Funeral to Finish

  Try as I might (which is admittedly not very hard), I have not been able to get my shit together to listen to the next album and so I'm going to put the whole thing on hold until Monday, January 3, 2022.   I also want to listen to some of the stuff on various year-end lists.  Doing this project has largely deprived me of the opportunity to keep up with new music, although I guess almost everything here has been "new music" but you know what I mean. Thanks for reading, and see you in a few days!

  Through no fault of Black Sabbath's and for reasons too mundane to detail here, I only got like four hours of sleep last night, perfect for this drony slab of sludge metal.  (It's kind of an amazing coincidence it comes right after that Metallica album, which is its direct descendant.)  Appropriately enough, this record kicks off with "Sweet Leaf," a plodding ode to marijuana that seems absolutely quaint now that you can buy THC drops in a brushed wood boutique and your general bud off the street is like 20 times more potent than anything Ozzy dreamed of in 1971.   Look, I listened to this with an open mind and all but let me just say that it struck me as more of a vehicle for influence than an actual album I would sit down and enjoy.  I mean, there are entire genres - not just bands - that copped their sound from this album.  That being said, it's kinda boring and Ozzy's lyrics are... well, Ozzy was never known as a great lyricist.   There...

  Regardless of how you feel about this album or Metallica or heavy metal in general, we all have to agree that "Enter Sandman" is an absolutely kick-ass song.  Just a fat slab of pure rock and roll.  So good that cello quartet Apocalyptica can do a deliriously great gothy cover of it. OK so I'm not a huge metalhead or anything but I really enjoyed listening to this.  I mean, sometimes you just need that pure headbanging shit, am I right?  Not only was this Metallica's best-selling album, it's one of the best-selling albums of all time , 16 million plus copies.  16 million heshers can't be wrong! I guess Metallica is pretty famous for being incredibly hard to work with, and the recording of this album was contentious, to say the least.  Producer Bob Rock clashed with the band repeatedly, but the results speak for themselves; it's a great sounding album.  OK, James Hetfield will never be remembered as a great lyricist, but I don't think many people...

  Going from Red Headed Stranger to this is more than a little jarring, like jumping from the hot tub into the pool, if the pool was electrified and French and heavily Autotuned.  (I actually accidentally jumped from RHS to tomorrow's entry, then had to backtrack, but you get the idea.)  Even I, the Old Guy Who Knows Nothing About Electronic Music, know that this was a hugely influential and important album, even if I did not know until yesterday that it was New York garage house or French house or maybe post-disco?  I guess I thought everything that came after disco was post-disco but apparently that's not what that means?  Anyway. First song, first side, is "One More Time," a song I became intimately familiar with since it was on Pitchfork's Best Songs of the 2000s (in fact, it was number 5!), and I made a Spotify playlist of the top 30 songs on the list that I listened to almost nonstop in early 2010.  (Just a quick detour here to say that the list is...

  I accidentally listened to the wrong album yesterday. Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? I can't believe this is the first time this has happened. Unclear what the holiday schedule will be yet.  Thanks for reading!

  I have never counted myself as a huge Willie Nelson fan.  Of course, I appreciate the songwriting - I mean, the guy wrote "Crazy" and "Hello Walls" and another couple dozen incredible songs - but I just don't like his voice.  I was approaching this album with a sense of "let's just get through it and move on." Guess what?  I kinda loved it.   It's telling that at first Columbia didn't want to put it out because they thought it was all demos.  (Willie had negotiated a contract with complete artistic control, however, so they put it out anyway.)  "Sparse" would be doing a lot of work describing this album.  It's quiet and contemplative, but with an unexpected weight and depth that I hadn't anticipated.  It's a country concept album, about a preacher on the run from the law after killing his unfaithful wife and her lover.  Not super out there for country music, but there you have it. One of the biggest surprises for me ...

  "Kraftwerk’s 'Trans Europe Express' is the most important pop album of the last 40 years, though it may not be obvious." OK, calm down a little, Randall Roberts of the Los Angeles Times .  First off, I'm not even sure this is  a pop album.  At least not the kind of "pop" that can stand without a synth- or electro- in front of it.  Now, this is certainly an important album, and was certainly influential, but most important pop album of the last 40 years seems like kind of a stretch.  I mean, Thriller  is just sitting there going "Wha?" To me, the funniest thing about this album (well, one of the funniest things, after the song "The Hall of Mirrors," which I'll get to) is the fact that it was recorded at Kling Klang studios in Dusseldorf.  Is there any better example of an album sounding like the name of the studio where it was made?  This album is all klings and klangs and boops and deet deet deet noises.  There is some pop on he...

  One of the downsides of never getting much into hip-hop in the 80's was that I totally missed some records that are now widely regarded as classics, like this one.  In fact, before yesterday, not only had I never heard this album, which is not entirely uncommon in doing this project, but I'm not sure I'd ever heard even a single song from it, which is. It is very 80's sounding hip-hop, all sparse production and James Brown samples and horn blasts and that shouty kind of rapping.  I liked "South Bronx," which had to have been, and probably still is, a neighborhood anthem.  "9mm Goes Bang" has singsongy "La la la la" backing vocals, incongruously set against a tale of urban violence.  It seems especially poignant knowing that group member DJ Scott La Rock would be killed in a shooting months after the release of this album.  "Remix for P Is Free" really shows off the dancehall influence that BDP was known for. So I can appreciate ...

  Imagine a warm January night in 1963 in Miami, a noightspot called the Harlem Square Club, absolutely packed with people ready to party, and here comes Sam Cooke, who by then was already a star, having released one instant classic after another, like "You Send Me," "Cupid," "Chain Gang," on and on.  Imagine further that this show, backed by legendary saxophonist King Curtis and his band, was actually recorded for a prospective live album.  Imagine being in that crowd, hearing a singer and a band at the absolute apex of their talents. Now imagine you're a white record exec in 1963 listening to the tapes and deciding they're too wild for the careful pop image you're trying to sell.  And by too "wild," of course, I mean too "black."  Because if there's one thing this album immediately makes you aware of, it's that Sam Cooke took the energy of a Southern black church service in the midcentury era and turned it secular ...

  Whoops, I totally spaced on this one when it came out in 1991 and so I can't say I was there when Massive Attack more or less singlehandedly created the genre of trip-hop.  In fact, I'd never heard this album before and was only hazily aware that it even existed.  This despite me being very, very aware of Mezzanine , Massive Attack's other album on this list (so far).  So let's dive in! After I listened to it through the first time, I went back and listened to "Unfinished Sympathy" again, mostly because it was the big single, and you know what?  Great song!  I mean, it's hard to listen to this now sitting where I'm sitting and realize how fresh and revolutionary this must have sounded at the time, because now it sounds like, uh, trip-hop, albeit a dancier flavor of trip-hop, which I suppose it was.  I feel like the first track, "Safe From Harm," is really what I think of when I think of trip-hop, that drowsy drums and sliding bass and soul...

  Funny story about "Cool It Down," the fourth song on this album.  Back in the day, our pal Burrito Justice had a show on local radio powerhouse BFF.FM and one time me and my friend Olu went on the show and picked songs from our Top 20 Songs list and put them head to head and people voted on which song they liked better.  One of my picks was "Cool It Down," which swiftly dispatched Olu's pick , Blonde Redhead's "I Am Taking Out My Eurotrash."  And why not?  "Cool It Down" is just a great rock song (not that Blonde Redhead has anything to be ashamed of).  One of many on this album, Velvet Underground's last "official" studio album. OK, not that funny. Is the first song, "Who Loves the Sun," an answer song to the Beatles' "Here Comes the Sun"?  Sure, why not.  It's a blast of sugary pop, all harmonies and light, but with lyrics about the meaninglessness of life after heartbreak.  ("Who loves ...

  Do you want the good news first or the bad news?  OK, good news first: yes, this album is a stone cold classic, widely beloved and bearing one of the best songs ever (which we will discuss in more detail below); a psych-era gem; a record store clerk talisman.  The bad news?  Uhhhh, I guess it's not perfect?  This narrative device didn't work out great. Let's talk about the good part first.  There are some absolute bangers on this album.  The first song, "Care of Cell 44," a song you know even if you don't recognize the title (which appears nowhere in the song), written from the perspective of a guy writing his girlfriend in prison, is a lovely pop confection, with Beach Boys-esque vocals and a Mellotron and the whole nine.  (There's also the deliciously contemporary tidbit that they wanted to call it "Care of Cell 69" and their American publisher wouldn't let them.  NICE.)  "A Rose for Emily" is baroque pop, all piano and delicate...

  Famously recorded following the death of his mother and the breakup of his engagement to designer Alexis Phifer, Kanye's fourth album seemed like a bizarre outlier at the time, a rap album that's mostly sung, a cold and sparse cry from the heart.  Little did we know that it would go on to become a template for an entire genre, spawning all kinds of Soundcloud rap that would eventually take over the world.  Oh, and Drake's entire sound. The 808s of the title refer, of course, to the Roland TR-808 drum machine that Ye used extensively (he only later learned that 808 was also the area code of Hawaii, where a good bit of the album was made), and it's appropriate in that the whole album sounds metallic and cold and machine-made.  Richly instrumented it is not.  The first song, for example, is punctuated by a drum machine track and a "bloop....bleep" that could be a game of Pong or a heart monitor; Kanye's vocals are wildly Autotuned, giving the whole thing an...

  Cocteau Twins is one of those bands that has always rested on the shady periphery for me; I mean, obviously I knew that they existed and I vaguely knew they were influential on the shoegaze/dreampop scene, and I knew the title of this album but I have to confess I had never sat down and listened to it before and you know what?  This is a beautiful album. It starts with Robin Guthrie's guitar, a chimy, chorusy sound, chugging chords, and then Elizabeth Fraser's voice, but just calling it her "voice" really is an understatement.  Not only does she have incredible range, which she shows off on that first song; it's also got an otherworldly quality that carries through the whole album.  It's no wonder that the genre this spawned is called "dreampop;" the whole album sounds like the soundtrack to a dream. After a few listens, I kept coming back to "Iceblink Luck," a perfect little jewel box of a song that shows off everything about this band. ...

  Two words for your Tuesday: Fuck and yes.  This album, which I have been listening to nonstop since last week, is a total blast of early 90's hip hop and fun and good times.  Does the very first track - "The Boomin' System" - sample James Brown's "Funky Drummer"?  You bet your ass it does.  Does this sound like the most spectacular exemplar of Golden Age hip hop?  Absolutely. Hard to believe that at 22, LL was entering Act III of his career but, as he famously says in the title track, "Don't call it a comeback."  Produced largely by Marley Marl and recorded in New York, it's got the huge drums and scratcing and LL's booming tenor and everything else you remember from early Clinton-era hip hop. OK OLD GUY ALERT HERE, as if it wasn't already completely apparent, but let's just compare a couple of verses.  Here's one from the title track: Don't you call this a regular jam I'm gonna rock this land I'm gonna tak...

  I feel like I have to tread lightly here.  After yesterday's blast of pop-punk energy, this restrained, quiet album is a radical change of pace, but I very much want to consider it on its own merits and not be influenced by what I've just been listening to. So I've tried very hard to do that, and to think about it in isolation, but after two listens I can't escape the feeling that this album is slight; not just in the sense that musically it's very open and airy but also in the sense that there's not a ton going on.  I'm not sure what I'm missing that affords this album this (comparitively) lofty position. The music is, I guess, jazz-pop?  It sounds like it's all drum machines, and that gives some of the songs a trip-hop feel, which I quite liked, but most of it is that kind of ethereal airy jazz/soul/R&B.  Some songs, like "Kiss of Life," really lean into the R&B, while a song like "Like a Tattoo" is so sparsely instrum...

  When we last saw Green Day, they had just SOLD OUT by moving from tiny local Lookout! records to Reprise, causing great consternation all over the East Bay.  Well, this album, their seventh, completed the process by moving 16 million units and making them into one of the country's - maybe the world's - biggest rock bands.  Now, as a former sneering indie kid, it would give me immense pleasure to report that this is the ultimate sell-out, an overproduced studio confection, lacking in imagination and packaged to appeal to the lowest and biggest-selling common denominator.  Unfortunately, this album fucking rips, and I can't stop listening to it.  It's fucking great. Green Day's secret power (or maybe it's not such a secret) has been to marry the hardest-driving, crunchies punk guitars to the catchiest, poppiest melodies, vocal tracks so great that Max Martin would cut off his Autotune knob just to write one of them.  I mean, I guess it's not a secret; that...

  I was blown away to be reminded that this album came out in 1985, almost 40 years ago.  Whitney really was the bridge between the 70's soul and R&B singers and the vocal acrobats today.  Without Whitney, there's no girl on American Idol cavorting up and down the scale, doing vocal unimaginable vocal runs, for good or ill. But this isn't really the album where Whitney seemed to be showing off her vocal prowess just to blow people away.  Instead, it's a more self-assured performance, the birth of an important artist rather than the mid-stage dynamism.  I'm sure you know the singles - "You Give Good Love," then "Saving All My Love," then "How Will I Know," the poppiest and most MTV of the singles, the one that really broke her to mainstream audiences.  It's irresistably catchy.  Written by George Merrill and Shannon Rubicam, they pitched it to Janet Jackson, who turned it down.  Good thing, too, because Whitney absolutely brought...

  When it came time to pick a punk name, guys would usually go for the abrasive (Johnny Rotten) or the arty (Lux Interior) or the gangy (Ramones), but Peter McNeish borrowed the name of his favorite Romantic poet, Percy Bysse Shelley, and christened himself Pete Shelley.  This gives you some clue about what the Buzzcocks were up to.  Solidly punk - more recognizably "punk" than the Clash, they absolutely go hard - but with a melodic edge and a rejection of the utter nihilism that dominated a lot of British punk of their era. That melodic edge is all over this album, a collection of singles released in the US in 1979 and immediately influential on a lot of American proto-punk bands.  Just check out "I Don't Mind," which is kind of all over the place but which has a vocal melody that is just out of this world: The second song, "What Do I Get?' became famous again after it was used in a few commercials, like for McDonald's in the UK and Toyota here in ...

  "Rocket Man," track 5 on this record, is, of course, one of the best-known songs in rock history and a staple of jukeboxes and karaoke machines worldwide, but I want to talk about a different song, one I have listened to far too many times in the last four days to be healthy, "Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters," maybe the finest song John and lyricist Bernie Taupin  ever wrote. The song starts quietly, with just piano and John's vocals: And now I know Spanish Harlem are not just pretty words to say I thought I knew But now I know that rose trees never grow In New York City Until you've seen this trashcan dream come true You stand at the edge while people run you through And I thank the Lord There's people out there like you I thank the Lord there's people out there like you Obviously, it's a callback to Ben E. King's "Spanish Harlem," but what the hell is going on here otherwise?  What is a trashcan dream?  I mean, this is clearly about ...

  Listening back to this for the first time in many years, I was struck by how much this album reminded me of Gang of Four's Entertainment , which came out the following year.  Both are - here comes the rock critic word - angular, kind of herky-jerky, with undeniably weird vocals and a slyly critical take on modern mores (ok, Entertainment  isn't sly about its critique, but you get my point).  I feel like before Devo was the "Whip It" Devo, the flowerpot hats Devo, they were a post-punk band with a lot of interesting musical ideas but not yet a thing. Devo started up in Akron, Ohio in the mid-70's and were probably too advanced for the public at that time.  They really came into bloom later during the 80's when irony was invented, but that's beyond the scope of this entry.  Anyway, their demo found its way to David Bowie and (of course) Brian Eno, who brought the band to Cologne, West Germany to record this record.  In a year when five of the top 100 s...

  Syd Barrett's crowning (well, only) achievement with Pink Floyd, this 1967 release has been hailed as a psychedelic masterpiece and a visionary recording, which is great because I fucking hated it.  OK, maybe that's too strong.  I really did not like it at all.  It combines all the worst parts of jazz and endless noodling and bad singing and unfinished songs into one painful package.  It is truly hard to believe that the band that did this put out something like The Dark Side of the Moon five years later. I must admit, my exposure to early Pink Floyd has been extremely limited - I do like the song "Fearless" from Meddle , a few years after this album - and it's always hard evaluating something I'm not super familiar with and am immediately turned off by but this is just so not in my wheelhouse that it's hard for me to be objective.  There's some stuff that I kind of liked, like the descending bassline on "Lucifer Sam," which starts out sou...

  Longtime readers will know that jazz is my weakest genre in that it's the one I know the least about and, let's be honest, like the least, so when a jazz album shows up on the list I usually sigh heavily and then put it on while I'm working and try to just get through it.  I was expecting pretty much the same here. I was wrong.  The first song, "Chameleon," starts out with a synth bass line that's immediately catchy and then the other instruments build in, assembling a funk-inspirred groove that does not let up.  I've since found out that it's a jazz classic, and I can see why.  There is a ton going on here, multiple layers, with new sounds introduced just as you've gotten used to the last new sound. "Sly," the third of four songs on the album, is named for Sly Stone, whose influence on this album Hancock acknowledged.  It also sits somewhere in that Venn diagram between jazz, soul, and funk.  The last track, "Vein Melter," re...

  Did you notice that every other record so far this week was by a female artist or group?  And now dumb old Bob Dylan comes crashing in on Friday to ruin our Grrl Power vibe.  Oh well. This is the album that turned Bob Dylan into BOB DYLAN,  It was only his second album, but it's full of songs that became nearly instantly famous and remain that way.  Everybody was like "Bob how did you write all these songs so fast?" and he literally said (actual quote) "The songs are there. They exist all by themselves just waiting for someone to write them down. I just put them down on paper."  Which is kinda true because like half of the melodies are lifted or reworked from older songs.  The melody of "Blowin' in the Wind," for example, is based on an old spiritual called "No More Auction Block."  I do not happen to love "Blowin' in the Wind" but that's probably because of the saccharine Peter, Paul & Mary version.  Bob's ver...

  I absolutely remember how inescapable this album was in, for me anyway, 1989 (even though it came out in 1988).  It was just everywhere, especially the first two songs, "Talkin' Bout a Revolution" and "Fast Car," the song that really launched Chapman into the stratosphere.  This album sold 20 million copies. You have to remember that 1988 was an era of slickly-produced pop.  The Top 3 singles of 1988: George Michael's "Faith," INXS's "Need You Tonight," and George Harrison's "Got My Mind Set On You."  All perfectly fine songs in their own regard, but this album offered such a contrast to that highly-produced sheen that it was irresistible to people. (Small digression, but I don't think I realized that "Got My Mind Set On You" was George Harrison, like George Harrison from the Beatles?! I think I just filed it in my mind under "mainstream pop" and didn't think about it.) The first song, writt...

  Way before Dolly was DOLLY, an icon of not just country music but American culture writ large, she was a working (extremely hardworking - 15 albums in 4 years around the time of this one) country songwriter and musician and singer, and this album is a perfect snapshot of this era.  Unlike most country artists (and probably most pop artists), she wrote almost all the songs on this album herself, with some offerings from Porter Wagoner, her longtime collaborator and possibly unfulfilled romance. The title song is a classic, a true story about Dolly's impoverished childhood and how her mother sewed her a coat out of rags that she wore to school, only to be teased by other kids.  Lots and lots of country artists have songs about their hardscrabble childhoods, but this is one of the most affecting and maybe even defiant you'll ever hear.  Dolly swears it's true; you can even see a reproduction of the titular coat at the Chasing Rainbows museum at Dollywood in Pigeon Fo...

  Potentially another lobster album , although I don't have a clear sense of how many people like this album.  (To refresh, a lobster album is one that people love but that I don't particularly like.)  OK, so I know some about Joni Mitchell, of course know a few songs, but had never heard this album before.  Let me cut right to the chase; I did not like it.  I'm not a huge jazz person, and a lot of this sounds suspiciously jazzy to me.  It's apparently the album where Mitchell broke from her folk/pop roots and started going wild and doing her own thing and whatnot.  More power to you, Joni, but this is not it for me. There is one song on here that I thought was kind of cool, "The Jungle Line," if for no other reason than because it has sampled drums, which may or may not be the first use of sampling in a major-label release.  The drum sound is cool, but again, there's that unleashed melody that just kind of free-floats all over the place and doesn...

  This album - Janis' second and, tragically, final solo record - opens with a fast drumbeat, soon joined by guitar and then that voice , that otherworldly voice that sounds like no one else before or since.  Really, this entire album is a tribute to Janis Joplin's amazing instrument, which she had complete control over and the ability to modulate between a raspy whisper and a full-throated yawp.  Just an incredible voice. Recorded in LA in 1970, it came out in January 1971, three months after Janis OD'd in a hotel room at the age of 27 .  It's a blues/soul pastiche, really well-recorded and expertly produced by Paul Rothchild.  Janis is backed up by her road band, the Full Tilt Boogie Band, who are clearly tight from a lot of shows together. But let's cut straight to the outlier, an a capella song that's so well-known that my Dad, who was a hardcore country music fan and whose interest in rock extended only as far as Roy Orbison, knew all the words to: "Me...

  I've been really lucky during the now-year-plus course of this project, because I've discovered some great stuff I otherwise wouldn't have heard; revisited some old favorites; and learned to appreciate things I didn't particularly like.  This one, I have to say, is a tough one, because I really, really, really, disliked this record. I realize that this album has been lauded as a masterpiece of post-punk and gotten the Cobain seal of approval (for the song "Typical Girls," specifically), and I'm probably going to come off as a music idiot for not liking it, but this just did not resonate with me in any way.  Let me just say I was unsurprised to learn that " [w]hen the group first formed, they couldn't play their instruments for shit ."  A lot of the songs sound like a group of people who have never written, or maybe even heard, a song before.  There's a lot of playground, sing-songy stuff that approaches "singing" but is so ant...

  After the disappointing sales of Paul's Boutique (an album that will surely appear later on this list), the Beastie Boys did what any self-respecting rap/rock band would do: bummed around LA for a few years, rented a former ballroom on Glendale Boulevard, threw parties, and listened to lot of records.  After a while, the stuff they were listening to - the Meters, Sly Stone, Lee "Scratch" Perry - started to creep into the songs they were working on, and this album is the result.  It sounds like a mash-up, a pastiche of genres and stylistic experiments, and the Beasties went back to playing instruments and being a band again after the mostly sample-driven Paul's Boutique . The results are mixed.  There's some unquestionably good stuff on here, like the singles "Pass the Mic," "Jimmy James," and probably the best-known song "So What'Cha Want."  I like "Jimmy James" in particular; it's built entirely on samples, as fa...