This was a fun listen. Spaghetti Junction, Humble Mumble, Red Velvet, Xplosion, Stankonia are all bangers that I hadn't heard before.
Killer album and a pleasant surprise. Short and fun, had somehow never heard this one before. f
Put it on this morning and just realized I'm already on my third listen. I take for granted how completely the Beatles had perfected the art of the pop song, and this is them still figuring things out. The Motown covers hit.
A very horny and monotonous album. The fillers feel like lazy alternate reality versions of the hits. Each track bleeds into the next and I struggled to keep paying attention. Even the singles feel like self-parody at this point. The cars/legs/girls thing hasn't aged well and feels like divorced dad rock you'd hear on touch tunes at Applebees.
Genuinely surprised by how little I enjoyed this. The one upside is it sent me back to Tres Hombres, which imo does the greasy blues rock schtick much better without tipping into cartoonishness.
Not a big 90s R&B guy, but this won me over. Holds up really well. Sharp lyrically, no weak tracks, and she's got serious vocal range on top of being able to spit. Narrative transitions on an album are hit or miss for me, the classroom interludes had me curious at first - she's absent from roll call while everyone else gets taught about love... but it started to drag by the midpoint.
Interesting tidbit: she was pregnant with Bob Marley's grandson during recording, which is what "To Zion" is about (and it features some genuinely sick Santana riffs).
Rating this is hard. I've absorbed some of the Lauryn Hill discourse over the years, and the New Ark lawsuit stuff lingers. But knowing what she was going through at the time, the album reads as authentic at least lyrically. She was undeniably talented and put this out against the grain of a hip hop scene that was very much a boys club.
I was not prepared for any of this and I have zero complaints. I think I hit peak enjoyment when he started scatting in the middle of Buscando Guayaba. Way more variety than I expected as a Salsa outsider. Musicianship and listenability off the charts.
For me, first masterpiece of this project. It's wild that Wonder wrote and played almost every instrument himself. The album has a spontaneity and playfulness to it, love the way the measures were constantly moving and shifting, hard to zone out even for a second. I'm also a sucker for that rhodes piano sound. The moog bass is all over this too, which was a surprise to me - had no idea moogs were being used this early.
"Too High" is unlike anything else on the album which made for a cool intro, I really dug the psychedelic funk energy it brought to the table. But the peaks for me were "Living for the City," "Higher Ground," and "Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing." Hard to pick a favorite between the three. The way "Living for the City" closes with Wonder shifting into that hoarse, raspy, preacher-like vocal timbre is so good. And apparently that riff on "Higher Ground" is a clavinet run through a wah pedal? DOPE. This one's going in the regular rotation and has me excited to dig into the rest of his classics run, which it looks like we'll be visiting at some point on this list.
Some fun facts I read about while listening:
- Wonder was the first Black artist to win the Grammy for Album of the Year... feels way overdue.
- Shortly after this album dropped he was nearly killed in a car accident and spent several days in a coma.
- "Living for the City" was apparently recorded in a single day, kind of unbelievable considering he wrote and played all the parts.
They’ve been cited by some of my favorite bands as a key influence, and I love basically any reggae-punk crossover, so I was already pretty primed to like this. Reading some of the coverage around the band, a lot of it falls back on this idea that they couldn’t really play their instruments. There are claims that they needed the Clash to tune their guitars or only knew three chords, but then you run straight into stuff like Ari Up getting guitar lessons from Joe Strummer, or Bob Marley cutting the Slits from an early version of ‘Punky Reggae Party’ when he found out they were women. At a certain point it starts to feel less like criticism and more like dismissal. Because when I listen to Cut the dub and reggae elements are deep in the bones of it, and the songwriting feels more inventive and rhythmically sophisticated than most of the punk scene around it. It's definitely raw though, and I get why it's not for everyone.
Favorite tracks: Instant Hit, Ping Pong Affair, Love Und Romance, Typical Girls, Adventures Close to Home.
