1001 Albums Summary

Perhaps it’s telling that the most I get involved in this album is when it briefly is just doing Brecht and Weill. It’s perhaps pointing I’m towards what the band would commit to more wholeheartedly in Strange Days, an album that feels like it has so much more of an identity than this one. As it stands a lot of the rest if the album feels more like an incomplete early draft of the many identities the band would adopt over the years. A loose blues act. A brooding pop act. And, unfortunately, a drunken bar band that somehow made it big. I think your fondness for this album is heavily depends on the patience you have for the two epics that shape it. And I’ve learned that I have some but not a lot. As fond as I am of Ray Manzarek’s organ, about 15 minutes into that solo I do sort of just want to tell him to move it along. And that’s generous compared to what I want to say to the band during the most indulgent bits of The End. I liked it all more when listening through the album as a whole but not enough to fully I love the album this time around. Highlights: Alabama Song (whiskey bar)

Outstanding album but is it just perhaps insanely sequenced? Starting with perhaps the most formless track on the album and playing the show stopping Hallelujah in the middle so as overshadow all of side and make Corpus Christie Carol, a great track in it’s own right feel like a bit more if the same by coming in just a couple of tracks later. The same songs in a different order… and you’ll maybe shape an album that’s already pretty good into the best of the 90s? I can’t quite figure out Buckley in a way. He feels like an anachronism. Sometimes feeling like a lost folk rocker from the late 60s like Nick Drake or his father. Sometimes pointing towards the chamber folk / indie work of the early 2010s. In the mid 90s there’s not really any good comparison to be made. Highlights: Grace, Last Goodbye, So Real, Lover You Should Come Over, Eternal Life, Corpus Christie Carol