Funeral to Finish

  Oh, god, whatever, it's fine.  You already know this album and probably have heard all the songs.  I guess it's a good album or whatever.  I just don't care.  There's nothing really that interesting about it to me.  If you like it, that's great.  I can see liking it or loving it, just like I can see not liking it or really not giving a fuck, like me.  I just feel like having strong feelings about this album is like really really loving Heineken or Chevy Tahoes.  Like, sure, but why? But since we're all here and there's a picture of Jack White above us, I want to talk about my favorite Jack White thing, his feud with the guy from Black Keys.  OK so Jack White has famously lived in Nashville for a while now and runs a label called Third Man Records and has a record shop down in the touristy part of town and all that.  And he got into some kind of beef with the Black Keys.  I guess he thought they stole the White Stripes sound o...

Man, what a wild album.  This sounds like Paul McCartney went "Let me take EVERY SINGLE MUSICAL IDEA I've had since John and I had our last fight and put them all in a hat and then draw them out and make songs out of whatever I draw."  So we've got "Ram On," a ukulele jingle that's a play on Paul Ramon, the fake name Paul used; we've got the fairly straight-ahead Buddy Holly-esque rocker "Eat at Home," a celebration of staying in that seems REALLY FITTING for 2020 (and also might be one extended dirty joke); and the strangled scream of "Monkberry Moon Delight," surely one of the weirdest things to come out of McCartney's head and mouth. The real centerpiece, of course, is "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey," a mashup of two songs into a deliriously catchy whole.  I'm extremely familiar with this song because the first album I ever bought with my own money was "Wings Over America," a triple live album by McCar...

  Wow this album starts off with a blast.  "Compared to What" is a horn-fueled jazzy swing with some truly dark lyrics: Slaughterhouse is killin' hogs Twisted children killin' frogs Poor dumb rednecks rollin' logs Tired old ladies kissin' dogs Hate the human, love that stinking mutt (I can't stand it) Try to make it real, compared to what? The rest of the record is quite a bit mellower.  After several listens, the description that keeps coming to mind is "sparse."  The songs are open, airy, sometimes too much.  There's a lot of sadness, a lot of empty space. The famous song here is, of course, "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face."  It wasn't a huge hit at first but then took off after it was featured in the Clint Eastwood film "Play Misty for Me."  WARNING; clip contains surprisingly explicit scene of Clint Eastwood having outdoor sex. Yikes.  But see what I mean?  There's almost no actual song there.  It's mo...

  I have to assume that the reason this album is so low is because it's a collection/greatest hits-type album, because HOLY SHIT this is a pretty amazing set of songs you already know every whisper, beat, string arrangement, and vocal in by heart.   Look at this list of songs: "Where Did Our Love Go" "Baby Love" "Ask Any Girl" "Come See About Me" "Stop! In The Name Of Love" "Back In My Arms Again" "Nothing But Heartaches" "I Hear A Symphony" "My World Is Empty Without You" "Love Is Like An Itching In My Heart" "You Can't Hurry Love" "You Keep Me Hangin' On" That's just from sides 2 and 3 of a 6-side collection!  I mean come the fuck on! These are more thsan just songs, they're part of the fabric of American culture.   I put this on when we were in the car on Christmas Eve day and I am happy to report that listening to it is just as easy and pleasur...

  Propitiously, "Pretty Hate Machine" and LiveJournal both came out the same year, 1999, because writing long angsty LJ posts freely using lyrics from PHM is a thing that I am sure happened even if I just imagined it.  When I was kid, we didn't have Industrial Dance music and we had to bum out to The Wall and write in an actual journal and Olu I swear to God if you post a picture of Andy Rooney under this I will block you mark my words. But the experiences of being a youth and feeling alienated and lonely are universal and Trent Reznor's genius was plugging into that feeling and layering the rage and self-pity that all 15 year old feel over his self-invented and frankly genius combination of Industrial and shiny 80's pop.  There is a grinding and uncomfortable undercurrent to songs like "Kinda I Want To" but the catchy chorus to "Head Like a Hole" is sing-along-worthy, especially if you're 15. The thing I got most listening to this again fo...

  I think during this project we sometimes have to agree to disagree, the albums and me, and that's where I am with this Can album.  Now, Can is highly regarded and incredibly influential - in fact, Stephen Malkmus, who led one of my all-time favorite bands, Pavement, which was obviously influenced by Can, said he used to listen to this album every night before he went to sleep (and not to introduce yet another recursive phrase here but that sounds like a recipe for psychosis to me) - but it is really, really not my thing.  I'm not super into long formless jams or weirdness qua weirdness and this album has plenty o' both. There are two semi-normal "songs" on here, and they're the last two songs on the album.  "I'm So Green" has nice funk vibe and "Spoon" - yes, the band got their name from it - has a touch of Swinging '60s, which isn't surprising because it was the theme music for a German cop show. You know who this really remi...

  It's sometimes hard to keep perspective doing this.  I'm sitting in 2020, almost 2021, writing this about these two albums (later repackaged into a single unit by Chess), and I've heard all or most of these songs for most of my life and heard all the derivative acts that they've influenced, like Springsteen and the Stones and essentially any band that uses electric guitars, and you have to keep in mind that Bo Diddley invented it .  You cannot overstate the importance of these two records. Among other innovations in rock music that we are so used to now that they are part of the language of music, Bo Diddley invented the ... wait for it ... Bo Diddley beat.  You can hear it right here, in the song "Bo Diddley." (The man was not shy.  Besides this song, his first album, cleverly titled "Bo Diddley," also contains the songs "Hey! Bo Diddley" and "Diddley Daddy."  You're welcome to sit down with the lyrics for this album, but I...

  The world is a terrible place. There's a raging global pandemic, a thick-skulled autocrat desperately trying to claw back a job he doesn't want to do, and the Designated Hitter somehow just snuck into the National League without anyone really fighting it.  Luckily, this album exists. This perfect 12" of sonic Valium actually produces a calming effect in all animals and humans on whom it has been tested.  From the time the needle drops on "Tired of Being Alone" to the incredible organ-fueled groove in "Love and Happiness" to the horn blast that kicks off "Let's Get Married," this album unloads one classic after another.  But, of course, it's really Al Green's voice that stars. It's an impossibly smooth croon/wail.  The man can absolutely bend his way around a note, maybe the best pure singer we'll see on this list (at least until we inevitably run into Otis Redding). If you haven't listened to it in a while, do yoursel...

  Like all/most of you, all I knew from this album was "Nothing Compares 2 U," which was just omnipresent in the background in the early '90s but which I never thought about much or paid much attention to.  So I was mildly surprised to find that there are a lot of interesting and good songs on this album!  The extremely gothily named "I Am Stretched on Your Grave" has a great dirgey vocal over a club beat.  It's a really pretty, if disturbingly dark, song.  "The Emperor's New Clothes" is, I think, a self-empowerment anthem and really has that fist-in-the-air vibe.  And I think "Last Day of Our Acquaintance" is as good a divorce song as I've heard. It's interesting that this album comes so soon in the list after Lorde's Melodama , since this was obviously a big influence on Lorde.  You can hear it all over Lorde's stuff - the sparse, chilly production, the aching vocals, the personal revealing that's almost too much...

  Everybody's getting sober! Well, not me. But Jason Isbell is! Or was, right before he made this album. After flaming out of the Drive-By Truckers for drinking too much and then putting out a couple of mostly forgettable solo albums, Jason went into rehab (encouraged, it is said, by none other than Ryan Adams, who has since developed his own problems that we might address later if, as I suspect, one or more of his records lands on our list) and came out sober and ready to record this striking, powerful album Isbell worked with producer Dave Cobb who was then mostly unknown but who has gone on to become the hot producer du jour due to his work with artists like Sturgill Simpson, Ashley Monroe, and especially Chris Stapleton.  Cobb is an expert at getting to the heart of a song, and a lot of the songs on this album are pure and honest and stripped of any ornamentation or pretention. "Cover Me Up," the opener, has become so well-known that now it gets covered by better-know...

  Man, this is a super interesting record.  Sonically, it's kind of all over the place, but there are some incredibly hooky melodies (especially in "Pursuit of Happiness (Nightmare)" and the virtually anthemic "Heart of a Lion (Kid Cudi Theme Music").  I wasn't surprised to see that MGMT guested on "Pursuit" because it has that golden hum-a-long thing you associate with the best MGMT songs.  Meanwhile, "Up Up & Away" has a chorus melody that could have been lifted from any number of angsty pop-punk bands. I hope Cudi catches up with Happiness because this is the most emo hip hop album I have ever heard.  Dude is down .  If emo-rap wasn't a thing before, this album created it.  It's interesting because - and please correct me if I'm wrong - I'm think rap was a lot more full of bluster and braggadocio, not an exploration of one's own interior pain.  There's a lot more of that now, but this seems like an early tra...

  Before we get to our Feature Presentation today, let's take a brief detour because it's CHRISTMAS MUSIC SEASON BITCHES.  Now, I can listen to "Fairytale of New York" just as much as the next guy, and by that I mean until my wife yells "Can you turn that off please?" from the other room, and of course there's "All I Want for Christmas Is You," which is rising up the charts AGAIN, but for a good girl-sung Christmas club banger, can I interest you in Ariana Grande's "Santa Tell Me"? It's honestly kind of a great song. Probably my favorite Christmas song in which the singer asks Santa to help her not bang someone who's gonna ghost her.  Try it out! OK, on to the matter at hand, which is not nearly as joyous as "Santa Tell Me."  I like Lorde.  I liked her first album quite a bit.  This one, however, just didn't work for me as well.  Like "Pure Heroine," a lot of the songs are about driving in a car and...

  If you feel suicidal, please call the Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK.  Do not, under any circumstances, listen to "For Emma" by Bon Iver. By now, you have probably heard the iconic story about how Justin Vernon broke up with his band and his girlfriend and retreated to an isolated cabin in the Wisconsin woods where he recorded the songs that would become this album.  It sounds like a keening cry of pain all the way through.  Even the vocals sound painful.  It is not a particularly pleasurable listening experience but is probably better if you have just broken up with someone and are looking sadly out a rain-streaked window.  I have not recently broken up with anyone so it did not land that hard with me.  Tbqh it starts to drag about 2/3 of the way through.  I get that it was hugely influential and yadda yadda but I had to cleanse my timeline with some garage rock after I was done just to feel alive again. My favorite Bon Iver stor...

  In July of 1968, the Byrds went to England for a show at the Royal Albert Hall and were all set to embark on a tour of South Africa when Gram Parsons, who hadn’t even been in the band that long, announced that he wouldn’t be going.  He said he opposed South Africa’s apartheid policies, but the band suspected that a nascent friendship – and nonstop partying – with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were actually to blame.  Gram got kicked out of the band. Later in 1968, after a series of setbacks and misunderstandings, Chris Hillman left the Byrds as well.  Hillman went back to LA, called up Gram, and got a band together.  That band was the Flying Burrito Brothers.  They wrote and recorded this record fairly quickly and it came out in 1969.  Nobody really gave a shit.  It peaked at #164 on the Billboard Top 200.  Tough shit for all you people in the ‘60s because the Flying Burrito Brothers just invented alt-country. This album is just great....

  I honestly don't know what to make of this album.  I've heard the name Laura Nyro before - I think from reading Rolling Stone! - but she never really crossed my radar, and I consider myself fairly well-listened.  I have never heard a Laura Nyro song to the best of my knowledge before I listened to this album yesterday. I guess it's kind of jazzy, kind of show tune-y?  Not stuff that I would usually seek out.  Actually it sounds like you wandered into the big room at the Stardust in 1972 and there was a big show and a woman in a super fancy dress was singing and everyone in the audience was smoking and drinking martinis.  That's what it sounds like I guess.  Or if you somehow projected Tori Amos back in time.  That big piano-forward power vocals kind of thing.  Anyway, another one for the respect-but-don't-love pile.

  This is probably the first album on here that I'd never heard all the way through and after I listened to it my immediate reaction was "I'm gonna listen to that again all the way through."  This is that good. First off, you've got "That Lady," which you know better as "Who's That Lady," and which you might remember from this commercial in which a discarded broom falls in love with a plastic lawn flamingo .  Nevertheless.  There are also some choice covers on here, like a sweet cover of James Taylor's "Don't Let Me Be Lonely Tonight" and the Doobie Brothers' "Listen to the Music" which is different enough from the original to make them hard to compare.  I like this a lot, but maybe the Doobies' slightly more? The real mindfuck is " Summer Breeze ," which started out as the whitest, most dentist officey '70s E-Z listening song of all time, by Seals and Crofts , a duo for suburbanites who fou...

  I hate to say it but my familiarity with King Sunny Ade was limited mostly to seeing him in show listings and having a vague awareness of him as an ambassador of African music.  This album is delightful!  Melodic, chiming guitar weaving its way around and through softly chanting vocals and over the constant backbeat of talking drums.  I read somewhere that Talking Heads were influenced by him and you can totally see that here. I was listening to this in the kitchen when my 7-year-old daughter walked in and wordlessly began twirling in place.  She rarely dances to anything so that's a big endorsement!  KING SUNNY ADE: HE MAKES CHILDREN TWIRL IN PLACE!!!

  I know the Beach Boys are like critical kryptonite and their catalog is regarded as untouchable and blah blah blah but I just found this album kind of....boring.  Like, all the songs sound kind of the same in that Beach Boys-y kind of way, there's lots of vocal reverb and "ahhhhhhhhh"ing behind every line and tambourine and 4-part harmonies and whatever but it's all just so uniform .  I know, this is where I get struck dead by Rock Critic Jesus. And some of the lyrics are ... far out, man, as they might have said in 1965.  Check out the extremely literally-titled "Don't Hurt My Little Sister": There she goes she ran in her room She'll probably stay in there the rest of the day It sounds like it must have been something you said You know she's awful used to getting her way Why don't you kiss her (Why don't you kiss her) And while you kiss her (Tell her you miss her) Why don't you treat her (Why don't you treat her) Treat her nice...

  I really enjoyed this album! I had never heard even a single track from it, which mildly surprised me but not entirely because nowadays I get most of my new music via stuff like Spotify and I'm not sure how I was getting new music in 2009.  Blogs, I guess?  Recommended on iTunes?  I have no idea.   Anyway, what happened here is what I was hoping with this project: discovering a really interesting, arresting, really musically well-put-together album that I otherwise would never have encountered. Remember when we were talking about breakup songs a while back?  This is ANOTHER whole album of breakup songs.  Check this out, from "Pretty Wings": Time will bring the real end of our trial One day they'll be no remnants No trace, no residual feelings within ya One day you won't remember me Your face will be the reason I smile But I will not see what I cannot have forever I'll always love ya, I hope you feel the same I guess when you're a famous R&B...

  Ah, our first Rolling Stones album.  I assumed that pretty much every Rolling Stones album would be on here somewhere but the fact that this is the first one to appear at #468 gives me a ray of hope that trash like "Steel Wheels" won't make it on here.  A boy can hope. This is an interesting Rolling Stones album.  There are songs that are clearly like the "classic" Stones sound from the late '60s like "When the Whip Comes Down" and "Lies" and there is the Sticky Fingers-sounding "Far Away Eyes," and then there are definitely hints of a new direction, like "Shattered" and "Beast of Burden" and the hey-we're-hanging-out-at-Studio-54-every-night-now-might-as-well-make-a-disco-song "Miss You." I actually think my favorite song on this record is a total dark horse, "Before They Make Me Run," a Keith song about his heroin bust that is notable because it sounds like he's STILL ON HEROIN...

  Remember when World Music was a thing? When you couldn't go into your local On My Grind or Hallowed Grounds or Spit Roasters without hearing the plaintive wail and vaguely reggaeish beat of a young multiculti crooner from Senegal or Madagascar or born in Punta Cana to parents from the Oblortski Autonomous Zone?  That is this album.  It is so World Musicy that it feels bad for me to say I did not love this album.  But now I see where that "Somebody You Used to Know" guy got his idea from! The late 90's, what a time, I tell you.  At this point in time I was living in Santa Cruz during a confusing and not really great time in my life and roughly half the dudes on Pacific looked like Manu in his festive garb above.  The other half looked like REALLY ANGRY tweaked out surfers because that's what they were.  I almost got beat up in a dive bar by and angry surfer because I made the mistake of thinking I had the next pool game but IT'S MY GAME BRO ok ok I do...

  My first exposure to Juvenile was back on MTV when - oh god help us, here it comes - MTV still played music videos , I know, can you imagine anything more old man to say.  Anyway, this album sold 6 million copies, holy shit. I have to admit I have never listened to it all the way through until yesterday.  It's easy to see why a song like "Ha" became a big hit, since it has the things that big hits have, a hummable chorus and some great lines.  Also almost every line ends in "ha," making it a descendent of the ghazal form of Urdic poetry , It's hypnotic and incantatory.   I wish I knew more about hip hop history because I'm not sure how to properly situate this album, but I could see it being hugely influential.