Lorna Doom is the star, with able support from Don Bolles. Pat's wall of noise is kept low in the mix so it doesn't detract from her melodies. The challenge is ignoring Darby's bratty ranting. GI ends with 10 minutes of filler that presumably took 5 minutes to write in the studio. Clearly, they were in a rush to get an LP out before the fad was over, but a 28 minute album would have been fine. The band's sound and the dry production were clearly modelled on just such an album, released by Ramones over two years previously, but that one also had good ideas and good songs. Where GI tries to expand on the template, it mostly irritates. The sampled speech on Media Blitz is a nice touch, but the aforementioned mess of Shut Down (Annihilation Man) and the phased cymbals on Our Way show they ought to have stuck to Their Way.
Don't trust an album on which the best songs are the ballads. I have a feeling I'll say that a lot during this challenge. Tuesday's Gone is pretty good, though, and to a lesser extent I enjoyed Simple Man and Free Bird. On a couple of the better songs, Ronnie van Zant sounds oddly like Gary Brooker.
It's not my favourite of the incredible mid-60s "gone electric" trio, but it is excellent (and I expect I'll be seeing the other two later).
Led Zeppelin are a band I've always hated, but every now and then I listen to them to try to understand what others see in them. This time around, I actually quite liked a few songs. It's still mostly a case of "that's not a good song, but it's a good groove, even if it goes on way too long," but that's a big change. I don't even know who I am any more.
Day 5: This is more like it. I hadn't heard this album in full since about 2007 and it was a delight to hear it again. I had forgotten the non-singles, other than Me and Mr Jones, but aside from the slightly underwhelming Addicted they're all good. I especially liked He Can Only Hold Her.
Prince made loads of good singles but the albums I've heard have a lot of filler, this being the exception.
I've owned the demos of this one for years and they were my favourite XTC album. It was a real treat to finally hear the finished album.
Musicians of the 1990s: you do not need to fill up the whole capacity of the CD. I had to listen to this in three shifts because it's far too long and I wasn't enjoying it at all. Maybe I was just in the wrong mood for it, and it's definitely not music for headphones. For each album on the list, I've been picking one song to put on a playlist. With this album, I picked a song at random, but I had tried to get through it rather than actively listening to it.
I have a lot to say about this one, but I can't be bothered right now. It's pretty good.
My favourite Drake album by far is Pink Moon, and I tend to forget how good the others are when I'm not listening to them. It's brilliant, of course.
I can't believe I hadn't got around to listening to The Saints before. This album is a blast. It's way more varied than I expected, too. There's piano, sax, and one song has both a country/surf influenced lead guitar part and an acoustic part that reminded me of The Searchers' Needles and Pins. It's the swaggering best bits of Richard Hell and the Voidoids and Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, with a hint of Swell Maps. Chris Bailey's slurred sneer reminds me a bit of Iggy Pop and Mark E Smith. That's not just because I heard The Fall's version of This Perfect Day first.
My tastes have changed so much as I've got older. As a teenager, I'd have been annoyed by a band taking themselves so seriously and not realising how silly they sound. That's because I took myself too seriously in a different way. Now, I love the ridiculousness, and I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. Also, knowing they're categorised as thrash and having heard some Metallica, I'd have expected the album to be overlong, drenched in reverb and as fun as waiting for the tumble dryer at the launderette on a sunny Saturday. This is more of a hardcore punk album with better production and the occasional bit of shredding. Not a second is wasted. Instead of lyrics by a teenager who's sick of the police shutting down gigs and taking his beer, the words seem to have been written by a gross 10-year-old boy who's somewhere between his Goosebumps and Horrible Histories phases and getting into Stephen King. It's gleefully gory, rather than self-pitying. It's tonnes of fun. As soon as it finished, I played it again.
"Who the fuck are 'Steely Dan'?" - Eminem, 2001
I get really put off when I feel I'm expected to like something, so friends online talking obsessively about Steely Dan has made me want to avoid them. I expected irritating smugness. There are moments when I think, "god, couldn't this solo be a few bars shorter," but overall I liked it. There are some lovely Neil Young harmonies on The Boston Rag, which might be my favourite song. A few tracks are just a pleasant sound - good production and skilled musicianship - rather than good songs. I was playing spot the reference to some extent. There's the Lady Madonna "see how they run" bit in Your Gold Teeth, for example. I was very surprised to realise Luke Haines had nicked part of My Old School for the chorus of The Auteurs' School.
Many slight songs are kept aloft for longer than they ought by the parachute silk of Disney strings. Of the first few, the line "like a bridge over troubled water, I will lay me down is memorable," and Cecilia is as unfortunately catchy as a cold on a packed train carriage. The title track is very of its time, a white gospel piano ballad in the region of Let It Be or Carole King's Tapestry. The album picks up with The Boxer, though I think that was the one marred by a saxophone solo at the end. The taut Everly Brothers rhythm of Baby Driver finally brings the album to life. Art and Paul must have thought the album needed more of that energy, as they follow up a silly cod reggae number with a cover of Bye Bye Love. Unfortunately, it's a lovely recording, so their lovely voices and that vital acoustic guitar part are buried under the noise of thousands of punters clapping out of time. It doesn't suit the mood of the album one bit, and it's hard to see why they didn't bash out a good studio take of a song they knew well enough to nail in one go. I ought to mention that The Only Living Boy in New York is quite good. There's also a song about Frank Lloyd Wright, which was an odd coincidence; earlier on the day I played this album, I had read something in Constellation of Genius about the opening of the Imperial Hotel, which had got me thinking about Conor Oberst's Mamah Borthwick (A Sketch).
Another I liked more than I expected. I wrote about it in my journal already.
Oh good, a lesser album by one of those groups you're "supposed to" like. Of course, when you get into what their politics actually are, they aren't the worthy group that patronising left wing NME readers wanted them to be, but nearly an hour of irritating record-scratching and Chuck D's dull hectoring voice is unbearable. Like Led Zeppelin, it's music for virgin boys who like to pontificate about their interests to give themselves a sense of superiority. I'm supposed to think this is better than the Geto Boys because it's "intelligent"? Fuck off.
I expected the whole album to consist of the boring white blues that begins You Shook Me, so I was really surprised when the album started with three songs of pretty decent psych-rock. It's like Disraeli Gears, if it came in 'plain' flavour. I enjoy the style of playing, but the songwriting is not particularly memorable and the lyrics are just floating lyrics from old blues songs. It quickly falls apart; while You Shook Me becomes more interesting, Ol' Man River is a drag and Greensleeves is still the sound of a thuggish monarch telling his next conquest "I'm in a band." 'Rock My Plimsoul'? Fuck me. I like how the unusual time signature sounds like they keep falling out of time, but that's about all I like. Beck's Bolero is pretty cool, though, and it helps by providing a break from Rod Stewart's smoky voice. This album is better than that Public Enemy one, though probably not as good as Lynyrd Skynyrd. That's the level we're operating on. As live takes on studio albums go, Blues Deluxe is far less jarring than Bye Bye Love on Bridge Over Troubled Water; the crowd noise is less intrusive and the sound of the band more consistent with the songs around it. However, like the inclusion of a traditional instrumental at the start of side one, a 7:30 live track is clearly filler to hit the 40 minute mark.
Double-double good, double-double good. Probably their best album, though there isn't a bad one among their original run (I like Yes Please).
It was surprisingly fun to hear the singles again, despite how much they were overplayed on radio and adverts at the time. The rest of the album was hard work to get through. I had to listen to a song at a time and take breaks because it was intensely irritating. Two and a half minutes into You're Not From Brighton, I had to check how long was left. It felt like it had been playing for about 25 minutes, but I was still halfway from the finish line. Acid 8000 is even longer. Jesus Christ, Quentin, rein it in a bit.
Chameleon is great for sampling, but it was quite exhausting to listen to the whole thing. I really wasn't in the mood. I'd have to listen again without headphones or depression.
The Humpty Dance is fun, but you know you're in trouble when the second track is an interlude stretched to nearly 7 minutes. Rhymin' on the Funk introduces the other members of the group over a beat that's mixed far too low. One of them really seems to lack confidence and I had to turn the volume up to hear him. Then there's another interlude. And so on it drags. I'd rather hear an album by their dancer, thanks.
For some reason, I had never heard a full album by the Divine Comedy before. A mid-90s album by a smart Alec fan of Scott Walker, Bacharach and David and mid-60s orchestrated pop was exactly what I needed. I really enjoyed this.
It might be the depression, but I didn't feel like listening to this yesterday. I hadn't heard the whole album in about 20 years, and I worried it would be another overlong hip hop album with about 2 good songs, a load of filler and some irritating skits. I've developed some cynicism about Dre, with his ghost-writers, ghost producers and headphones marketing empire. Well, I was right about the skits, of course, but 14 year old me was right that it's a great album. I can't imagine how it sounded in 1992, because I first heard it around 10 years later, but it has always sounded really dated in a way I find fascinating. Some of my favourite hip hop from the early 90s has a dusty warmth that gives it a kind of timeless, vintage quality, as though it was excavated from a secret, hidden past. The Chronic sounds exactly like 1992: ultra-modern in its time, but soon faded by the blazing California sunshine coming through the windscreen. It's one of the best albums of the decade and it was really good to hear it again. During this current run through the 1001 list, the only album I've enjoyed as much was Reign in Blood.
I have too much to say. It's brilliant, obviously.
It tails off a bit towards the end, but this is a good album.
I should think of something to say about this, but right now I can't be bothered. It was pretty good.
I should have listened to this years ago. I always liked Poison Arrow and the title track. It's really good.
Fucking genius, one of my favourite albums of all time, and not even Luke's best.
Another of my all time favourites, and probably his best album.
After several good and great albums in a row, this is the hangover. I've been been picking one song from each album and adding it to a playlist, and for this one, I based my choice on length, because every song is horrible and some are extremely long. The album ends with a 23 minute blues song in which a white songwriter compares a bad relationship to being whipped. He's talking about a pillory rather than being enslaved, but it's ill-judged and you certainly don't feel any sympathy for him. Just before the end, one of the guitarists plays Frere Jacques, which is the one but of light relief during this awful slog of an album. I've heard Lynyrd Skynyrd albums better than this. Honest to god, Lynyrd Skynyrd! I'd give it zero if I could.
This was a welcome relief after the horror of the Allman Brothers. The dreamy orchestrations are the perfect setting for her fragile, prematurely ancient voice. During the second song, I found myself wondering if Bob Dylan had studied her phrasing. I tired of it by the end, but I would listen to it again. When I found my attention wandering, the solos brought me back in.
American problem, nothing to do with me. The album peaked at number 52 and the best-performing single, the title track, reached number 82. She just means nothing over here, and deservedly so. The title track is my favourite, as it's generic adult contemporary, like a Richard Marx album track, as opposed to tedious blues rawk with harmonica solos and shit 80s production.
Some nice grooves and patronising, remedial "My First Protest Song" lyrics would like to meet decent songs to hold listeners' attention for the duration of yet another overlong album. It's pleasant background music and nothing more.
I hadn't got around to listening to Joni before, though I'd heard the odd song. This is really good and my rating will probably go up the more familiar I get with it.
Fairly average rapper and producer markets himself as a genius and gets away with it, despite heavily relying on ghostwriters and ghost producers to do much of the work for him. It should have been enough to market himself as a charismatic performer and not have to pretend to be a visionary auteur. It's not a bad album, so I shouldn't let the Milli Vanilli of it all bother me. Actually, that's unfair on Milli; they never claimed to be making "great art." Maybe the problem is that Kanye is all show, all persona, and his persona pissed me off long before I knew he was a neo-Nazi. The genius myth simply isn't entertaining. I mostly listened to hip-hop up to 2004, but around the time this came out I just wasn't hearing anything that excited me any more. I quite liked the singles from this, but no more than I liked The Game. It's like being told Lady Gaga was a wildly inventive maverick chameleon circa The Fame; one can't just claim it without backing it up. It's not that the emperor is naked, but that he's wearing the same jeans, t-shirt and trainers as the guy next to him.
Oh yeah, and once again IT'S TOO LONG. He could have cut nearly half an hour from this and it would have been a much better album.
Oh, for fuck's sake, not this. I've always hated the title track. There are several dull piano ballads, including one which invents Bryan Adams and another about "the white man's burden" and manifest destiny. There's some irritating blues-rock, including one song that has a ZZ Top style riff with a kind of hybrid disco/country beat. The only song I liked was the second one, which is surely the kind of thing Elliott Smith had in mind when he wrongly dismissed his own 'I Figured You Out' because "it sounds like the fucking Eagles." If only I had just listened to his song for 40 minutes instead of this shit.
I don't have anything to say right now, but I had never heard the whole of this album before, and I liked it.
I can't believe that a two hour long album which starts with a 21 minute long track is supposed to be the record he made *before* his head disappeared up his arse in search of a bag he'd stashed there. I don't have time for this, so I'll assume I don't like it and listen tomorrow.
