisenhower-era: Vegas neon, enormous cars, women in pointy sunglasses and headscarves, cocktails by the pool and a nuclear test going off somewhere in the Nevada desert at seven because apparently you might as well watch it before breakfast. The whole album has that same shiny, accelerated confidence. It poses for the photograph. By the time Prima reaches “(I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead) You Rascal You”, even an old song with a genuinely nasty premise has been turned into affectionate silliness about somebody stealing his ravioli and meatballs. The murderous refrain now sounds less like menace than the way you might address a particularly badly behaved stray dog: you absolute little bastard, I fed you. I liked The Wildest! a lot. It doesn’t quite have the extra dimension that would push it towards five stars for me, but it is extremely good at what it sets out to do, and considerably more musically sophisticated than its apparent looseness suggests. Most importantly, it belongs to an entertainment tradition that saw no contradiction whatsoever between being funny, theatrical, audience-facing and technically excellent. The Wildest! sounds loose because everybody involved is good enough to make looseness a performance choice.

By 2005, The White Stripes had acquired a problem they hadn’t really had before: everybody knew what The White Stripes were. White Blood Cells had made them indie darlings; Elephant and “Seven Nation Army” had turned them into something approaching public property. They were on Top of the Pops, Sofia Coppola had Kate Moss pole-dancing in a White Stripes video, and the peculiar little red-white-and-black duo that once required advocacy suddenly didn’t need anyone explaining them at all. Success had supplied them with an identity, and identities supplied by other people have a habit of becoming cages. So Jack White did something I approve of enormously. He went home with the songs substantially unfinished, surrounded himself with instruments he wasn’t especially fluent on and got thirteen tracks made in roughly a fortnight. The Elephant in the room needed to be moved quickly. Make Elephant again and you’ve gone stale; don’t make it again and you’ve betrayed whatever everybody has just decided to love about you. The only sensible response is to get another record into existence before expectation has time to harden around it. What’s fascinating is how completely Get Behind Me Satan exposes the real White Stripes formula. It was never “huge guitar plus Meg hitting things”. It was reduction. Use very little, make every sound carry weight, leave the gaps alone, keep the accidents, and stop when the idea is finished rather than when the song has reached some respectable length. Swap guitar for piano, marimba, toy piano, hand drum or acoustic strings and the method survives perfectly well. “My Doorbell” could almost be transplanted onto an earlier album if you put the guitar back in; “Little Ghost” is an informal half-secular hymn whose jaunty surface hides a relationship gone paper-thin; “Instinct Blues” is Cole Porter crossed with Muddy Waters, at points reducing itself beyond rhythm into little more than scrapes, squeaks and bits of abused string. The ingredients have changed. The method hasn’t. White has also built himself a recording setup in which he hasn’t got time to become self-conscious. The songs are unfinished, the instruments unfamiliar, the deadline absurd. It’s the musical equivalent of writing before you’ve had time to cross anything out. The result is rough but extraordinarily competently captured. On “My Doorbell” he backs away from the microphone and lets the room get into the vocal; you hear the walls, the distance, the physical act of singing. On “The Nurse”, the beautiful marimbas are punctured by Meg’s enormous boneheaded drum stabs. Nothing is being polished into obedience. The album keeps the life in the first impulse. And what comes through that lack of filtration is a surprisingly bruised Jack White. Broken trust runs through the record, but so does the need to escape other people’s expectations, and I don’t hear those as separate themes. “The Nurse” turns the person who is supposed to care for you into the source of the wound. “The Denial Twist” understands the dangerous privilege of the songwriter: private life becomes public material, and the singer gets the microphone. “White Moon” is an impressionist nursery rhyme for an expressionist performer, its Rita Hayworth imagery floating past in fragments while White sings as though every fragment matters desperately. At times the feelings are gauche and raw. Good. A record made this way ought to show the bits that a more careful process would have tidied out. The really interesting thread, though, is projection. “Take, Take, Take” is one of the sharpest songs here because Jack’s own explanation of it — that it’s about people not being taught manners — is absolutely sufficient. A fan meets Rita Hayworth and every request is “all I needed” until it is granted, at which point he needs something else. She eventually says she needs some sleep and he decides that seems mean. By the end he has converted her perfectly ordinary boundary into evidence that she never cared he was there at all. That’s fandom curdling into grievance: the object of admiration stubbornly remains a subject with her own fatigue, time and interior life, and the fan takes offence. Fame merely magnifies a very ordinary failure of empathy. “As Ugly As I Seem” then turns the same problem back onto Jack. Someone has a “vision that you had decided for me”, and that line feels central to the whole album. Creativity doesn’t make somebody a saint, but audiences often discover an artist, canonise an imaginary version of them, and then become furious when the ordinary flawed person starts showing through. The correction can be as false as the worship. The artist goes from saint to monster without ever having been seen. Get Behind Me Satan increasingly sounds like a record made by someone discovering how unpleasant it is to be surrounded by other people’s versions of you. By “Red Rain”, that relationship with the outside world has properly curdled. “You think not telling is the same as not lying” is trust reduced to semantic evasion; “if there is a lie, then there is a liar too” refuses to let responsibility disappear into fog. The song itself sounds slightly broken, toy piano and familiar White Stripes attack reassembled just a little out of true. It’s less angry than emotionally wrecked, as though even the language two people use to negotiate honesty has stopped working. Then the whole record shrinks down to an old country ballad on a piano. “I’m Lonely (But I Ain’t That Lonely Yet)” begins, “Well I miss my mother and I miss being her son”, and suddenly artist, celebrity, difficult bastard, genius and projected public object all fall away. Whatever you become, you remain somebody’s son. Later White nearly whispers the verse about going down to the river, wondering whether any reason was left, and leaving just before his lungs could get wet. He barely seems to dare say it. Yet the song isn’t surrender. Its subtext feels closer to: I’m not rewriting myself for anybody. He can admit loneliness, regret, selfishness, ugliness and despair without accepting somebody else’s preferred version of him. That is why this gets five stars from me. Not because every moment is immaculate, but because I watched an artist deliberately get himself back to a place where he could surprise himself. He abandoned the tools with which he had just become enormously successful, trusted speed, reduction, accident and unfamiliarity, and discovered that the White Stripes identity survived perfectly well without the props everyone had mistaken for its essence. Get Behind Me Satan looks like a band running away from what made them themselves. In fact it proves they knew exactly what mattered and what could be thrown away. The Elephant in the room needed to be moved quickly. They moved it.

I knew Groovin’ already, but this listen made me realise I’d underestimated my relationship with it. Six years ago I knew I liked it; this time I had a much better vocabulary for why. The Young Rascals are an extraordinarily fluent band. Soul and R&B aren’t styles they’re trying on, but the language they already speak, and that gives them the freedom to spend most of this album cheerfully ignoring the question of what sort of band they are supposed to be. If Groovin’ reminds me of anything outside music, oddly enough it’s Richard Linklater’s Waking Life. The rotoscoping in that film is continually changing style: if one visual treatment doesn’t grab you, don’t worry, another one will be along shortly. Groovin’ has much the same restlessness. Its musical surface keeps mutating, sometimes dramatically, without the intelligence underneath it changing. Soul, garage psychedelia, chanson, doo-wop, sunshine pop, Latin-inflected rhythm, acoustic pop and the emerging “heavy” sound of 1967 all pass through, and you barely have time to acclimatise before the picture changes again. That could easily have produced an incoherent mess. What saves it is fluency. A British group reaching for American soul at this point could make wonderful records while still sounding like students of the language. The Beatles, for example, loved this music and absorbed huge amounts from it, but on something like “Got to Get You Into My Life” I can still hear the act of translation: brilliant musicians asking themselves how brass and soul rhythm might work inside a Beatles record. With the Rascals, that grammar seems internal. Brass, Hammond, backing vocals and groove don’t arrive as stylistic signifiers; they behave organically because this is where the band started. That makes their experimentation unusually convincing. “How Can I Be Sure” can suddenly adopt the emotional posture of chanson, complete with accordion and a harmony that seems permanently reluctant to tell you where home is, without sounding like a novelty French number. “Find Somebody” can head into murky, blunt-chorded Nuggets territory, not a million miles from the 13th Floor Elevators or the Misunderstood, and still retain the physical confidence of a soul band. “A Place in the Sun” can borrow the grammar of doo-wop, including a spoken interlude and false ending, without turning into revivalist comedy. They’re not putting costumes on. They seem to understand what these different musical languages are actually for. The self-production matters too. That was still highly unusual for a young pop group in 1967, and what’s interesting is that the Rascals don’t use the freedom to impose a grand unified studio aesthetic. Quite the opposite: Groovin’ sometimes feels as though they have decided to produce eleven singles. Each song gets whatever shape, instrumentation and atmosphere it needs, with almost no obligation to resemble the song on either side of it. This is an album in the older sense — a collection of songs — made with a very modern confidence that every one of those songs can inhabit its own world. The title track remains the most startling example of that freedom. “Groovin’” still sounds remarkably modern to me: the whole temperature, pressure and tempo of the band suddenly change, and this previously muscular R&B group drifts into relaxed Latin/Caribbean-inflected soul-pop without making a fuss about the transition. It doesn’t sound “tropical” because somebody has decorated the studio with palm trees; the feeling is embedded in the rhythm. Coming from the band that made “Good Lovin’”, it isn’t a modest development so much as a colossal sidestep. There’s plenty of sheer pop pleasure here too. “A Girl Like You” has gorgeous soul backing vocals, a wonderfully crisp snare, brass, piano and even harp, yet everything feels load-bearing rather than decorative. “I’m So Happy Now” has an irresistible bounce that briefly put me in mind of the Small Faces. “If You Knew” sounds as though it could have wandered off Help!, particularly in some of its “Tell Me What You See”-like cadences. “You Better Run” periodically settles into a lovely slab of rhythm-guitar-and-Hammond heaviness while somehow continuing to groove rather than merely thud. There is a slight dip for me with “I Don’t Love You Anymore”, which eventually leans a little too far into cheese, but the hit rate is remarkably high. More importantly, the album keeps moving. By the closing “It’s Love”, the structures themselves seem to be loosening: flute, odd little piano figures dropping through the register, forward propulsion underneath while the song starts to break down and dissolve. It feels less like a grand finale than a band discovering that the doors have opened onto a looser musical world and seeing no particular reason to close them again. So what genre is Groovin’? “Psychedelic soul-pop” is probably the least inadequate answer, but really the genre is pop in the broadest possible sense: take anything useful, understand it properly, shape it into a song and move on before anyone can box you in. A genre-agnostic delight, and a strong four stars.

There is something almost deceptive about the sheer competence of this record. Owen Bradley is producing, the Jordanaires are hovering decorously behind Loretta, and Nashville’s session musicians sound as though playing country music this immaculately is no more taxing than making a cup of tea. You could put Don’t Come Home a-Drinkin’ on, pay no attention whatsoever to the words, and hear an exceptionally well-made 1967 Nashville album. But that immaculate surface is also the delivery system for material about drunkenness, infidelity, sexual double standards, loneliness, separation and the unequal terms on which marriage could operate. That is where Loretta Lynn becomes fascinating. She isn’t attacking marriage from outside it. If anything, this album takes marriage ferociously seriously. Love matters, fidelity matters, companionship matters, the home matters, and precisely because all those things matter, the husband does not get to behave as though only his wife is bound by them. The title track lays out the proposition immediately: you cannot stagger home drunk after a night out and expect affection merely because you have arrived. It is an extraordinarily blunt domestic ultimatum delivered over music sprightly enough to play at a church picnic. Country music has always been rather better at plain speaking than its reputation suggests, but there is a productive tension here between form and function. Nashville country of this period had formidable professional gatekeepers: the song had to work, the singer had to deliver it, the musicians had to know exactly where to put every note, and the resulting record had to pass as respectable entertainment. Loretta fulfils every requirement and then uses the access she has gained to say some distinctly inconvenient things. Her voice is part of the trick. She rarely sounds like she is delivering a manifesto. She sounds clear, reasonable, tuneful and sometimes positively cheerful while explaining why the arrangements between men and women are bullshit. The really striking thing, though, is the programming. This is not a concept album, but the songs repeatedly behave as though they have heard the song before them and now have to deal with its consequences. “The Shoe Goes on the Other Foot Tonight”, originally a contemporary Marty Robbins song, becomes far more charged when Loretta sings it. A husband staying out drinking was socially legible; a wife claiming precisely the same freedom carried very different consequences. Loretta goes out anyway and leaves him to do the waiting, worrying and presumably some of the domestic work that made his own freedom possible. “Saint to a Sinner” follows and pushes at the same double standard: male misconduct can be treated as behaviour, while female misconduct is liable to become character. The album is equally good when it refuses to make Loretta merely the prosecuting counsel for inadequate husbands. “I Really Don’t Want to Know” understands that people arrive in relationships with histories and that knowing every detail about the people they loved before you is not necessarily a route to happiness. “There Goes My Everything” refuses another convenient fiction: the idea that once somebody leaves, you must immediately rewrite the relationship so that they were always terrible and you secretly knew it. Sometimes somebody mattered enormously and still left. You are allowed unfinished business. Then comes one of the album’s best little sequences. “I Can’t Keep Away From You” briefly abandons grievance altogether and simply admits that being in love can override every sensible objection. People can be absolute idiots and still reach a point where you would rather be with them than anybody else. Immediately afterwards, “I’m Living in Two Worlds” wakes up and surveys the damage. With him, she pretends to be happy and knows she does not fit; without him, she is cold and lonely. Wanting somebody and being able to construct a workable life with them turn out to be entirely different propositions. That emotional untidiness is perhaps the album’s greatest strength. “Get What ’Cha Got and Go”, co-written by Loretta, lasts less than two minutes and is essentially an eviction notice. He says she is holding him back; her magnificent response is that she will help him pack. Fine. Off you go. Then “Making Plans” immediately admits that watching him actually leave is going to break her heart. This is how relationships often end: not with one immaculate decision followed by enlightenment, but with anger, acceptance, refusal, tenderness and grief taking turns at the wheel. Loretta’s own songs also have a little extra attack. She is a superb interpreter of outside material, and the song selection throughout is doing enormous work, but when the words are hers she seems to know exactly where to place the knife. The closing “I Got Caught” is particularly good. She does not claim innocence; she admits cheating. Her argument is that the man condemning her is an experienced cheat himself. He got away with it. She got caught. The album’s whole argument about unequal standards is compressed into that distinction. Unexpectedly, I kept thinking about Lucinda Williams’ Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. They sound nothing alike, but they share an understanding that adult relationships are contradictory, compromised and resistant to tidy moral conclusions. Williams had another 31 years of women in country, folk and rock enlarging the space in which a female artist could speak, write and construct an entire world. Loretta Lynn is one of the people helping to create that space in the first place. The coal miner’s daughter is not rejecting traditional marriage; she is examining it from inside, finding herself simultaneously wanting it and constrained by it, and demanding better conditions. I cannot quite give this five stars. The immaculate Jordanaires-and-Nashville-session-player sound is simply not a musical language I love enough for that. But that is a matter of personal taste rather than failure on the record’s part. The lyrics and song selection are doing five-star work, delivered through five-star musicianship in a genre that normally starts somewhere around three stars for me. Everything about the production is designed to make the message pass smoothly through the gates. And then Loretta gets inside and starts rearranging the furniture.

Pink Moon feels like a record made by someone steadily removing himself from view. Not collapsing, not running out of ideas, but subtracting everything he no longer trusts. Arrangement goes. Ornament goes. Exposition goes. Conventional song development goes. The album itself barely lasts 28 minutes. By the end, even Nick Drake seems less a performer than a trace left behind by one. The key to it is elision, evasion and veiled declaration. Drake rarely tells us exactly what has happened. He gives us emotional states without case notes, images without explanations, addresses to an unnamed “you”, then suddenly drops a line of startling certainty. “You know that I love you / You know I don’t care / You know that I see you / You know I’m not there.” “Know” is four statements over a stubborn ostinato. Love and indifference, presence and absence. Everything that might reconcile those contradictions has been removed. That refusal of context is not a failure of articulation. “Things Behind the Sun” is one of the most fully developed songs Drake ever wrote: harmonically rich, structurally controlled, full of expressive changes that carry the argument with the lyric. He can do elaboration. He simply chooses, across much of Pink Moon, not to. The missing information feels deliberate. The album increasingly sounds like a critique of the machinery surrounding the singer-songwriter. “Please beware of them that stare” does not sound like fear of getting on stage so much as distrust of what happens once you are there. The audience stares. Critics frown. Promoters count bodies through the door. Renown becomes another metric imposed on the work. “Free Ride” sees through the pictures on the wall and the people coming to the ball; “Parasite” moves through stations, church bells, polished shoes and the Northern Line as though Drake is observing society from outside it. That is where the record becomes more than merely sparse. Drake seems to be erasing himself from the contract. He has already made two carefully arranged albums and watched them meet critical reservation and widespread indifference. Pink Moon feels like the sigh that follows: all right then, one more try, but this time I am not dressing it up for you. The guitar is therefore crucial. It is not accompaniment filling the space left by absent musicians. It often carries as much meaning as the lyric. On “Road” the picking seems to stumble out of its own metre, catch itself and continue. On “Place to Be” slack bass strings thud and drone while the trebles ring above them. In “Free Ride” the guitar locks around the vocal like close harmony, the strings behaving almost like backing singers. “Harvest Breed” sits on a nagging, unstable figure that makes the lyric feel wrong before Drake has even told us he is falling. That technical precision matters because it prevents Pink Moon being mistaken for an unfinished record. The surface is bare; the construction underneath is exact. Drake can barely seem bothered to sing, yet once he does, guitar and voice snap into place with extraordinary discipline. His long introductions often feel like the true resting state of the album: strings vibrating, notes decaying, air around them. The voice arrives almost grudgingly. Must I really? The lyrics carry the same reluctance. Drake seems to be trying to say difficult things without turning them into accusations. The evasions may be ethical as much as aesthetic. He is wounded, frustrated, suspicious of the whole pantomime around his work, but rarely cruel. Even when he appears to be addressing critics, audiences or promoters, he keeps shifting into image and implication rather than prosecution. That makes “the movement in your brain sends you out into the rain” central to the whole record. Drake may no longer believe in the transaction around making music, but he still believes in making music. The audience can vanish from the equation. The promoter can vanish. The critic can vanish. The need to create remains. Then the erasure goes further. In “Parasite” he describes himself as though he possesses no useful social function at all: observer without belonging, participant without purpose. By “Harvest Breed”, the evasions become frightening. Falling fast, looking for a friend, wondering whether this could be the end, stooping to kiss flowers while descending. The song never says plainly that something is seriously wrong. The guitar says it for him. That is the painful retrospective pull of Pink Moon. You want to ask: Nick, why didn’t you say something? But he did. Just not plainly. The album is full of failed declarations, truths smuggled through metaphor, warning signs disguised as poetry. And yet it does not end in simple disappearance. “From the Morning” turns the album outward. Earlier Drake is “on the ground”; now “we rise from the ground”. Finally, “we are everywhere”. The figure who has spent the album becoming translucent does not quite vanish. He diffuses. Pink Moon is a manifesto of disappearance in which the one thing Drake refuses to erase is the song itself. Everything else can go: arrangement, ornament, approval, audience, social usefulness, even the fixed outline of Nick Drake. What remains is the movement in the brain.

The strange thing about …Baby One More Time is that I think the music press was simultaneously right and very wrong about it. NME gave the album 1/10, Rolling Stone gave it two stars, and much of the contemporary response treated Britney Spears not merely as a 17-year-old making a patchy debut but as evidence that pop had fallen into enemy hands; the sneer was often aimed as much at the teenage girls buying it as at the music. The awkward bit is that buried inside the snobbery was one inconvenient truth: quite a lot of the album really isn’t very good. The title track, however, is extraordinary, and failing to separate single from album meant failing to notice what was actually new. “…Baby One More Time” doesn’t move like an obvious monster hit. It has a peculiar lope, almost a plod, and gets its scale not from speed but from the way the arrangement opens around that stubborn pulse. The vocal is where things get properly interesting. Spears has said that the night before recording it she stayed up late listening to Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” over and over, trying to get something of Marc Almond’s rusty, slightly frenzied quality into her own lower register. You can hear why, particularly when she presses against the pitch, but the clearer ancestor of the finished rhythmic language is Michael Jackson: clipped consonants, hiccups, glottal catches, bursts of vocal fry and phrases broken into percussive units. She sounds almost as though she has already been cut up in Pro Tools before reaching the microphone. That feels more significant than simply calling the record heavily produced. The machine is no longer something that happens to the singer afterwards; the singer is beginning to anticipate and mimic what the machine does. Twenty-first-century singers would increasingly learn to sound Auto-Tuned whether or not pitch correction was doing much work, because the artefact itself had become part of the vocal language. Britney is doing an earlier version of that. The mannerisms are easy to parody, but using fry, catches and chopped syllables with her rhythmic precision is not, and the best material understands that she is most distinctive when spitting notes out rather than luxuriating in them. The Travis cover mattered because it stripped away nearly everything a certain kind of late-90s indie listener had decided to hate. Take away Britney, the school uniform, the marketing, the teenage audience and the cultural argument around her, slow the song down and play it on guitars, and there is still a bloody good song sitting there. Travis themselves eventually said as much: not “good for pop”, not an ironic guilty pleasure, simply a good song. For a lot of us it was a useful controlled experiment in whether we had actually been judging the composition or judging the people it was aimed at. Unfortunately, once that remarkable opening single has got through the door, it turns out to have smuggled an awful lot of sludge in behind it. Jive had a hugely experienced young performer, already at home onstage and in front of a camera, but no established idea of what “Britney Spears” meant musically. Spears herself had imagined something closer to “Sheryl Crow music, but younger”, while the late-90s market was dominated by boy bands and girl groups, so the debut becomes a large bowl of suck-it-and-see. There is wholesome Britney, dreamy ballad Britney, Euro-pop Britney, R&B-adjacent Britney, conversational pop-rock Britney and, intermittently, the clipped, percussive Britney that history keeps. Listening now is pop palaeontology: crack open a track and another possible career falls out. Some of those counterfactuals are genuinely interesting. “I Will Be There”, with its light acoustic bounce, lets her use the conversational phrasing and exact rhythmic placement the ballads keep suppressing; in another timeline I can imagine it becoming the first hit and Britney developing into a successful pop singer-songwriter, something like Tiffany with depth – “I Think We’re Alone Now”, but afterwards she tells you she has theories. “Thinkin’ About You” is fairly vanilla, but the bounce gives her somewhere to put the attack, the little fries and the stop-start phrasing, and suddenly the recognisable future Britney is standing in front of you. The more legato the album asks her to become, the less successful it generally is, not because long notes are inherently unbearable but because they force her towards the wrong competitive field. Put her next to Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey and the other enormous voices of the period and she is merely a good singer; give her rhythm to bite into and she becomes herself. The weaker material repeatedly forgets that. “Sometimes” is perhaps the blandest thing on the menu, immaculate late-90s teen pop finished off with one of the most obvious truck-driver’s key changes imaginable, while “Born to Make You Happy” feels like the sort of mid-period Spice Girls song you could hand to Emma Bunton without altering its DNA. “From the Bottom of My Broken Heart” disappears into dreamy emotional beige, and “I Will Still Love You”, with Don Philip, sounds like a soundtrack duet waiting for a video of two singers in headphones grinning through the studio glass while pretending the cameras have caught an intimate spontaneous moment. None of this is disastrous. In some ways that is the problem: the album is desperately competent, tasteful and safe, and Spears is usually more interesting than the songs. Even the vocal presentation often feels inherited from late-90s girl- and boy-band architecture: stacked choruses, layers of backing voices, parts that could easily have been rotated among three soloists capable of singing behind one another. Britney is nominally the solo star, but the record has not yet learned consistently how to build around her as a unique instrument. That is why I don’t hear much of a through-thesis. The lyrics are mostly forgettable, the styles pull in different directions and the album feels less like a coherent artistic argument than a songbook assembled by a committee still working out what its star might become. There is nothing inherently wrong with committee work, which is where my comparison with Off the Wall becomes useful. That album is hardly a single-author statement either: Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones are choosing from material by Rod Temperton, Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder and Susaye Greene, Carole Bayer Sager and David Foster, among others. Some songs are plainly greater than others, but the calibre of the writing and strength of the curation make the possibilities converge on Michael; you can hear a solo identity being built without everyone seeming to have brought a different brochure to the meeting. On …Baby One More Time, the possibilities are thrown at Britney to see which one sticks. It is the difference between variety being organised into an album and variety being left as evidence of the audition process. Even the closing cover of “The Beat Goes On” feels like another fossil rather than a conclusion. Its late-90s loungey, pseudo-sampled, vaguely bossa-nova production keeps threatening to burst into life, gives Britney another chance to be percussive, then meanders away as though she is auditioning for Mike Flowers Pops. It is a curious little fish and an oddly suitable ending to a camel of an album: designed by committee, full of identifiable adaptations, and somehow still able to get you across the desert. The record goes out not with a bang but with a retro whimper. At which point yesterday’s piece about taking records seriously and judging them on what they are trying to do returns to bite me rather neatly. Me and my big mouth: I appear to have made a rod for my own back, because having argued for empathetic listening I can hardly dismiss this as disposable teen pop simply because much of it leaves me cold. I have to acknowledge the craft, the historical importance of the single, the peculiarity of Britney’s rhythmic vocal style and the spectacle of a commercial identity being discovered in public. I also have to acknowledge that historical importance, technical competence and an interesting fossil record do not magically turn filler into killer. So I do think …Baby One More Time belongs in the canon, but not because it is a great album. It isn’t: it is far more filler than killer, and three stars feels right for a record I find more curious than consistently good. What makes it worth preserving is that it is a museum piece from the instant before Britney Spears became an established idea, with several abandoned futures still visible in the rock around her. You can hear pop history deciding which Britney Spears is going to exist, and that is more interesting than much of the album itself.

Debut albums often have an element of audition about them: look, we can do this. Roxy Music says: we will not. For forty-odd minutes the band seem determined not to sound correct. Ferry pushes notes sharp under pressure. Rhythms stumble when they ought to march. Instruments are mixed in proportions that feel faintly wrong. Genres appear, get worried at, and mutate before they have properly settled. Even the big endings are allowed to grate against themselves. It is like a beautifully cut suit with the tailor’s pins still in. It's uncomfortable, but try to take them out and the suit falls apart. That is what makes this album so difficult to describe as merely “eclectic”. Lots of records contain several styles. Roxy Music behaves as though styles are things to be interfered with. “If There Is Something” begins as countrified comedy, Ferry hovering uncertainly between crooner and parody, then somehow changes state until the joke has disappeared and he is pushing urgently sharp through “I would do anything for you”, the whole thing becoming lonely, synthetic and strange. Yet it never feels as though another song has begun. It simply mutates under you. That distinction matters because there are other kinds of transformation here. “2HB” does not mutate so much as evaporate. Ferry gives one of his most restrained performances while a nagging electric piano worries away underneath him and the band lurch around almost comically, as though they have been assembled from the wrong parts. Eventually the saxophones blur everything into dream and the song just disappears. “The Bob (Medley)” behaves differently again. It cuts. Here the hand of Peter Sinfield and the King Crimson world is most obvious: Roxy are less interested in presenting a song than in being cinematic. Muffled battle sounds, distant music, abrupt scene changes, something resembling an advertising jingle with an air-raid siren behind it, apocalyptic verses, then a timpani-laden ending. It feels like walking down a dark corridor into a cinema where something has already started. Bryan Ferry studied under Richard Hamilton, and that relationship feels useful here because this album often thinks like collage. Not “a mixture of influences”, but familiar cultural objects placed beside one another with the joins left visible. Hamilton’s Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? puts consumer images next to one another until the act of juxtaposition becomes the point. Roxy do something similar with musical history. And history is everywhere. Country, doo-wop, Bogart, Coward, early rock’n’roll, wartime cinema, cabaret. But nothing is allowed to become comforting nostalgia. “Chance Meeting” gives us Brief Encounter: railway stations, romantic manners, the whole old-film apparatus. Then the memory is decorated by keening guitar feedback, like watching the film on a television that refuses to behave. Modernity keeps breaking through the signal. Eventually the guitar sounds almost industrial, like scraping girders, as though a new world is physically being constructed over the nostalgia. That is why I resist the easy story that Eno is the strange one while Ferry supplies the conventional material. Ferry himself has a profoundly odd relationship with the past. His later covers album These Foolish Things makes that obvious: Dylan, girl-group pop, Motown, old rock’n’roll, standards, all re-staged until familiar songs become slightly peculiar objects. He does not preserve the past. He makes the past strange. “Ladytron” may be the purest early example. Ferry is not vulnerable here; he is playing the character, and the arrangement gives that character room to breathe. The lyric belongs to a romantic matinee hero while the band march into the future underneath him. The crooner meets Metropolis. Ferry remains the crooner. The scenery changes. There is also much more comedy on this record than accounts of Important Art Rock usually allow. The closing quotation section of “Re-Make/Re-Model” is sophisticated collage, yes, but it is also the band formally introducing themselves by bursting into bits of other people’s music. It is funny. There is something of Neil Innes and Vivian Stanshall in the willingness to rummage through musical history and put things together in deliberately inappropriate ways. Artists clown. They just tend to disguise the fact by the time someone writes the catalogue notes. “Would You Believe” is almost the perfect example. The lyric is a remarkably plain love song. The band collide into it like clowns: sax-heavy 1950s rock, doo-wop, Little Richard, while Ferry attempts to maintain his dignity as a crooner who has somehow wandered into the wrong genre. Slapback and reverb leave his vocal lurking behind the band, and even when everyone starts trying to integrate, the sound remains rude and mismatched. That deadly serious clowning reminds me of Phyllida Barlow’s huge dock installation at Tate Britain: mad construction, apparently unstable, pieces absurdly out of proportion, the feeling that the whole thing might collapse. The instability is not a defect. It is the engineering. “Sea Breezes” takes that refusal of correctness somewhere else again. Taken straight, it could be a magnificent forlorn ballad. Roxy will not take it straight. Ferry’s tremolo makes the opening feel like a haunted chamber piece; then the song seems to wander into Berlin around 1927, a chamber song meeting the Bauhaus. The drums attempt something martial and stumble over themselves. There is almost an “Alabama Song” trying to emerge from inside it. As a drama student I found Brecht very easy to get into, and listening again I wonder whether Roxy had already taught eight-year-old me some of that grammar: visible joins, abrupt changes of register, comedy sitting beside dread, the performer displaying the character rather than disappearing inside it, art constantly reminding you that it has been constructed. The final joke is “Bitters End”, an archly Coward-esque little curtain call with something slightly gothic in the wallpaper. It is funny, although explaining precisely what is funny about it is difficult because the proportions themselves seem to be the joke. Then the band withdraw entirely and leave Ferry with the final words a cappella: “should make the cognoscenti think”. After spending an album exposing the machinery, they remove the scenery altogether. I am including “Virginia Plain”, despite it not appearing on the first UK pressing, because it entered the album’s history quickly enough that for many listeners it simply is track four. It is also the compressed version of the whole proposition. The rest of the album suddenly sounds almost prog beside it: long structures, instrumental conversations, songs wandering into other states. “Virginia Plain” packs the same appetite into three minutes and detonates it. I first heard it when I was eight. Ours was a household obsessed with music, so everything stopped for Top of the Pops. I remember wondering why Ferry was singing like that, pushing against the pitch in a way I had never heard before. I did not want him to stop. Eno looked like an alien in a feather boa apparently manufacturing noises, but the music itself never sounded alien to me. It sounded welcoming. I understood enough of its language to know that I had absolutely no idea what they were going to do next. That remains the thrill of Roxy Music. It is funny without being comedy, accomplished while refusing to behave properly, nostalgic while constantly sabotaging nostalgia. Most debut albums tell you what a band can do. Roxy Music already knew. They were much more interested in what they could refuse to do.

George Clinton has always struck me less as a conventional bandleader than as a political huckster in the old medicine-show tradition: part preacher, part carnival barker, part confidence man, arriving in town with a miraculous cure and enough theatre to persuade you to try it. Ken Kesey worked by a similar method. Reverend Billy Talen does now. The point is not simply to make an argument. You build a temporary alternative reality, invite people inside, and let them discover that the rules have changed. Mothership Connection may be the purest expression of that instinct I’ve heard. The first side is essentially a space opera crossed with a travelling revival meeting. “P-Funk (Wants to Get Funked Up)” doesn’t so much begin as tune us into a radio station that was already broadcasting. Clinton is cosmic DJ, preacher and patent-medicine salesman, and P-Funk is being offered as the cure for whatever ails you. By “Mothership Connection (Star Child)” we’ve stopped listening from outside and joined the procession. The wonderful appropriation of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” makes the whole scheme explicit without ever laboriously explaining it: the chariot is now the Mothership, gospel salvation has become funk, and Star Child has us safely in his hands. Then “Unfunky UFO” performs one of the album’s cleverest reversals. The aliens haven’t travelled to Earth to bring their superior knowledge to the primitives. Their own world is dying of funklessness and they’ve come here because we have the answer. They want to learn how to funk so they can take it home and save the planet. This isn’t transcendence, exactly. Clinton isn’t telling us that salvation lies somewhere out there among the stars. The treasure is already here, embodied in Black music, rhythm, pleasure and communal movement, and it can be spread through the galaxy. All of which makes the record sound much more solemn than it is. Clinton’s great achievement is that he never hammers you over the head with any of it. If you have to analyse the proposition too hard, the proposition has failed. The grooves do the work. And good Lord, these grooves. Mothership Connection has an astonishing physical presence for a record from 1975. I had something like the experience I get imagining the first impact of Sgt. Pepper: not necessarily “these are better songs than anything anybody else is making”, but how the hell does the record sound like this? The bottom end is huge, rounded and elastic. Bernie Worrell’s keyboards squelch, burp and occasionally seem to be conducting experiments in interstellar flatulence. The percussion is exquisite. Bootsy Collins repeatedly demonstrates his virtuosity by showing what he doesn’t need to play. On “Handcuffs” in particular he plants himself in the pocket and simply refuses to leave. The band is tight as fuck and loose as all hell at the same time. The more Clinton strips the language down, the better the record often becomes. “Give the people what they want when they want it, and they want it all the time” barely develops as a lyric during “Supergroovalisticprosifunkstication”, but that’s precisely why it works. Repetition turns statement into slogan, slogan into chant, chant into ritual, until meaning gives way to physical participation. “Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof off the Sucker)” does the same thing even more directly. That wonderful low chant of “tear the roof off the mother sucker” practically becomes another bass instrument. By “Night of the Thumpasorus Peoples”, language can dissolve almost completely into beautiful gibberish because the groove is capable of carrying everything itself. “Handcuffs” is the complication. I actually paused the album there, something I almost never do. The song is about possessiveness, jealousy and the need to be wanted, but it’s delivered from so comfortably inside the possessive man’s viewpoint that I couldn’t establish how much distance Clinton wanted us to have from him. Satire? Confession? Caricature? A deliberately ugly bit of male psychology? It knows enough about its narrator’s behaviour to make a straightforward endorsement seem unlikely, but never gives us the reassuring wink that would settle the matter. At first I thought it had broken the album. Then I remembered the physical LP. The world-building is really side one: transmission, procession, testimony, conversion. Side two is better treated as four discrete songs rather than a continuation of the space opera. And eventually “Handcuffs” began to look less like an inexplicable rupture and more like a grimy dose of Earthbound reality. If this record merely said “loosen up, surrender to the funk and everything will be fine”, it would be escapist utopianism. Instead we’re reminded that people remain jealous, needy, controlling, insecure and contradictory. The funk may free you, but sure as hell it don’t make you pure. I’m still not certain I’ve solved “Handcuffs”, and perhaps I’m not supposed to. Life is ambiguous, awkward and comfortable too. What I am certain about is the rest of it. This is one of the grooviest records I’ve ever heard: sumptuously produced, beautifully arranged, played by a rhythm section operating at a ridiculous level, and conceptually audacious without ever allowing the concept to get between you and the pleasure. I expected something closer to the abrasive, Lord-of-Misrule politics I had wanted from Maggot Brain. Instead Clinton offers a much sweeter pill. He doesn’t overthrow the existing world by shouting at it. He builds another one that looks much more fun to live in and waits for you to come aboard. I did.

I wasn’t looking forward to this, and I’m afraid the album mostly justified my apprehension. It begins rather well. The title track is a lovely little 68-second burst of arcade-future synth, honestly, I felt like I was watching Pole Position II loading up in 1984, and it leads beautifully into “Jump”. And “Jump” is genuinely good. It doesn’t mean much, but who cares? The synth is used like a huge guitar riff, the hook is enormous and the whole thing is wonderfully economical. Eddie Van Halen mostly remembers that virtuosity works better when it serves the song than when everybody has to stop and admire it. There is one passage where the record suddenly puts on a cape and threatens to become ELP, but it recovers. Unfortunately, “Jump” increasingly feels like a Trojan horse. “Panama” can be summarised as VROOM SEX WIDDLY. It confuses cars and women for three and a half minutes while Eddie makes noises. “Top Jimmy” is much better: flashy pub rock about a locally famous singer, silly, affectionate and genuinely endearing until everything stops for the compulsory guitar demonstration. “Drop Dead Legs” returns us to women as anatomy. “Hot for Teacher” contains some excellent drumming before becoming a cartoon wolf whose eyes shoot out of its head because teacher is sexy. “I’ll Wait” brings the synths back but forgets to bring much of a song with them. That became the problem. These tracks often feel less like songs than substrates. Pick something sturdy enough, then stick Eddie’s pyrotechnics, Alex Van Halen’s drums and David Lee Roth’s leer on top. The playing is phenomenal. Christ, they can play. But the album keeps making sure I notice that they can play. And the lyrics are mostly just thick. I don’t need profundity from Van Halen. “Jump” proves that perfectly well. But if you’re going to be vapid, at least be funny, charming or gloriously stupid. Parliament can repeat nonsense until it becomes a whole world. AC/DC can make stupidity feel elemental. Van Halen too often make stupidity feel studied. There is also something very funny about four men with enormous hair, makeup and theatrical clothes spending so much lyrical energy reassuring everybody how tremendously heterosexual they are. They look like Bet Lynch’s backing band and sing as though a woman’s legs constitute a major philosophical discovery. The title track is good. “Jump” is an excellent pop single. “Top Jimmy” has charm. There are terrific bits of playing throughout. But mostly? VROOM SEX WIDDLY.

Trio is an incredible album: Dolly, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris singing together with astonishing taste, restraint and musicianship. When all three voices lock together, it barely sounds like harmony so much as a new instrument being created in front of you.

There’s an accidental beauty to Ragged Glory: Neil Young becomes completely Neil Young at almost exactly the moment being completely Neil Young becomes modern again. Coming straight after Freedom and “Rockin’ in the Free World”, this could have gone horribly wrong. Young suddenly had an audience of younger musicians taking distortion, abrasion and singer-songwriter material into places that owed quite a lot to him. The embarrassing response would have been to notice and start sounding a little more like them. Instead he gets Crazy Horse together and makes an album almost magnificently unconcerned with whether anybody still wants Neil Young and Crazy Horse to sound like Neil Young and Crazy Horse. Meanwhile, I can imagine younger bands putting this thing on for each other and going, “Yeah. This is cool, man.” He doesn’t move towards the moment. The moment moves towards him. Crazy Horse make perfect sense as a band built around somebody who essentially writes songs on an acoustic guitar. They don’t elaborate them. They give them mass. “Country Home” could probably be over in half the time with Neil and an acoustic, but Crazy Horse find a pocket and stay there, accreting dirt, abrasion and tiny variations until the sound itself becomes the action. The songs are loud without becoming punk, have attack without becoming metal, and breathe without becoming elaborate. These are rocked-up acoustic songs. There’s almost an anti-virtuosity to the whole recording. Each song sounds less like the definitive studio master than take X of however many: keep playing it until somebody says, yeah, that’s the one. The pauses, ragged entries and rough guitar edges remain because nobody is wasting time polishing away what made the performance worth keeping. That turns out to be important, because time is really what this album is about. Neil Young knows what time does to people, including himself. “Love to Burn” is Grumpy Pants Neil as relationship counsellor: if you’ve built something real, don’t fuck it up. You haven’t got forever to start the whole process again. “Days That Used to Be” is about the quieter danger: don’t rock the boat, settle for things, make a thousand little accommodations, then discover they’ve carried you a hundred thousand miles from the person you used to be. “Mansion on the Hill” even reaches back musically towards “Southern Man”, less swung and more planted but harmonically strikingly familiar, as though Young has wandered into his woodworking shop, picked up an old shape and thought, mm-hm, that’ll do. Appropriate for a song about ageing and wanting some connection with the person you used to be. This is learned veracity. Artists often begin simply, become sophisticated, then confuse complication with progress. If they last long enough, the good ones sometimes come back to simplicity because they’ve finally realised who they are is sufficient. Ragged Glory is Neil Young absolutely there. “Over and Over” needs remarkably little to express the sufficiency of another person. “White Line” is the simple pleasure of movement and American escape. “Farmer John” is gloriously boneheaded, loping along with something of the gait of the early Modern Lovers’ “Pablo Picasso”. Its boneheadedness is the point. Then there’s “Fuckin’ Up”, where the Godfather of Grunge title suddenly sounds less like retrospective journalism and more like a simple description. Young howls like a dog, Crazy Horse yell back, and the band don’t develop the song conventionally so much as keep turning up the pressure and accreting frenzy through dirt. The call and response reminds me of the way Bryan Ferry gets progressively more frantic in “Re-Make/Re-Model” while the rest of Roxy shout CPL 593H back at him. It sounds as if another mistake could happen at any second, which is precisely what a song called “Fuckin’ Up” ought to sound like. By “Love and Only Love”, the album has reduced its argument to almost embarrassing simplicity. You weren’t listening when Neil said it quietly, so he and Crazy Horse are going to say it again very, very loudly. Love gets you where you’re going. Hate is exactly what you think it is. Stop fucking about. The long, ragged performance doesn’t complicate the message; it makes evasion increasingly difficult. And then “Mother Earth (Natural Anthem)” widens the whole thing beyond individual lives and relationships to the ecosystem sustaining them. The sustained guitar chords behave almost like pedal notes on an organ, leading the voices through the changes, and the whole song becomes a hymn: praise for where we live and a warning about our folly. Its folk language feels ancient, sitting on the same broad family tree as songs like “Dirty Old Town”: melodies and drones that seem inherited rather than invented. You could imagine arranging it remarkably easily for bagpipes. The harmonic language feels as old as the hills that will remain after we’ve made them useless to us. Young was worrying at this territory as far back as After the Gold Rush. Again: you were told. You weren’t listening. That’s why the form and function of Ragged Glory match so completely. The lyrics keep saying that time is finite, that people drift, that love needs acting upon, that what sustains us shouldn’t be squandered. Crazy Horse make the record according to exactly the same principle. Get the songs down or spend a year fussing over overdubs. Don’t sand away the truth. This is what we have. Mean it while it’s here. For all its extraordinary timeliness in 1990, Ragged Glory hangs outside time. Young doesn’t adapt himself to a new generation of noisy American guitar bands. He simply becomes most completely himself at precisely the point his time comes round again. ★★★★★ — and one of those records that makes me want an imaginary sixth star simply for being so brilliantly itself.

The thing I liked about Queen when I was nine or ten was grandeur compressed onto a slab of 7-inch vinyl. I remember “Seven Seas of Rhye” appearing on Top of the Pops, liked it immediately, and by the age of eleven or twelve had already become the sort of insufferable little music purist who would tell people that actually I preferred it to “Bohemian Rhapsody”. Half a century later, I think I finally understand what I was hearing. Queen II catches Queen before they have properly learned to be Queen. They are hungry but intentional: no hit yet when they recorded it, but finally given proper access to Trident rather than scavenging studio downtime. The odd thing is that they take one of the flashiest studios in London and occasionally manage to make it sound as though it has been installed in a cupboard. The ambition keeps outrunning both the available tracks and their experience of arranging them. “Father to Son” throws several different definitions of heavy at you simultaneously; “White Queen” is widescreen in conception but boxy in execution, with lyrics that sometimes resemble earnest sixth-form poetry forced awkwardly into the metre. There are glimpses of the future in the extraordinary overlaid vocals and Brian May’s orchestral guitar, but the elements don’t quite integrate. Freddie can sound like this remarkable singer sitting on top of a slightly muddy backing track rather than the organising force of the band. Most of Side White therefore feels like a school production mounted by an unusually talented early-70s rock group. Brian and Roger are still trying out available languages: Zeppelin, psych, pastoral folk-rock, even a little Jethro Tull. Roger’s “The Loser in the End” is rather endearing precisely because he hasn’t learned to be excessive yet. At this point the counterfactual is still available: Queen could conceivably have become a much more serious, reasonably successful British album-rock band. Then you turn it over and Freddie blows the doors off. Side Black suddenly sounds recognisably like Queen, only comically dafter. Silliness becomes an organising principle. Where Brian seems to begin with a rock song and add things to it, Freddie appears to imagine the entire deranged theatrical object first and somehow marshal the rest of the band into making it happen. “The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke” is something like pre-Raphaelite rock: Victorian grotesquerie, invented words, fifteen syllables where five would have done, and an arrangement apparently designed on the principle of “how many ideas have we got?” “Yes.” “Nevermore”, improbably, is genuinely lovely. Then comes “The March of the Black Queen”, which is a fantastic load of old bollocks. Syd Barrett writing opera. Wagner crossed with Looney Tunes. Garrulous bollocks with overdubs. It is actually more complicated than “Bohemian Rhapsody”, but much less focused, and that makes it fascinating: you can hear Freddie worrying at the cage, discovering that a rock song can contain almost anything. “Bohemian Rhapsody” would eventually take this impulse, boil it down and make its architecture comprehensible. Here the prototype is still shedding bits of scenery. “Funny How Love Is” then applies a deliberately Spector-ish wall of sound to a song whose lyrical thesis is approximately “funny how love is”. Add fifteen more voices. No, fifteen more. And finally “Seven Seas of Rhye” arrives and everything snaps into focus. It sounds clearer and less boxy than most of the album, but the really important difference is arrangement: Queen stop stacking every idea vertically and start firing them horizontally. A good pop single doesn’t have to wait eight bars before introducing the next thought. “Seven Seas” keeps changing before you expect it to, and by the time the coda arrives there is a genuine feeling of: is that it already? That was the trick I heard as a child. Grandeur without acreage. There is something unexpectedly Beatles-esque in the organising principle too: not that Queen sound like the Beatles, but that they share George Martin-era glee in treating the studio as part of the composition and pushing the machinery until fidelity begins losing the argument with imagination. Later Queen would become frighteningly good at making enormous constructions sound effortless. Here you can hear the joins, the overloaded tape and the decisions that don’t quite work. Side White on its own would be a low three. Side Black is sufficiently mad, individual and alive to drag the whole thing up to 3.7 and therefore a rounded four. Its greatest charm is that Queen are not yet familiar with themselves. The signatures haven’t become mannerisms because they don’t know they’re signatures yet. Halfway through Queen II, Queen discover Queen. Fortunately, nobody has yet told them what to do with it.

I went into Diamond Life carrying a fair bit of baggage from 1984. At the time, Sade seemed inseparable from The Face, Robert Elms and a particular kind of aspirational consumer culture. I was involved in grassroots community theatre in a small Lincolnshire market town, making deliberately rough-and-ready music with whatever was available, and listening to things like the Three Johns. Sade appeared to come from another world entirely: immaculate, sophisticated and apparently designed for people who knew which wine to order. It felt like two tribes. Strip away that cultural baggage, though, and Diamond Life is an extraordinarily accomplished debut — and considerably more muscular than I remembered. “Smooth Operator” immediately surprised me. There’s real bite to it: jagged electric-piano stabs, Stuart Matthewman’s saxophone and Paul Denman’s bass grumbling insistently underneath. This isn’t music politely waiting to be admired. It has enough sonic pressure to take possession of a room. That bass became one of the revelations of the album. On “Hang On to Your Love”, the lyric argues for persistence in a relationship while Denman’s bass seems almost to argue back, worrying away underneath it like the troubled relationship itself. These arrangements are too intelligent simply to illustrate the words. They complicate them. Sade Adu’s singing works similarly. She has a wonderful habit of leaning off notes rather than onto them. Where another singer might emphasise emotion by pushing harder, she sometimes lets the voice become ragged or slightly unstable. There’s a moment in “Frankie’s First Affair”, just before the saxophone solo, where a high note seems almost to escape her control. But surrounded by playing this precise, it obviously hasn’t escaped anything. The loss of control is itself controlled. That became one of the keys to the record for me. The early demos were apparently much rougher and closer to free jazz and funk. Robin Millar’s production pares that down until every remaining gesture matters. Less becomes more. Control brings freedom. Adu’s background at Saint Martin’s makes perfect sense in that context. Fashion students understand that placement is everything: apparently trivial decisions about proportion, space and what you leave out can be the result of enormous thought. Diamond Life sounds like that. A keyboard stab here, a tiny guitar chop there, a backing vocal placed exactly where it changes the emotional balance. Millar’s production makes those decisions beautifully legible. But the polish turns out to be a delivery mechanism, rather like the strings on Lennon’s Imagine. It makes the argument attractive enough to get through the door. And the argument, unexpectedly, is kindness. Not niceness. Not sentimentality. Kindness with stamina. Again and again these songs return to constancy, commitment and care. “Hang On to Your Love” tells you not to abandon a relationship when it becomes difficult. “Frankie’s First Affair” looks at the consequences of treating somebody carelessly. “I Will Be Your Friend” then puts the singer on the other side of the equation: having demanded persistence from others, she promises it herself. She’ll be there. She walks the walk. “When Am I Going to Make a Living” was where my understanding of the album really shifted. The title apparently originated when Adu was broke enough for money to be a serious daily concern, and the band themselves were hardly living the Diamond Life. Yet here they are making one of the most expensive-sounding British records of the period. “I’m hungry, but I won’t give in.” That line changes the meaning of the polish completely. This isn’t the sound of people displaying what they possess. It’s the sound of people insisting upon standards regardless of what they possess. You can have two plates to eat off and still make beautiful artistic choices. You can be skint and sound expensive. And then comes “Sally”. In another context, a sophisticated soul-jazz band singing earnestly about the Salvation Army could be as naff as all hell. Instead, “Sally” feels like the centre of Diamond Life. It follows “When Am I Going to Make a Living”, and that sequencing matters. First: I’m struggling, I’m hungry, and I’m determined to get out of this. Then: what about the people for whom things have gone even more badly? “She’s doing our dirty work.” That is the line around which the album seems to pivot. Sade aren’t congratulating themselves for caring. They point towards the person who is actually out on the streets doing the caring. Nor is “Sally” saying, “Look where we came from.” It’s closer to an acknowledgement that this is how pear-shaped things can go. Success is contingent. Escaping precarity doesn’t make you fundamentally different from somebody who didn’t. And that is where Diamond Life parts company with the culture I associated it with in 1984. The problem was never aspiration itself. This is a fiercely aspirational record: it values achievement, beauty, discipline, style and success. Adu clearly wasn’t interested in romanticising poverty. She wanted somewhere better to go. What it rejects is the gaucheness of Thatcherism: the vulgarity of making aspirationalism uncaring. Get on, certainly. But getting on doesn’t absolve you of responsibility towards people who haven’t. Escape hardship without deciding that those still experiencing it somehow deserve their position. Don’t pull the ladder up behind you. That makes it rather wonderful that Diamond Life became such a soundtrack to precisely the aspirational consumer culture I mistrusted. You could take this fantastically tasteful record home to your beautifully appointed living room and discover that the bloody thing was quietly arguing against you becoming indifferent to everyone outside it. Finally Sade cover Timmy Thomas’s “Why Can’t We Live Together”, and the album’s moral horizon expands again. What began with persistence between individuals, moved through personal hardship and then outward towards social care, finishes with the simplest possible question about collective existence. And again it doesn’t point the finger. It nags. Those shifts between major and minor keep the song unsettled, and its slow insistence gradually becomes almost triumphal. The question itself becomes the argument. So yes, as a British response to quiet storm, Diamond Life is remarkably sophisticated. The band already know who they are in a way that is almost preposterous for a debut. There’s no sense of musicians throwing different identities at the wall to see what sticks. The musical grammar is already complete. But after listening properly, “sophisticated” isn’t the word I’d finally choose for it. Diamond Life is a kind album. An album about kindness to people you love, kindness to people less fortunate than you, and the persistence required to keep being kind when indifference would be easier. It understands that kindness isn’t softness. It’s something you persist in doing.

Do me a favour with Hunting High and Low: try to forget a-ha. Forget the pencil-sketch video. Forget Morten Harket’s cheekbones, the screaming teenagers and forty years of “Take on Me” being treated as shorthand for the entire 1980s. Pretend it’s 1985 and somebody has handed you a debut album by three skint young Norwegian music obsessives who have moved to London, are barely keeping themselves going, and have no idea whether any of this is going to work. Dig, if you will, a different picture. What strikes me immediately is how unlikely this music is as the foundation for mass pop stardom. It’s jittery, chilly, melodically awkward and occasionally grandiose to the point of absurdity. The drums can be startlingly physical, little electronic figures shimmer and push at the edges, and the arrangements keep twitching when a more conventional pop record would settle down. There’s a lot of early-80s European art-pop in its bloodstream. Ultravox and Yello make more sense to me as reference points than the generic “synthpop” label. Some of the little repeated melodic cells behave almost like percussion; reduce them further and you can glimpse the kind of electronic reductionism that another generation would later push much further. But a-ha still want melody, drama and enormous choruses. They have all this nervous machinery underneath and then Morten Harket sails over it with a voice capable of ridiculous leaps. Billy MacKenzie kept coming to mind. Harket has the same useful quality of making a songwriter believe that awkward intervals and absurd vocal ranges are perfectly reasonable things to put in a pop song. Some of the verse melodies here are genuinely lumpy. They don’t flow politely from one phrase to the next. Lines run too long, stresses land strangely, and Harket has to dance around the construction until it sounds natural. Then suddenly a chorus arrives with such melodic certainty that you realise these people can write a hook whenever they damn well choose. That combination of cleverness and simplicity is one of the pleasures of the record. Sometimes you can hear young writers thinking a little too hard. Then something like “And You Tell Me” appears, barely decorated, with a melody so obvious after the event that anyone who has ever tried writing songs wants to throw something at the wall. The temptation is always to mistrust the first simple impulse and improve it to death. They don’t. Bastards. The English is occasionally odd too, but I rather like that. These are young Norwegians writing in a second language, and sometimes the lyrics have an angularity that matches the music. At their best, they capture something quite specific: being young, foreign, ambitious, broke and slightly adrift in London. The grand adventure of leaving Norway to become musicians turns out to involve cheap food, cold rooms, uncertainty and a nagging awareness that the whole thing might have been a terrible idea. That gives the album much of its emotional character. There is a real froideur to it, but also constant yearning. The surfaces can be cool and distant while Harket’s voice keeps reaching across them. That tension is probably what makes “The Sun Always Shines on T.V.” such an extraordinary piece of work. It is almost monstrously focused: enormous, controlled, cold on the outside and desperate underneath. Everything the album has been trying to do suddenly locks into place. It isn’t flawless. Occasionally the treatment makes the material sound slighter than it is. “Love Is Reason” is the obvious example: a lyric about obsessive new love and wanting to reshape yourself for another person gets octave bass, chirpy little interjections and a treatment so obscenely perky that it starts wandering into “Life Is Life, la la la la la” territory. A little too Europop for my taste. Elsewhere, though, the older musical ambitions and the newer technology fuse beautifully. By the end of the album there are long lines, odd meters and unexpected chord changes that feel almost progressive in spirit. You can hear musicians whose formative loves predate synthpop discovering what the new machinery allows them to do rather than merely chasing whatever was fashionable in 1982. And all this was made before everyone started screaming. That may be the most interesting thing about a-ha. Their story is sheer persistence in two stages. First came the persistence needed to get Hunting High and Low made at all. Stay in London. Stay broke. Keep writing. Keep recording. Fail. Try again. Lesser commitment sends them home to Norway chastened, muttering that the music business is a load of shit. They become nearly-boys, never even famous enough to become has-beens. Then the wish comes true in the most perverse possible way. They want international recognition and get hysteria. They want people to hear their music and find themselves confronted by thousands of people screaming over it. They want to be taken seriously as musicians and discover that the world is overwhelmingly interested in Morten Harket’s cheekbones. It’s the Bedazzled version of success: the genie grants the wish while completely misunderstanding the point of it. So the second stage of a-ha’s persistence becomes a much longer one: trying to get out from underneath the form their success took and persuade people to hear what they were actually doing. Hunting High and Low catches them before any of that feedback has arrived. Three serious, broke young men making a chilly, funny, ambitious, occasionally gauche and frequently fascinating art-pop record while hardly anybody is interested. Then everybody is.

Yesterday I gave a-ha’s Hunting High and Low four stars. Today I am giving Johnny Cash’s At San Quentin three. This is why star ratings are not rankings of artists. Hunting High and Low is a funny little 1985 synthpop album made by three young Norwegians who had come to London with very little money and an enormous amount of ambition. It has mismatches, dated sounds and the odd throwaway, but it knows what it wants to be and, more often than not, achieves it beautifully. Johnny Cash is Johnny Cash. But At San Quentin has the particular misfortune of following one of the greatest live albums ever made. At Folsom Prison is, for me, the second-best live album ever recorded. It crackles with jeopardy. Cash, the Tennessee Three and the prisoners seem to be discovering the event together. The guitars are rough, the recording is rough, Cash scarcely appears to care whether his instrument is perfectly in tune, and the possibility that the whole thing might go somewhere unexpected is present almost constantly. Then it became enormously successful. Columbia had been nervous about the idea of recording Cash in a prison. He proved them wrong by making something extraordinary. The obvious lesson might have been: trust Johnny Cash. Instead, the lesson appears to have been: Johnny Cash albums recorded in prisons work. So sixteen months later we get San Quentin. Except now everyone knows what they are making. Columbia are recording it. Granada Television are filming a documentary. There are cameras and technicians around the stage. What had been an unlikely experiment is now an Event. And you can hear the difference. Cash sounds tired. Not insincere: that distinction matters enormously. His sympathy with prisoners feels genuine, as does his irritation with the television crew getting between him and his audience. But he sounds weary, and much more conscious of delivering a professional performance. The band has changed too. Luther Perkins had died the previous year, and his absence matters enormously. At Folsom his brutally simple guitar playing was almost part of the architecture: hard, repetitive, primitive in the best possible sense, leaving Cash all the room in the world. At San Quentin the band sounds more conventionally like a country touring band. At moments it edges towards the television-country world of Hee Haw: accomplished, entertaining and much less dangerous. “Wanted Man” never really catches fire. There is a guitar break where the snare doubles the lead figure which feels horribly over-emphatic. “I Walk the Line” sounds almost perfunctory. Cash stops to tune his guitar, which ought to be a completely meaningless observation except that Folsom felt like a place where stopping the momentum to worry about such things would have been inconceivable. Even the chatter works against it. This is an album barely longer than half an hour and yet somehow it rambles. Then “San Quentin” happens. Suddenly the electricity is there. Cash tells San Quentin that he hates every inch of it and the prisoners erupt. The sentiment itself is hardly revolutionary. Nobody imagines prisoners wandering around congratulating themselves on how enjoyable prison life is. What matters is the microphones. Everybody in that room knows the sentiment is leaving the room. Cash has taken something utterly commonplace inside the prison and said it into Columbia’s recording equipment and Granada’s television cameras. The prisoners’ roar of agreement is going to escape those walls and be heard by people outside. You cannot fake that response. Then Cash performs “San Quentin” again. This time the prisoners largely shut up and listen. They know the song now. They know they probably aren’t going to hear him perform it there again. The first performance is an explosion; the second feels almost like testimony. Keeping both on the album is probably its smartest decision. “A Boy Named Sue” has some of the same accidental vitality. Cash barely knows the song and Carl Perkins more or less jingles along underneath him while everyone discovers where it is going. I have never particularly loved the song — the censored profanity and comic violence have always struck me as danger with safety rails — but here there is at least genuine spontaneity. “Peace in the Valley” works beautifully in this particular room too. Its Protestant theology of redemption acquires enormous weight in a prison: society has judged these men, but human judgment is not necessarily the final judgment. Cash doesn’t have to pretend everyone there is innocent. The more interesting proposition is that guilt does not cancel humanity and grace is not reserved for respectable people. Then, inevitably, we finish with “Folsom Prison Blues”. Which is unfortunate, because it reminds you of At Folsom Prison. And underneath all of this is a queasier problem. I have little difficulty believing Cash’s motives. His concern for prisoners was real. The trouble lies with the machinery surrounding him. Columbia discovered that Johnny Cash + prison + prisoners responding to Johnny Cash made compelling and commercially successful entertainment. At Folsom they captured an extraordinary event. At San Quentin they attempted to reproduce it, enlarge it and document it from every angle. That creates a magnificent contradiction. The cameras and recording apparatus partly contribute to Cash sounding tired and irritated and make the whole enterprise feel less spontaneous. Yet precisely the same machinery allows the most authentic moment on the record — the prisoners erupting during “San Quentin” — to leave the prison. So yes, something can be authentic and exploitative at the same time. And an album can contain moments far greater than anything on Hunting High and Low while still deserving a lower rating. Because four stars does not mean “a-ha are better than Johnny Cash”. It means Hunting High and Low succeeds remarkably well at the peculiar thing it sets out to do. At San Quentin sets itself a much harder task. Whether Cash intended it or Columbia did, it inevitably asks us to believe that the extraordinary chemistry of Folsom can happen again. For most of these 36 minutes, it cannot. The setting has returned. The jeopardy hasn’t. That is why a-ha get four and Johnny Cash gets three. You can franchise the prison. You cannot franchise the lightning.

It came out in 1988 and sounds curiously detached from 1988. If it belongs anywhere historically, perhaps it sits somewhere off to the side of the Paisley Underground, but it keeps opening doors into the following decade. There’s some of Tindersticks’ melancholy here; more importantly, it feels almost like a permission slip for Wilco: proof that country instrumentation, indie sensibility, sophisticated production and completely plainspoken emotional writing can coexist without any of them cancelling the others out. That last part is the mystery of the record. Mark Eitzel is extraordinarily direct and unselfconscious. Yet the music surrounding him can be exquisitely polished: jangling guitars, fingerpicking, immense reverberant spaces and Bruce Kaphan’s astonishing pedal steel. Usually production this beautiful puts glass between listener and singer. Here it somehow makes Eitzel sound more exposed. “Firefly” establishes this immediately. It has a chorus I could hum after one listen and a gorgeous steel guitar that seems to extend the glow of the fleeting moment being described. The music preserves something the lyric already knows cannot be kept. Then “Somewhere” gives us what I can only call magic-realist Americana: ordinary buses, cocktail lounges and hospitals inhabit the same world as surreal, impossible images. Everyday America develops a fever. “Laughing Stock” reduces everything again. Sparse electric and acoustic jangle, rim shots, yearning, eventually finger clicks. Its opening idea is devastatingly simple: being a laughing stock proves the world is made of rock; some people manage to grow on it and some don’t. The world is hard, and it is particularly hard when you’re the butt of everybody else’s joke. A simple truth put simply. “Lonely” got me personally. Its central thought is essentially: if I have to be this lonely, I may as well be alone. I’ve known that feeling. Hearing somebody else articulate it so plainly doesn’t resurrect anything dreadful; it does something much nicer. You discover that your experience wasn’t particularly special after all. Someone else has sat in the same emotional room. The middle of the record becomes unexpectedly dark. Alcohol stains California, but there’s nothing remotely romantic about drinking here. “Bad Liquor” sounds like a terrible busking act playing through blown amplifiers: distortion, a harmonica nagging at the song, angry drunken fragments. It lasts less than two minutes and then simply stops dead. It is the sound of judgement failing in real time. The hard edit into the jangling country waltz of “Now You’re Defeated” is brilliant. Here defeat itself becomes dangerous: once somebody is diminished enough, their fallibility can become something another person uses to control them. Affection, dependency and possession become horribly difficult to separate. Elsewhere, “Pale Skinny Girl” opens from delicate melancholy into a vast canyon of sound, a snare reverberating across an apparently endless wasteland. “Blue and Grey Shirt”, with that keening steel guitar, is merely a tiny vignette of disappointment — someone waits all morning for somebody who never comes — until Eitzel quietly enlarges it into singing songs for people who are gone. Then the album starts looking west. “Western Sky” is spacious Americana about defeat and reinvention: new name, new face, somewhere else. Everything good must surely be over there on the horizon. Except the western horizon is also where everything disappears. “Highway 5” destroys even geography as an escape route. Jangled, rambling verses give way to repeated refrains surrounded by distant crashing feedback, like dread travelling several miles behind you but never falling away. I once slept for two hours on a Greyhound travelling Interstate 5 through the San Joaquin Valley and woke to scenery that seemed absolutely unchanged. California felt too big to escape from. That is this song. Finally “Last Harbor” retreats into extraordinarily delicate fingerpicking while Eitzel stretches out the question of whether another person might finally become his last harbour. After an album full of failed attempts at escape — drink, lovers, roads, parties, reinvention — perhaps another human being can provide somewhere to stop falling. Perhaps. Neglect. Escape. Futility. Reinvention through other people. That’s California: gorgeous music wrapped around people who keep trying to escape themselves, only to discover that wherever they go, they have brought themselves along

The famous Sniffin’ Glue cover gave you three chord diagrams and the instruction: now form a band. The “Chirping” Crickets delivers essentially the same message twenty years earlier. Here’s one chord. Here’s another. Here’s a third. Now go and form a band. Guitar, guitar, bass, drums, close harmony vocals. Most of the individual parts can be copied by an enthusiastic teenager. Even the little stumble in the timing towards the end of “That’ll Be the Day” can be copied. The guitar breaks can be learned. The harmonies can be worked out around somebody’s front room. Nothing essential feels beyond reach. That matters enormously in 1957. Elvis sounds as though he has arrived from another planet. Buddy Holly sounds as though he has come from across the road. The innovation is at least as sociological as musical. Holly and the Crickets offer artistic permission: you do not need to look dangerous, employ an orchestra, possess impossible instrumental technique or wait for showbusiness to manufacture an identity for you. You can be four fairly ordinary-looking young men with instruments and songs. Britain was simultaneously developing the Larry Parnes model of pop stardom: find the young man, rename him, style him and construct the act. The Crickets look much more like a little working band that existed before the entertainment industry noticed it. That distinction must have been explosive to teenagers in Liverpool. The sound is far less polite than the Buddy Holly of greatest-hits compilations. “Oh, Boy!” is a smash-and-grab little record, with Holly’s famous vocal hiccup still audibly rooted in country singing rather than established as a trademark. “Not Fade Away” sounds as though it has been recorded in a cupboard, Jerry Allison thumping away on a cardboard box while those clipped backing vocals are placed with extraordinary precision. The following tracks make it obvious that this cramped sound is a choice rather than an incapacity. Norman Petty and the band are working with relatively little — microphones, rooms and tape — but they have remarkable ears. Holly can move away from the microphone and allow the room to change the emotional distance of a line. On “You’ve Got Love”, his tremulous voice and the saturated recording combine until a long held note briefly sounds as though the singer has been put through a guitar amplifier with the tremolo switched on. Many a clever producer could spend an afternoon making a drum sound like a cardboard box. The Crickets simply play the cardboard box. The backing vocals are perhaps the easiest part of this record to misunderstand. Their surface owes plenty to country harmony, the Jordanaires and vocal-group pop, and “An Empty Cup (And a Broken Date)” shows that inheritance rather too clearly. The voices become fussy and decorative, and suddenly the record is rooted firmly in 1957. Most of the album is rooted about six months into the future. On “Maybe Baby” the backing voices effectively become the lead instrument during the break. Elsewhere they provide hooks, punctuation and rhythm. The important development is the combination: a self-contained guitar band that also behaves like a vocal ensemble. That is what the Beatles took into English rock. Not simply guitar, guitar, bass and drums, but three people capable of becoming a close-harmony vocal group whenever a song needs it. Listen to early Beatles BBC sessions and the family resemblance is almost embarrassingly obvious: small rooms, boxy sound, little guitar figures, short drum fills answering the vocal, harmonies carrying real weight, everybody doing several jobs at once. By the time “That’ll Be the Day” arrives, everything has come together. A teenage George Harrison could listen to that guitar break and make a decent attempt at reproducing it. Lennon, McCartney and Harrison could contract the sprawling Quarrymen skiffle gang towards a handful of boys with guitars and voices, sometimes working with whichever drummer happened to be available and at one point contracting almost completely to Lennon and McCartney singing together as the Nerk Twins. Skiffle had already told British teenagers that they could form groups. The Crickets showed them that such a group could make pop records. Some older forms remain visible. “Send Me Some Lovin’” is almost a prototype teenage ballad with the orchestral decoration stripped away, its emotional conventions exposed so plainly that you can already imagine Neil Innes or Vivian Stanshall parodying its descendants. “Last Night” crosses teen-idol pop with doo-wop; give it one enormous bass vocal in the middle and you are halfway back to the Ink Spots. Those moments show where the Crickets came from. The rest shows where everybody else is going. Then “Rock Me My Baby” closes the album with virtually everything we now think of as Buddy Holly: the hiccups, close vocals, guitars, yelps and barely contained excitement. It is the whole package distilled into one final rush. Punk eventually needed to print the three chords on the page because twenty years of rock music had accumulated virtuosity, professionalism and gatekeeping. In 1957 the Crickets could simply make the record. Five stars, because this is the template. The sixties were born; right here.