1001 Albums Summary

Great set of tunes, but peters out a little bit in the final third with its weakest, arguably most derivative material. But it's all relative to an almost peerless first half, and there are still some nice harmonies, great playing and superb production throughout, which keeps it breezy. Personal favourites are the first side's quieter ballads, but The Chain is undeniable.

Too many meandering melodies over some fairly standard four chord loops. Appalling synthesizer sounds frequently undermines the beauty of the playing and Gaye's voice. Whenever I listen to Marvin Gaye beyond the big soul-pop hits I start to wonder how much I'm able to enjoy his wonderful voice when it's delivering half-baked lyrics and hazy, unfocused tunes. Then he hits you with a 'When Did You Stop... ' and things start to make a bit more sense. Too much slow-tempo divorce jams on this for me to enjoy any of the good stuff.

How do we listen to Michael Jackson at this point? This album feels to me like the watershed moment, at which the quality (or at least the average quality) of the music has waned enough that the reasons to come back to his work have curdled. That said, some of the beats, baselines and changes here are terrific, and I found myself enjoying such fundamentally silly songs as Speedy Demon and Just Good Friends because of the elastic funk production and Jackson's sometimes irresistible way of blendng lead and backing vocals. There's still a good album here from a singular performer, but the combination of a background of biographical ickiness, the incessant vocal ticks that have begun to lapse into self-parody, and the sickliness of some of the cartoonish elements of the production and songwriting make me happy enough to consign this to the depths of history, along with the remaining years of Jackson's output.

How much you like this album possibly depends on how much toleration you have for some quite silly English music hall parts (plenty), peak Britpop laddishness, albeit semi-parodic (much less), and general south-east posturing (very little). It's quite tricky to get through all 16 songs without a bit of irritation setting in, especially when Albarn is doing his wideboy schtick. That said, lots of these songs are undeniable - an apotheosis of mid-1990s UK guitar music. Even a good few years after I last listened, I find a lot of it very enjoyable. Coxon's guitar parts are a good match for Albarn's alternating melancholia and ruined boozy hedonism.