1001 Albums Summary

I’m enough of a Beatles fan that I bought their entire discography when the 2009 re-releases came out. And yet, somehow, I never really listened much to their post-breakup content. As a result I’m hitting this album mostly fresh. Side A opens with the title track, one of the two ‘big’ McCartney/Wings songs that everyone knows, along with ‘Live and Let Die’. I’ve heard this song numerous times, but had somehow failed to notice the first two movements or, in fact, the storytelling aspect of the song. I guess I wasn’t paying attention to the lyrics previously? It feels very much like a late Beatles song, like it would fit on Abbey Road where they were showing off their respective trajectories. And of course, that immediately leads into very ‘Live and Let Die’ horns, leading into a throbbing fuzzed out bassline for ‘Jet’ and lyrics that seem awfully focused on whether the Major is a “lady suffragette”, whatever that’s supposed to mean in this song’s context? It feels a bit like the song was an excuse for that repeating line and… what? ‘Bluebird’ feels in line with some of the late Beatles songs again, and is kind of a jarring change tonally from the previous song, slowing way down into a love song about gaining freedom from… something?... that goes more jazzy than the Beatles ever did, again showing McCartney’s changing style and musical growth. It’s an odd middle track in this case, though, given that after it settles to its conclusion, you immediately get hit with the almost ABBA-like bassline that drives ‘Mrs. Vandebilt’ and its weirdly nihilistic lyrics leading into lunatic laughter and then… organ music and ‘Let Me Roll It’, the album’s slowest track, rolling almost too slowly? The little jogs in the guitars after each chorus are at least interesting, but I can’t say it makes for a terribly exciting end to the side. Side B ends up feeling almost like a different album entirely, for most of its runtime. It remains in the slow-paced ballad space through ‘Mamunia’ and its glorification of standing in the rain (which I can agree is worth doing now and then), and ‘No Words’ despairing at a one-sided love, before settling into a song that is absolutely a wake, ‘Picasso’s Last Words’, in which ‘Jet’ comes back to say hi. This does at least help to start tying the album together more overtly, even if it feels decidedly out of place in a song that is quite literally about a death, but then it turns around and brings back the refrain from ‘Mrs. Vandebilt’, too, leading into the album’s finale, ‘Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five’, a more upbeat song with utter nonsense lyrics that are mostly just there to let the album wrap with another musical theme that prefigures ABBA, along with lyrics that don’t feel especially sensical, but then, this particular song isn’t really about the lyrics, it’s about the music. In a return to the style of the aforementioned ‘Live and Let Die’, this builds into an orchestral surge that builds and builds in a way akin to the way that ‘A Day in the Life’ ended back on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967, only when it breaks, unlike A Day in the Life’s chord fading to silence, the Band on the Run suddenly returns to lead us out. Oh good, they really did manage to never be found. I do feel like this is kind of motioning at being a Sgt. Pepper’s kind of concept album-alike, but as with Sgt. Pepper’s, it kind of comes apart in the middle, only vaguely maintaining the pretense. That said, I can’t fault it for this; there’s plenty of great songs here, and if the album has trouble finding itself in the middle, it’s only because this was Paul coming out of arguably the lowest point in his career and finding his footing again. 7.5/10. A few bangers that I won’t hesitate to listen to again here, but it doesn’t feel like McCartney has quite the same magic here as some of his later collaborations with John Lennon had.

Oh, hello, political album. So, I’m coming into this completely cold. My normal music sources don’t play soul/funk music, so I’m not familiar with this genre in general. I wish I was. I should be. Hopefully that’s going to change by the end of this thing. I am completely the wrong person to be talking about a lot of the themes here, though. I live in a region that has been predominantly White for as long as I can remember. There were *no* Black kids in my high school, in a town that didn’t crack 5000 population until around the time I was starting college. My entire exposure to non-White/Caucasian/whatever-epithet-you-prefer culture comes through media, and even then, largely through osmosis. Now, all that said, I can at least try to come at this in something resembling empathy. This is probably not the best album to be the first funk album I’ve ever listened to, but there’s still a lot to enjoy here. I love the instrumentation across the board here, and the way that the tracks give the music a lot of time to build up before Curtis Mayfield’s falsetto comes in and establishes the statements that his songs want to make. I came into this with a very different idea of what I was going to encounter than what I got. The A-side opens by giving us a track about senseless urban violence, a brief eulogy that stays away from going anywhere near being a dirge, lyrics even calling out that it’s all too common an event, that it’s hard to truly mourn when it’s been so clear that it was coming. So, like… I know that the Conscious Hip-Hop genre is a thing, but I was not expecting that kind of content in a 1970s funk album. The center of the album, the rest of the A-side and the start of the B-side knows exactly what it wants to say after that. Look after your own, your neighborhood is a community, find strength in togetherness, in shared faith, in the knowledge that everyone is suffering together. But all too soon, it comes back to the darker thesis statement. The stereotypes about Black people are that they’re violent toward each other, that they’re someone to fear, and that’s not right. Practice what the Good Lord preaches, let love defeat fear, and stop destroying community where it should be propping you up. Poverty is everyone’s problem, and climbing on your neighbors’ backs to try to get out instead of working with them to lift everyone is only going to drag everyone down. This is not the album I expected. This is not the album I wanted right now. But all the same, this is an album I’m glad to have heard. I don’t know that it’s an album I would return to, though. I can appreciate the artistry, and the messages, but that’s not a place I often want to go in my listening. 10/10 for artistry – this is an album that knows what it needs to say what it’s trying to say, and has precisely that, no more, no less. 10/10 for messaging, as well. However, I have to rate based on enjoyment and likelihood of returning to this album or my numbers are going to be skewed in a way that doesn’t help to sketch out my musical tastes, so unfortunately I think the most I can give this is a 6/10. Not the score I want to be giving the album, but as a gauge of enjoyment on anything besides a purely intellectual level, it’s probably the most honest

OK, this is a *lot* more like what I was expecting yesterday when I put on the other Curtis Mayfield album. I’m not especially familiar with the soul/funk genre, but this one’s more like what I think of in the genre, and the whole thing just feels more… summery? I found myself really getting into a lot of the tracks here, and unlike on *There’s No Place Like America Today*, I can absolutely see myself listening to this album again. The most obvious difference that stands out in Mayfield’s singing in this case is that he seems to be using more of his vocal range, not spending nearly as much time in the higher register that seemed almost hesitant and wispy at times on the later album, particularly in that album’s “Billy Jack”. All of the lyrical songs here feature Mayfield giving it his all, delivering another message album but seeming almost more sure of himself and the strength of his statements against drug use, drug sales, even engaging with the business, with The Man. The A-side opens with a thesis statement in “Little Child Runnin’ Wild”, directly calling out the way that drug use destroys families, pulls people apart, keeps the already poor stuck in a cycle of poverty. This is immediately followed by “Pusherman”, a first-person ode to the life of a drug seller, that draws attention to the façade that hides the uncertainty and fragility lurking underneath. This leads into “Freddie’s Dead”, a flat refutement of even that façade of the Pusherman, pointing an accusing finger at how the drug sellers pull others into their orbit, and just drive them to their deaths in the street. The side ends with an uptempo instrumental track that sounds like exactly what it claims to be, a “Junkie Chase” scene through the streets of the inner city and lets the orchestral aspects of this album’s band show off. It’s an enticing end to the side, to say the least. The B-side comes up in a more mellow manner, a smooth bassline that gets your head bobbing before the horn section jumps in and heralds Mayfield’s love song for this album, “Give Me Your Love”, a promise to stay by his lady no matter what. It’s followed by an outright roasting of the pusher life, “Eddie You Should Know Better” directly calling out how getting into that lifestyle makes you into the kind of person that nobody should be idolising, that everyone knows will turn on so-called friends when it’s a threat to the bottom line. The beat speeds up again for “No Thing On Me”, a song that focuses on the way that keeping your head up high and staying out of the drug game altogether helps you keep your hope and stay out of the spiral of destruction that only drags everyone around you down with you. It mellows into “Think” after that, a wind-heavy instrumental track featuring, of all things, an oboe; this is perfectly placed in the album, a slow moment to focus on what you’ve heard before, the arguments against taking the too-good-to-be-true easy way out of poverty when it just serves to push everyone else deeper. Why go for drugs when you can have your own innate natural high? Better to stay clean and clear. And this leads straight into the title track, “Superfly”, a finale that directly lays it out again: If you get into the selling game, you’re more likely to end up dead than making it to anything like the American Dream. Better to do things the right way. I come out of this with a much greater appreciation for Curtis Mayfield than I was left with after *There’s No Place Like America Today*. There’s more to grab onto here; the message is just as potent as the later album, but the wrapper is more approachable if you’re not familiar with the genre. Solid 8.5/10 for me on this one.

If you had told me before starting this journey that my first 5-star album was going to be 20+ Cuban musicians, many of them at least forty years into their careers, having a traditional music jam session, I would have called you crazy. *Buena Vista Social Club* locked the score before the third track was even over. Now, this isn’t to say that I went into this album expecting not to like it. It’s more accurate to say that I had no clue what I was going to hear at all. This album is one that I was sort of peripherally aware of in the context of having seen it in music sections at stores when it came out, but I didn’t know what it was, and besides I didn’t really buy a lot of music at the time. I’m not sure I would have even picked it up off the shelf, to be honest; my CD collection at the time was a mix of soundtrack albums and electronic music with a couple of Weird Al albums and a random disc of Beatles covers mixed in; I had a few more cassette tapes but that was a similar assortment, with a couple of Blue Note samplers in place of the electronica and a collection of old radio programs given to me by my grandmother in place of the soundtrack albums. So, this would have just completely missed my radar. 90% of my musical education after that came in the form of Rock Band video games, so… yeah. That kind of limited things since I wasn’t really getting out into the more varied genres outside of rock on my Xbox and pop or classic rock in the car. Basically, I wasn’t in the market for something like this. All that is to say… I never would have known what I was missing. Never knew what I was missing. The musicians on this album don’t show any sign that they had just been thrown together to record a few albums then scatter again, and you can hear how they’re just *enjoying* themselves in the studio. I know there’s a documentary that came out about these sessions. I don’t think that’s enough. I want to know what they were playing and recording that didn’t make it onto this album, or onto the 25th anniversary re-release. I really, really hope there will be more treasures like this one hiding in the next 1085 albums, because I need more surprises like this. Yes, I know I barely talked about the album here, but let’s face it, everything is subjective and this is what my mind said I should write here. 10/10, the only thing that disappoints me is that I had the original release instead of the 25th anniversary version so I don’t have a second disc of this immediately handy. And that’s not the album’s fault.

It’s hard to have grown up in the Pacific Northwest in the 90s and not have heard of Nirvana. At the time they were active, most of the music I was hearing was country, of all things (please note: Neither of my parents listens to country anymore. They both quit when they divorced almost three decades ago. As I understand it, they didn’t *start* until after they were married. I don’t know what to make of that.) so this band came and went without my having been familiar with their music; my entire exposure consisted of Weird Al’s “Smells Like Nirvana” and that told me what they sounded like I guess? And then, of course, Kurt Cobain’s death was all over the news. I’ve heard more of their music on the radio more recently, but never really put the effort into, like… digging in. I’m not sure this album really helps with that, but I can absolutely appreciate what I’m hearing. And I appreciate it a lot. It’s hard to judge an acoustic live album when I’m not especially familiar with the band’s studio sound on a lot of these songs. I mean, leaving aside the Grateful Dead where you’re arguably doing it wrong if you’re not listening to live, you’re getting something vastly different from the norm. Even so, the musical talent on display here is anything but hidden. The sound I expect from what I’ve heard of Nirvana previously is here, stripped down to its essence, and the set, with its mix of Nirvana originals (but not their big hits for the most part) and covers, lets the band show its range. It’s a fascinating way get my first exposure to many of these songs, and makes me wish I’d encountered this album far sooner in my life. Now, all that said, I find myself kind of wishing I was watching this concert rather than just listening; I’m forced to imagine what the band members are talking about when they banter between the songs. Alas, I’m only listening. Still, this is absolutely an album that’s going in my list of all-timers. I can see myself listening to this one more than a few times just on its own. … And I was mostly done writing all this out and then “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” came on. Cobain belting out on the second half? That cinched it. No wonder that was the closing song, I’m imagining that even with three cups of tea, that did something to his throat akin to what “Twist and Shout” did to John Lennon at the end of recording *Please Please Me*. Brilliant way to close the set. 10/10, easy.

My first time hearing ‘Pinball Wizard’ was Elton John in a pair of giant Doc Marten stilt boots, playing a piano that was built into a pinball machine. Just to get that out in front of anything else. My first encounter with *Tommy* was, weirdly enough, someone’s t-shirt while standing in line at Disney World. Not that I had any idea what I was looking at, or what Tommy was, it was just a very striking shirt advertising the Broadway musical. I don’t know why that stuck in my head. Sticks in my head still. Blame my autism or something. The next time I encountered it was a couple of years later. I had a day where I was home from school or something, I know for sure that there weren’t any family members around with me, and I was flipping channels, and caught Encore just as they were about to start playing the film, “Tommy”. The t-shirt flashed into my mind, and I decided to leave it there and watch. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I hadn’t seen anything quite like it before, and that’s leaving aside the whole Acid Queen sequence. My only real exposure to Elton John before that had been seeing his episode of The Muppet Show, but even so, he ended up being the one face I actually recognized in the whole thing. And all of those images I was unprepared for lodged in my head. So that’s where I’m coming from on this. I’ve seen the film a number of times, I’ve become more of a fan of The Who, but somehow I just never came around to actually listen to the album itself. I think this is the first rock album I’ve ever listened to that had a proper overture. That was a surprise, hearing the whole album in miniature within the first few minutes, similar to what I knew but also different. That same thing applies to the whole album, in fact; all these songs that are *like* what I’m familiar with, and yet different. So how do you rate something that occupies a position like that? This album has existed at a weird disconnect from my experience for over three decades. I can’t disconnect it from the images that have been lodged in my head since my youth. The Who sings Acid Queen and I see Tina Turner and that bizarro mirrored sarcophagus box with the syringes, even though I know it’s not actually there, that it’s from one of the film’s most fever-dream sequences. The Who sings Pinball Wizard and Elton John tromps around in meter-high stilt boots. It’s impossible to untangle. I can’t judge this on its own merits simply because I’m too familiar with the alternate version of it I encountered in my youth. 9/10, rounded up to 5/5 stars. I’m absolutely going to listen to this again, even if I can’t take it as its own separate document from my previous experience with the songs. It’s not quite as virtuosic as I would want from a 10/10… I’ll need to listen to a live version, though, since I’ve heard that those are where the album really shines. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to play some pinball.

I don’t know what I was expecting out of this, what is quite literally the first hip-hop album I’ve ever listened to, but it was not a quiz show with utterly bizarre questions. Now, that said, I also don’t know where to come from in terms of considering *3 Feet High and Rising* as a document. There’s a lot to appreciate here; there’s the little flashes of recognition from the samples, the rhythm and the wordsmithing, the meter and the message. The way that De La Soul is clearly just having a load of fun making this album. On the other hand, there’s ‘De La Orgee’. I know I have a tendency to write a lot about these albums, but I just… This is difficult for me. I really don’t know where to even start to approach this. I’m hearing a few of the same messages that are in the Curtis Mayfield albums that came up last week, especially around drug use and how that ends up wrecking lives. I can absolutely get behind that, and the rhyming and meter isn’t as obnoxious as some of the people around me might think. And then there’s ‘De La Orgee’. There’s a recurring thread about daisies, D.A.I.S.Y. Age, the positive pushback against the negativity that fills so much of the gangsta rap style around this time, the need to bring out what’s inside yourself rather than what the dominant culture pushes as the view to put out there. And that’s absolutely a great message. But also, there’s ‘De La Orgee’. I honestly don’t know that I’m going to come back to this album. I mean, it’s not bad. I can see myself enjoying albums with the same positivity behind them. I like the way these guys are absolutely pushing back against what a lot of folks think hip-hop is. But I really don’t know what to make of ‘De La Orgee’ being shoved in the middle of everything else, right before a song about phalli. Sorry, De La Soul, but even if I like the messaging, that pair of tracks drags things down pretty significantly. Gonna have to give this one a 4.5/10, so it gets two stars. Alas.

I’ve never heard this album before. I know that for 100% certain. So why does it feel so familiar…? --- I was today years old when I discovered that my first real exposure to DnB music was Ape Escape. OK, that probably requires explanation. I first encountered electronica as a genre as a teenager, trying out random stuff at the local indie CD store. Jeez, I miss that place; they had all sorts of random stuff, priced without any particular rhyme or reason. I got imported versions of multiple CDs at well below the domestic cost from that place. OK, I know why they went out of business, doing that. Anyways. I came into electronica by way of the House, Trance, and Ambient subgenres. I had encountered other genres through the Wipeout XL soundtrack, but not really enough to dig into; however, with that as a starting point, I wound up with my small CD collection including Crystal Method, The Orb, Future Sound of London, and Apollo Four Forty. Before any of that, though, I got exposed to a lot of this through video games. Wipeout, yes, but also Ape Escape, with its Jungle/DnB/House soundtrack by Soichi Terada. And… I never knew that was the genre there, until today. So, what to say about this? Well, for one, ‘Jah The Seventh Seal’ is the first music I’ve ever been made dizzy by. I know playing with stereo channels does some wild stuff, but that was something else. OK, more seriously, I enjoy this. It’s some solid 90s beats, hitting me right in the nostalgia, even though I’ve never encountered this album before, other than a vague memory of seeing the cover at the CD store. It’s the kind of music I can jam to, for sure, and I can see why this was the album to break the DnB genre into the mainstream. Going to go with a 9.5/10 on this. It just makes me happy to listen to.

Wait a second, that’s a mbira. I was not expecting what I got when I started this album. Three minutes before anything even motioning at being rock music, and even then… I had to check the personnel on this album to make sure that Frank Zappa and Spike Jones weren’t in the ensemble. Found object percussion is definitely not what I was thinking I was going to get. I can’t identify most of those sounds and they *just keep coming*. I don’t know if I like this or not. There’s words in the opening track but I can’t understand them. They sound like they came from a movie, but without being able to make out what’s being said, it’s useless to try to understand them. It’s a tone poem, lyrical without lyrics, dissonant with intention. The songs come after that, drenched in metaphor, anything but straightforward to parse. “Book of Saturday” seems to be describing the mindset of someone who can’t decide if they should end a relationship that has long since lost all the excitement. “Exiles” seems to indicate that the decision was made and the protagonist has walked away, left behind everything to explore a new future, fame and fortune without the trappings of the past. “Easy Money” suggests that this has led into sin, a lust song (there’s no love there, just catcalls and transfer of funds, this is all about physical beauty, purely transactional) suggesting that perhaps our protagonist has chosen… poorly? Doo-ba-dee-dow-dow, ba-doo-dee-dow, ba-da-dow, ba-dee-doo. And then the lyrics are gone again, and it’s time for an instrumental starring a dùndún. Whoever this percussionist is, they’re certainly skillful. I feel a bit like this is some kind of spacey psychedelic thing… and then suddenly TRUMPETS and then we’re into a much more straightforward track that… sounds like it has mice in a deathmatch? And violence described through violin. And… and… in the parlance of video games by Harmonix, that is quite a Big Rock Ending. um. 😵‍💫/10

Well, this is certainly making interesting use of stereo sound. I feel like this wants to be a front channel and a back channel or something instead of left and right, which is certainly a way to use stereo. I had no idea what I was going to be getting with this. About all I knew was that it was going to be psychedelic, but that’s obvious from the cover. So we open with a hitchhiker in the rain getting high before before getting on a plane, and then… something very very very dark what. Wow. A song about an archetypal goth black widow fortuneteller. OK, this album went hard dark fast. And then a porpoise mouth. Yesterday, I had an album with straightforward lyrics and confusing music. Today I have an album with straightforward music and confusing lyrics. “I hunger for your porpoise mouth.” wat. One of the things I’m realizing as part of this project is just how few songs I’ve actually paid close attention to the lyrics of. Not that I know this band, but I’ve heard plenty of psychedelic music over the years, and I don’t think I’d realized just how completely bonkers some of this is. Like… I feel like “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” is positively sane, comparatively. “Section 43” is nice, though. Not sure why it’s only one track when it feels like it’s a bunch of short instrumental pieces. There is a lot to like here. I mean, I don’t know what to make of the song about superheroes getting LBJ high, but “Sad and Lonely Times” features some duet action that feels pretty wonderful. The track order was supposedly selected so that each side of the album started out more… conventional… and got more psychedelic as the needle approached the center of the vinyl. Yes. Yes, this was successfully done. We’ll open the mind and drop acid with LBJ and wander into the desert and become a wandering mystic and and and and and ☮️ The masked marauder is high and tripping through a field of daisies, I guess. I can see listening to some of the tracks here again, but some of them are also decidedly, um… I think I would need to be as high as the musicians to enjoy them properly. 5.5/10

This may be the most approachable album I’ve listened to all week. Joni Mitchell is one of those musicians who is just kind of… always there. I’ve never really paid much attention to her work; that may be because I haven’t spent a lot of time listening to folk rock, or it may be just that I haven’t had the urge, or didn’t have the chance, or... Well. Ask me why I’m doing the 1001 Albums Challenge. Anyways. I turned this one on, and the opening piano just made me smile. The way that “Court and Spark” builds up over the song feels like the proper way to open an album like this, bringing all the pieces together into a full band. The songs on the whole are… emotionally dissonant? That’s probably the best way I can describe this. If you pay no attention to the words, these are all (well, mostly) upbeat, hopeful songs, a little jazzy alongside the piano and guitar… but if you pay attention to the words, most of these are sad songs, the words of someone who has fallen out of love with love. There’s a vulnerability on display here that you don’t often get in albums that try to be pop music. It’s an unusual combination, to say the least, all leading into “Trouble Child”, the one song that actually feels downbeat in the music to match the lyrics. It actually feels kind of like it’s what the whole album is building to, the inevitable crash of someone who is trying to appear happy while they’re inwardly depressed. … and then that track suddenly veers into the bubbly jazzpop of the one song on the album that Joni Mitchell didn’t write, a cover of Annie Ross’s 1952 “Twisted”, which fits at the end as, like… the person who went through all those songs we just listened to needs therapy, I guess? It’s very clearly a different style altogether from the rest of the album, but it feels like a perfect mirror of “Trouble Child”–one song took all the pessimism and held it so that the other could be a release of joyous energy. 7.5/10, but then bumped up to 8.5 for “Twisted.”

I’m having a hard time finding an angle to come at this from. Not going to lie, the first few lines felt like it was going to be a sci-fi album, which would have been fun. But no, we went into sex noises and bouncing about as many times as we’re about to alright. So, let’s try coming at this in a few ways, then. The in-line rhymes are fun. That’s getting the attention of the English major in me. The content, though… I’m not really a good judge here. I’m PNW, the region that is literally as far from ATL as you can get while remaining in the lower 48, but.. like… jeez. Toxic masculinity much? It’s all about sex and pimps and ho’s and a bit of feeling bad about it but then we’re right back in the midst of more of it. I mean, sure, sex-positivity is a good thing, but… it can be a bit much. And then we take a break for bombing Baghdad at the midpoint between the two Gulf Wars, along with spewing some racial slurs. OK, I’m sorry. I can see the musical artistry and the quality of the rap here, but I just can’t get past the content here. It’s not my happy place. I’m glad it’s not all about violence and drink as the line in “Humble Mumble” called out, but it’s still, like… I dunno. It goes back and forth between ‘Hey stop that’ and ‘Gonna talk about how awesome it is to do that’. I feel bad about putting low ratings on all the hip-hop I’ve encountered so far (admittedly, a sample size of 2), but I just can’t see myself listening to this album again. 2/10 – 1 star.

I don’t speak Arabic. That’s an important baseline to admit here – I have no clue what the lyrics are singing about, so I’m focused entirely on the music and the sound of Khaled’s voice. That said, I do like what I’m hearing here. I’ve never been one to shy away from the “world music” category, as there’s a lot of interesting sonic landscapes to explore. And there’s a lot to appreciate in this particular case; many of the sounds that are present here, musical motifs and instruments, just aren’t anything you’d expect in music that originated in the West. Or at least, that’s what the first two tracks seemed like. Then “C’est La Nuit” came on and suddenly I’m faced with a soft-pop chanson that only gives the smallest hints of the album’s Algerian origins. Admittedly, French influence would be expected, given the history of that country, but I really came here for something new and outside of my typical listening. ...and then it’s a bilingual John Lennon cover. OK then. Kind of risky, singing a song that explicitly expresses the idea of no religion when you live in a country with religiously-conservative laws… And in this case, the middle-eastern styling of the violins toward the end actually make me think more of something by George Harrison than Lennon. After those two tracks, we’re back into the more directly Algerian music again, and a lot of this just gets my head bobbing, and oh wow that’s record scratching in “E’dir E’sseba”. The biggest problem I have with this album, honestly, is the length. I find myself feeling as if, well… it just keeps going. And going. I like the music, I really do, but I find myself wondering if the reason this *specific* album is on the list is partially to give Algeria a bit more time in listeners’ ears against the sheer volume of US/UK albums. OK, wait, “Mele H’bibti” is an interesting surprise toward the end. Bit of light D’n’B action going on there, alongside some symphonic influences, that’s interesting. Gonna give this a 6.9/10, and rounding up to 4 stars. Would have been 4 stars either way but it loses a bit on the numeric rating because it just got a bit long-winded, and the last track was the chanson again in a different language but still “C’est la nuit” a whoooooole bunch of times.

Here’s a band that I’m familiar with, for sure. When I briefly took guitar lessons in high school, the tutor I was working with had actually given me “Bad Moon Rising” as one of the pieces to work with first. So I’m definitely familiar with the blues rock sound of CCR. And my classic rock radio listening certainly meant I was familiar with the opening track here, “Born on the Bayou”. Likewise, while I’m not someone who lives in the titular *Bayou Country*, it’s hard to be even a little media-aware and not be familiar with the general shape of the culture. And we’re definitely getting a crash course, anyways, with the second track celebrating bootlegging along with a bit of sleeping around and… ok, on the surface that’s some Tom Sawyer hijinks in the third verse but I’m not sure I needed to think too hard about that suggestion there. OK, let’s not dwell there. We can move on to… aw hell, it’s a broken heart song featuring a suicide. All right then. The B-side of the album is a bit more upbeat. It opens with a nice 12-bar blues in the form of a “Good Golly Miss Molly” cover that leans more fully into the blues than Little Richard’s original, but still manages to be a higher-beat song than most of the rest of this album. We then move on to “Penthouse Pauper”, which is… weird. It’s a song about how the singer would always be the best of anything that he could be… then reveals that he’s got nothing to his name. It doesn’t really feel like it’s one of the stronger songs on the album, particularly when it’s bookended by the Little Richard cover and “Proud Mary”. Gimme that Mississippi riverboat action, yeah. And then we wrap with what became the usual CCR concert-closer and “Keep On Chooglin’. Not that we get much more about how to do that beyond that it’s what you do when “you got to ball and have a good time”. So it’s like the opposite of Jerry Garcia’s ‘Truckin’’ I guess. Anyways. Got some really good tracks here, but also some kind of weak tunes that seem more focused on pushing the theme of the opening tune about being from Bayou Country and everything else being explorations of that regional life. And yet, not a lick of French. So they’re bayou folk without a lick of Cajun or Creole to them? I think I’m hitting this with a 6.5/10. It’s inoffensive, and has some songs that I do enjoy, but as an album I’m not sure it’s really getting the job done.