1001 Albums Summary

It's the 6th form common room, March 1994, and the indie kids are huddled round a Walkman, straining to hear the previous evening's taped Evening Session from some bent back headphones, when the penny drops. "They've Gone F****g Disco!" Us indie kids weren't ready. We loved "Modern Life Is Rubbish", we wanted the Sugary Tea tour on loop, and, in the words of "Blue Jeans", we wanted them to "stay this way for ever". But sadly our heroes were restless - the indie disco was no longer enough for Blur. They wanted real nightclubs, real dancing, and real money. The shoegazers and the baggy chancers were always giving it "there had always been a dance element to our music" but this was different. This wasn't just dance music, it was POP music - and it wasn't just ours anymore. It was too good. Too commercial. Too confident. It turned out that confidence was a preference after all: Blur (pushed on by Food records) had decided they were going to be massive, had written the songs to back it up, and sure enough, Girls and Boys went to number 5, and the bigtime arrived: the Radio One breakfast show, advert billboards, Mile End, Brit Awards, TFI Friday, Tabloids, CD clubs advertising "Parklife" on the back of the Radio Times for the next five years. They definitely weren't ours anymore. Musically, the signs had been there all along, and Blur had already shown more range than most - they'd already navigated from shoegaze to noise-rock to baggy to music hall to pub singalong, but no-one expected Blur to make Sgt Pepper for the 90s. But Parklife was that good, and more than 30 years later, it still just about works. Like Sgt Pepper, the expanded musical pallette allowed them to use the medium as the message - a song about 18-30 holidays could be delivered as eurodisco; a song about the great British park could actually sound like a ranting tramp at a bandstand singalong; a song about a doomed love affair could be soundtracked with film noir strings. Somehow, Stephen Street managed to keep it coherent and focused - the band's influences were all over the place at that point, and they're often very overt: Pink Floyd on "Far Out", Talking Heads on "London Loves", music hall skits and lift music and god knows what. The b-sides were even more nuts - they had a reasonable crack at a modern jazz parody on "Beard" (sadly relegated to the b-side of Parklife), and the very best b-side of them all: Magpie: a jangle-guitar setting of William Blake's "A Poison Tree" ("I was angry with my friend I told my wrath, my wrath did end"), taken from 1794's Songs of Experience, which had previously been set to music by Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1958, and by Benjamin Britten in 1965. Something tells me Streety wasn't getting this sort of thing with Jesus Jones. Alongside Damon's musical poncery, unlike "The Great Escape", it does sound like Graham is still having fun at this point - his crunchy new wave interjections ensuring that "Girls and Boys" wasn't pure disco cheese, and the gorgeous Marr-esque countermelody in "Clover Over Dover" which help make it one of the melancholic highlights. Lyrically, "Clover Over Dover" is like a less lyrical "Shakespeare's Sister", and, given Blur's Who obsession, I've always wondered if this was the tongue-tied song of Jimmy, at the end of Quadrophenia, in which the mod dream plummets over the white cliffs (which would make it Phil Daniels' second appearance on the album!). It also resonates with the maritime malaise of the other standout ballad - the peerless "This Is A Low". Having introduced us to Jim and Susan a couple of years previously in "For Tomorrow", Damon brings in characters, everywhere: Jubilee, Tracy Jacks, Bill Barrett - they're all fun, but when compared to their 60s forebears - Lola, "Arnold Layne", Tommy, and even the dedicated follower of fashion - they do feel a bit contrived. Damon's newfound reliance on third person perspectives could be partly due to Parklife's spiritual origins in Martin Amis' 1989 novel "London Fields", which Damon read while on tour in the US in 1992, and which is woven throughout the album. Sometimes it's explicit (the voice of Keith Talent pondering "the mystery of a speeding car" in "London Loves"), sometimes thematic (the park as cultural melting pot in "Parklife", the pub as a shop window for those 'on the game' in "Bank Holiday", the exotic femme fatale in "To The End", not to mention the dog track on the album cover), and possibly structural, too: a single work from multiple related perspectives, an unreliable narrator popping in and out of the action. It's a weakness in "London Fields", but in "Parklife" it adds to the album's kaleidoscopic appeal. But Parklife is definitely flawed. There are a lot of "LAH LAH LAAHH"s on this record, and the mockney stuff (particularly in "Bank Holiday") sounds naff, 30 years on. Amis gets away with it in "London Fields" because it's well observed - in Parklife it just feels like panto. I liked both "Jubilee" and "Trouble In The Message Centre" at the time, but in retrospect they sound weak - fine as shambolic indie tunes by Seymour - but under the studio polish they don't shine. Magic America hasn't dated well - a cartoonish characterization of America bourne of their disastrous 1992 tour, which is not as poetic as either of their other songs responding to US cultural hegemony: 1993's reflective "Miss America" and 1997's "Look Inside America", by which time they've decided that "she's alright" after all. Sonically, it's mastered to be very compressed and radio-friend, but there is some light and shade to break up the texture. If I'm being picky, some of the string and brass arrangements do sound a bit cheap: at the time Blur were 60 grand in debt to EMI, following disappointing sales for "Modern Life Is Rubbish", so the fake strings on "To The End" are more of a pale cultural signifier, rather than the Hollywood string arrangements the song deserves (and which would follow as the money started to roll in). Finally, Parklife exemplfies a lot of people's objection to Blur, which is that Albarn's dilettantism - which would lead to Mali Music, Gorillaz, Dr Dee, supergroups with Tony Allen with the blokes from Verve and the Clash, Africa Express, Operas about Chinese Monkeys, austere solo albums wanging on about Iceland - indicates his fundamental insincerity. Whilst there may be some truth in that, it seems to me that he is a driven and curious egomaniac who cannot stop exploring, and making, music, even if it's not perfect. He can be a total dickhead, but without him, this era-defining record would not have been conceived, let alone made. Even if it did kill "indie". The Jubilee-era sixth formers (slouching back on the settee), lost something that day. But the world gained something special.

Rap-rock should've been INCREDIBLE. It started pretty well (Aerosmith and Run DMC, Rage Against The Machine, Ice-T and Bodycount)...But then came Nu Metal, by which time rap-rock was just a marriage of convenience, conceived in the boardroom rather than the streets, perfect for humourlessly advertising energy drinks to angry teens, or soundtracking wrestling highlights. I can think of some nice things to say about Linkin Park. Firstly, they're not Limp Bizkit. And from the evidence of this album, they were more emo than I'd realised, some of the melodic choruses end up sounding like Evanescence. Their intros are often pretty good. And "Cure For The Itch" is a passable DJ Shadow-esque instrumental beatdown - a blessed relief from all that shouting. My favourite moment in this album is the breakdown in "A Place For My Head", when the lead vocalist whispers, then shouts (inevitably) GO AWAY!! - I shall, with the greatest of pleasure. (One more good thing - it reminded me of this perfect Kyle Gordon parody: https://share.google/4s2HiqZOMtGgBE8vE)

This is great stuff. Three albums in and they are absolutely cooking. The flows are tight, lyrics are dope, and the beats are clean - this was the last J5 album that Cut Chemist worked on, and alongside nu-mark's productions, it's a classic distillation of the sample-heavy boom-bap sound. There's some great hooks too - there's nothing at the level of "Concrete Schoolyard", but there's definitely some standouts: "What's Golden" and "The Thin Line" are both proper earworms, especially the latter where Nelly "like a bird" Furtado adds some class to the chorus. "Day At The Races" is extraordinary - dizzying lyrical dexterity, including a verse from veteran Big Daddy Kane ("the T-Rex"). Chali 2na steals the show throughout - "The Verbal Hermann Munster"'s buttery bass/baritone voice and playful lyricism is one of the wonders of hiphop. If there's a Mount Rushmore of MCs, he'd be up there. The production is sparse but detailed - it sounds great on headphones - and there are nods to previous J5 albums, like the "here's what we do" sample from the first album; and the opening double bass lick following on from the last track of "Quality Control". If there's a criticism, by this point in j5's discography it is a little predictable: maybe that's inevitable when your manifesto is all about "taking it back to the days of yes y'all-ing", but at this point we've heard enough humble bragging and dissing, no matter how dope the beats or wholesome the sentiment. "Hey" is a bit flat, and there's also a bit of a jolt in Juju's opening line in "One Of Them" - seems homophobia was alive and well in 2002, even amongst "conscious" rappers... Overall, though, it's a really good listen. It's my 3rd favourite J5 album, but it's still class - and a testament to how good they were.

I find this collection of opaque mysticism, sensual melancholy, biblical allusions, shaggy dog stories, and just straight-up perving, totally intriguing. Musically, it's restrained. There are some striking moments, such as the plunge to B minor on the word "laugh" in the verse of "Stories of the Street" - but on the whole, there's just enough to sustain the poet's spell. Apparently, during recording, Cohen and producer John Simon had some fundamental disagreements about the arrangements - Cohen, perhaps unsurprisingly given that he was a poet first, wanted it very stripped back, originally stipulating vocals and guitar, some bass, and no drums at all. As a compromise, the accompaniments, such as the folk fiddle in "So Long, Marianne", or the accordion and flamenco guitar in "Stories of the Street", are often too delicate and too in thrall to Cohen's voice to be fully appreciated. Even the duet between a whistling owl and a screaming man in "One of Us Cannot Be Wrong" - a genuinely weird and unsettling moment - is kept offstage. Primarily, the music is a vehicle for Cohen's poetry, of which I understand basically nothing. It's possible that's what keeps me coming back: maybe *this time* I'll figure out what it means. Well, either that or I acknowledge this meaningless stream of consciousness just happens to sound great. Til then, lines like "you held on to my like some kind of crucifix" will continue to be lodged in the mind. And everytime I think about where my tea bags have come from, I'll think of Suzanne.

I can't get into metal. I'll curl my lip at a decent decent riff, and I've been known to lightly headbang, but something about me is just not able to connect to this music. There's a great moment in "Some Kind of Monster" where Lars Ulrich's dad is asked what he's thinks of their new material. He takes a breath and says "if you were to ask me, I would say...delete that." Listening to this, I agree with him. And yet, "...And Justice For All" is clearly not rubbish: the recording is a bit tinny, but it's musically ambitious, and virtuosically played - double-pedal bass drum semiquavers, athletic guitar solos and all that - but it feels like listening to a band playing studies - impressive, but cold, and humourless. (The only chuckle I had was imagining that "Harvester of Sorrow" was a review of a suburban pub chain. Given that words are "Anger / Misery / You'll suffer unto me", I don't think Metallica liked the carvery.) A lot of the songs are episodic, shifting time signatures and tempi between sections - many of the tracks are nearly ten minutes, and the whole album clocks in at over an hour, which requires prog-levels of concentration from the listener. But who is it for? Who wants earnest 10 minute epics about the rape of justice, or ecological destruction? People who really want to shock their mum? And there are so many words! Combined with Hetfield's abrasive monotone, it's like being pumelled repeatedly with an angry thesaurus. As befits a total metal wuss like me, my favourite bits were the quieter sections, such as the all-too-brief acoustic breaks in "To Live Is To Die", or the gentle opening to "One", both blessed relief from an hour-plus assault of crunchy overdrive. But overall, an exhausting experience. Time for a cup of tea and some Leonard Cohen.