Appropriate that this was the first record to come up for me, as I’d just listened to it a week or so before. It’s on regular rotation in my house — “The Boxer” is a longtime favorite, and the rest of the album is almost as perfect. "Baby Driver" is a weirdly sexy song, which hadn't really occurred to me until this most recent listen. I also didn't know until reading the Wikipedia page (thanks for the link, Generator!) that "So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright" was a song *about* Art Garfunkel, which Garfunkel sang without that knowledge. Sneaky, Paul...
Lots of Beatles and Beach Boys influence on this record, but it hits a sweet spot where it feels like a loving homage and not like a cribbing of style.
Country's first concept album tells a story about murder, loss, escape, and a quest for redemption. Or so I'm told. Really all I hear when I listen to it is one fantastic song after another, and a lackadaisical vocal delivery that tells some intense stories with a sort of whimsy and irreverence. An excellent listen!
This is an album that merits some reading about cultural context to fully appreciate it. When Britpop had become a cozy, predictable drudgery for the artists with whom it was most closely identified, some of them hunkered down in the dazed comfort until their diva tendencies made it unsustainable. Others (well, at least one of them) branched out to collaborate with some of the voices that weren't welcome in the dominant music scene at the time, expanding genres and minds.
AND! None of that is even to mention that this was presented to the world as a band made up of animated apes. So weird and awesome (and, in terms of the animated band members themselves, very cute).
I'd imagine anyone born within ten years of me knows "Clint Eastwood" and both the original and Soulchild-remixed "19-2000" (and has probably spent some time, as I did, being annoyed by how intensely overplayed both songs were), but the album is even more all over the map than those two very different singles would suggest.
"Double Bass" is a great instrumental break that's simultaneously hip-hop and something you would hear during the intermission of a movie in the 60s. "Latin Simone" feels out of place until you realize how perfectly it fits on such an eclectic album. Ditto "Slow Country," a trippy and disorienting blend of reggae and fuzz. The rhythm section on "M1 A1" could hold its own on a much heavier track, but as it is this is as close to Blur as the album gets. Whenever the band starts to sound too much like a Blur side-project, though, a beat kicks in or an echo-y and expansive guitar riff sends you off into a desert somewhere, or the bass pulls you down into the low end in a way that no mere Britpop band ever could, and you forget about the Blur connection.
What a fantastic treat to be told by an album generator that I *have to* listen to one of my favorite records of all time. I love, have always loved, will always love "Do You Realize?" more than just about any bit of uplifting media. The message -- that we are all tiny, insignificant motes of dust in an indifferent universe and we will all be gone before we know it -- is somehow so inspiring when paired with the swelling and ebbing of the music. Throughout the rest of the album, the groovy interludes, the weird noises, the screams of rage and the spacey expanses of utter calm...it's just so good.
In my forty-one years on this planet, most of the people I've encountered who identify as Air fans have been pretentious to an extent that's made me not want to listen to Air.
So, does the fact that I loved this record mean I was wrong to make assumptions, or does it just mean that's I've gotten extremely pretentious?
I'm an appreciator of outstanding musicianship, and I know that the energy of a live show -- the spell a great live band can set on its audience -- is hard to capture with only audio (or even audio and video...sometimes you just had to be there), but I don't have the patience to keep paying attention after eight minutes of guitar soloing. Even if it's exquisite guitar soloing, I just start yawning.
So I get why this album is on this list, and I respect it. But it is definitely not for me.
Outstanding album. I was only familiar with two of these songs when I first turned on the record, and even then not super familiar. It’s weird, because I feel like I’ve heard a lot of Neil Young in my life, but this seems like kind of a quintessential album that has never come to my attention.
Throughout most of the songs, there’s a driving groove that makes the long, contemplative (but never too complex) guitar (and fiddle?) solos feel lively and crisp. I say this is someone who finds jam bands extremely dull (see: my review of the Allman Brothers’ “Live at Fillmore East,” the album I listened to yesterday).
I’ll probably be picking a copy of this up on vinyl, or at the very least streaming it again in the near future.
Hmmm, I think I'm goth now? All it took was some driving, prominent bass lines without too many frills; a steady and unambitious drumbeat to match; some jangly, shimmering, but not overly complicated guitar that layers on more darkness despite sounding bright; lyrics that aren't afraid to be gloomy without being ironic or shocking; and emotional grandiosity that isn't theatrical or lamenting. It's a formula that got repeated (and, sure, improved upon) by bands with a bigger reach in the decades that followed, but this album had to have been a huge influence on the Cures and Interpols of the world.
As a bass player, I love a band where the guitar takes an occasional backseat to the rhythm section, and this album has a ton of those moments. Usually those are when the band sounds its most brooding...and clearly "brooding" is what they're going for here. Will Sergeant is restrained to the point that his guitar creates more space than it fills, so he's definitely still the lead musician here, but you only hear from him every so often and he rarely resolves a melody.
It's psychedelia without the showiness, funk without the syncopation, and blues without the ... well, without the blues, if that makes sense. (It doesn't.)
I listened to it twice. "Do It Clean," "Rescue," "Stars Are Stars," and "Villiers Terrace" were my favorites.
