Funeral to Finish

  Drake is one of the biggest artists of the 2010s (and will be for the 2020s, if he so wishes, I'm sure).  And yet - personal confession time here - I could not name a single Drake song.  He has just never been on my radar.  I mean, I know what he looks like, and we all know the meme , but I could not name a song.  Even after listening to this whole album, I still couldn't. [LENGTHY PARENTHETICAL: I don't know any songs because, of course, I was listening to it on my device while walking around or whatever, the same way I, and probably most everybody, consumes music these days.  As a Gen Xer, I used to listen to music as a youth by putting on albums and then carefully studying the sleeve and liner notes as it played.  This way, I grew to know what each song was named.  Now, I barely look at my phone while music is playing so I almost never associate songs with names.  I barely know the names of any songs any more.] So.  This album.  Now, although I had very little prior kn

  Poor George.  He spends years in the Beatles and they only let him contribute a couple of songs an album!  So the Beatles break up and George has SO MANY SONGS saved up and he apparent puts them all out AT ONCE.  I guess this was the first triple album?  (Later, Paul and Wings would release a live album, Wings Over America , also a triple album.  I wonder if that was done specifically as a rejoinder to this.)  This did not need to be a triple album, but let's get to that later. First, the good: "What Is Life," which you all know, has one of the greatest and most memorable guitar riffs in history.  "If Not For You" sounds like a Dylan song because it's a Dylan song.  Our old buddy Phil Spector shows up again here, bringing the instantly recognizable Wall of Sound to songs like "Wah-Wah" and "Let It Down" and, of course, "My Sweet Lord," Harrison's possibly subconscious update of the Chiffons' "He's So Fine.&quo

  There's a definite 90's hip hop sound, and this album definitely has it.  I've been trying to figure out what exacrtly makes that sound so distinctive - like, if you'd never heard this and someone put it on and asked you to guess, roughly, what era it came from, you'd instinctively say 90's - and I think it's a few things: (1) sort of trip-hoppy drums, with lots of reverb, a snap snare, really high in the mix, (2) minimal, repeating instrumentation; (3) dense, rapid-fire raps, with very little vocal affectation.  Here's a perfect example, "Cradle to the Grave," from this album: This album has all of that stuff, but it's like the dark side of it, where something like Tribe Called Quest is similar, but definitely not dark  like this.  (Not coincidentally, I assume, Tribe's Q-Tip was deeply involved in making the album.)  Even the beats are kind of menacing, and lyrics, about violence, poverty, and death in the projects of Queens, are st

  You can't help but like Lil Wayne.  Of course, he talks a tough game (album opening lyrics: "Cash Money, Young Money, motherfuck the other side / They can fuck with us if they want, I bring 'em homicide / Word to my mama, I'm gon' continue bombin'") but he just seems like a genuinely likable guy.  He does hits on sports TV shows, and has interests in all kinds of stuff, and just seems like a good dude.  I mean, it's tough to stay hard when you're on The Masked Singer . This album, which came out in 2005, was Weezy's fifth, and is generally considered his best work.  It's really, really good!  There's a lot of bravado, not unusual for albums of this type and artists in this genre, but it's backed up with some truly excellent flow and some musically interesting tracks.  Wayne's voice is a real instrument here, cracking with emotion and booming with power.  I really dig the intricate rhymes, but like when it's transcribed her

  Another one of those albums you know a ton of songs on, from the early Smokey Robinson-written songs like "The Way You Do The Things You Do" (and boy, those songs sound so Smokey I had to check to make sure it wasn't him singing) through the hits like "Ain't Too Proud to Beg" to the more obscure stuff like "Psychedelic Shack."  Just an incredible barrage of songs you know by heart.  The Temptations didn't just crank out hit after hit, they left an indelible mark on American culture. (Speaking of, once when I was extremely young I saw one of those duos with two guys with acoustic guitars in a bar playing covers and they played "My Girl" except they substituted "cocaine" for "my girl" in the lyrics so it was like "I guess you'd say/What can make me feel this way?/Cocaine.....Cocaine...."  The crowd ate it up.  The 80's, man.) Since I've now fucked everything up by mentioning the 80's pleas

  When people say "acid rock," this is what they're talking about, that combination of blues and pointless, too-long guitar solos.  The music itself is fine ("It was hard to get the band to play in tune and in time. They just weren't very good musicians," the engineer later said), but the obvious star here is Janis Joplin.  It's fascinating listening to her right after yesterday's Hot Buttered Soul , since the centerpiece of both records is an unforgettable, magnetic voice, and those voices could not be more different.  Where Hayes rumbles with powerful, oaky sureness, Janis shrieks and wails and somehow stays on key the whole time.  It's really an amazing performance. The songs the band wrote themselves are really nothing interesting.  "Turtle Blues," which Janis wrote, is just straight-ahead blues.  "Combination of the Two," which kicks off with a Bill Graham intro to make it sound live (although it wasn't), kind of mean

  What a wild album.  There were only four songs on the original version, one of them 12 minutes long and one of them 18 minutes long, and Hayes only helped write one of them.  So this weird collection, released into the teeth of the 2-minute single era, sold a million fucking copies.   First we've got to talk about "By the Time I Get to Phoenix," that sappy lump that a million shitty lounge singers have tried to emote into.  Well, Hayes said fuck that and took that song and gave it an eight-minute spoken word intro, backed with only a one-note bass thump and cymbal tap, in which he spins out a story about a woman who did him wrong - seven times!!!! - before he decided to leave her in a '65 Ford and head from LA towards, yes, Phoenix.  In a completely different vein, there's the lyrically loony "Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic," which finds him singing lyrics like I wanna come back Cause I like it like that Your modus operandi Is really all right, out

  For lack of a better word, this album is just spooky.  Recorded in 1936 and 1937 when Johnson was just 25 and 26 years old, it's really just a scratchy recording of the man and his guitar, but it would go on to become the foundation for a lot of what we think of as "rock" today.  Even if you don't know anything about early blues or know what a I-IV-V sequence is, if you listen to this you'll immediately go "Oh! That's the blues sound!"  It's that recognizable. The recordings languished in obscurity for many years until John Hammon persuaded Columbia Records to issue them as a set in this album in 1961.  There is probably no way to overstate the impact this collection had on popular music.  Everyone from Bob Dylan to Keith Richards to Eric Clapton was immediately galvanized by what they heard on this record.  Of course they were.  Johnson's voice, which varies from a plaintive whine to an anguished growl, sounds like it's issuing straigh

  If you were part of any "scene" in the 80's or 90's (and, I'm sure, today), you knew all about the evil of "selling out."  Selling out was what happened when someone in the scene accidentally became successful, like more successful than house shows or pop-ups or whatever you had.  Like getting a record deal with a major label or getting an agent or selling your art in a gallery to rich people.  Selling out was the worst thing that could happen to someone because it meant they were no longer real . This was Green Day's sellout album, when they left (amicably, by all accounts) indie local Lookout! records and signed with Reprise.  Everyone in the East Bay punk scene was SO MAD!  You are not ever supposed to actually make money.  That is not cool.  The punk club 924 Gilman banned Green Day from entering the place and as far as I know the ban is still in effect.  Sellouts! [UPDATE: I am informed via Twitter that the ban was lifted a while back and the

  I've known this day was coming for a while, and here it is, and I still have the same problem: how to write about an album that's intensely personal to me, one that I've listened to all the way through maybe more than any other album in the last 20 years, one that's rightfully regarded as one of the best, if not the best, record of the 90's, and still languishes here at 376.  Not everyone likes this album and that's fine.  There's a probably apocryphal Jerry Garcia quote that goes "Not everyone likes us, but the people who like us really, really like us," and that's true of this album as well. How to describe this album.  I guess it's lo-fi psych-folk, with some funeral marches and Bulgarian folk influence?  No, it's campfire songs for those with schizoaffective disorder?  No, it's indie rock from an alien planet?  The very first thing you hear, in "King of Carrot Flowers Pt. 1" is a simple strummed acoustic chord patte

  God, I forgot how hard this album goes.  This album absolutely fucks.  This album is a pure jagged slice of early-00's NYC dance punk, and it makes you feel young again, or even young for the first time.  I don't know how these songs were written but if you told me they locked themselves in a squat with no heat in Brooklyn for three days with nothing but red wine and Adderall and this is what came out of that I would believe you.  I was listening to it in my own house and I wanted to jump around and throw something through the window.  Fuck, this is a great record. You are immediately drawn to Karen O's voice, a seething, screaming, prowling instrument that, at first anyway, dominates the sound, but then you realize that Nick Zinner's guitar is just as important, buzzing through the whole thing, playing off the vocals (or vice versa, I don't know).  Karen O and drummer Brian Chase met at Oberlin, which makes sense because these songs are all arty and avant-punky a

  My first thought was "Man, this sounds dated," but then I realized it came out in 1983, making it essentially the "Rock Around the Clock" of hip-hop.  The top 3 songs of 1983 were "Every Breath You Take," "Billie Jean," and "Flashdance...What a Feeling," and although those are all incredible songs in their own regard, none of them have the immediacy and the urgency of any song on this album. Listening to it again now, you're struck by the heaviness of the beat and the frequent interplay between DMC and Run.  They frequently trade off vocals in the middle of a line, finishing each others' thoughts.  Their rhythm became so understood to be the voice of hip hop that it's the go-to whenever anybody wants to do the I'm-a-white-person-doing-a-rap, like "My name is MICHAEL and I'm here to SAY I like doing RAP in an obvious WAY."  That dot-dot-DOT-dot-de-dot-dot-DOT vocal pattern is the backbone here and became u

  Like many adolescents in the 80's filled with suburban ennui and a taste for sci-fi and fantasy, I had a Rush phase in my early teens, which involved a fair amount of listening to this record, arguably Rush's best or at least most accessible.  Their two biggest (and probably most radio-friendly) songs are both on here, "Tom Sawyer" and "Limelight."   But don't take it from today TK, take it from TK's writing about this album in the school newspaper in nineteen-eighty-*cough*:  "'Tom Sawyer' was almost based on keyboards, with guitar secondary; their transition to techno-pop was almost complete.  Other cuts that proved notable included 'Limelight,' 'YYZ,' and instrumental named for the airport designation of Toronto, and 'Red Barchetta,' which survived zero airplay to become a sort of underground classic."  OK that's enough from you, young TK. No, I am not linking to this opus from my teen years. Later o

  This album is making me rethink my longstanding aversion to jazz.  I could actually see myself putting this on again and listening to it of my own volition, which is not something I thought would ever happen with a jazz album.  When we last encountered jazz  in the form of Ornette Coleman, it was so disjointed and skittish that even someone who loved it said it was like an "atom bomb falling on a chicken coop."  But this is not that kind of jazz!  It is, I learned, be-bop, and I know I sound like someone who has just come to your country and thank you how to use money please but there are actual songs with structure and recurring themes.  It's actually fine background music!  I guess it could be foreground music too if you're not me. I'm not alone in my feelings about Ornette Coleman.  Guess who else was dubious about it?  CHARLES MINGUS JR.!!!  He said, about Coleman, "...if the free-form guys could play the same tune twice, then I would say they were pla

  This album fucking whips ass .  After yesterday's somnambulant drone , this set of razor-sharp feathered hair Camaro rock really hits the spot.  If you're a Gen X like me, you probably grew up hearing a lot of these songs on your local megawatt AOR fucking ROCK station, the one that did the Top 500 songs of all time countdown over Memorial Day weekend (your AOR station did do that, didn't they?).  Do you know "Gimme Three Steps," a rollicking tale of a blonde man being threatened with a firearm?  It's good.  Maybe you know "Tuesday's Gone," if only from the movie "Dazed and Confused."  It's really a lovely, plaintive song! Barring all of those, OF COURSE you know, or know of, "Free Bird," the closing song on the album.  As a song, "Free Bird" (two words, please make a note of it) is just ok; it's not that interesting, but has a nice jam at the end that kinda serves as a capsule summary of Southern rock.  Bu

  If Tame Impala didn't exist, major music festivals would have to invent them.  They're the perfect late-day act or headliner - just edgy enough for the music snobs and kids, but also easy and unthreatening enough for the dads.  I've seen Tame Impala multiple times at festivals, and they're (or really, "he's," it's just Kevin Parker and a bunch of hired help) always FINE.  I remember seeing them at FYF in Los Angeles, before that festival crashed and burned amid a slew of horrifying sexual harrassment allegations  against the founder, and poor Tame Impala had the misfortune of following Vince Staples on the same stage.  After Staples' incendiary, electric set, Tame Impala seemed positively neutered.  They were playing and it was FINE and every bro who had been throughout the festival was drawn to the sound like moths to MOR but I was mostly just meh.  I had reached the ultimate state of meh-ness. [Looking back at the 2016 FYF schedule , it looks l

  A dark, brooding album full of emotion and borderline physical pain, this record was recorded as the band, which formed in Bristol, England, in the 80's, was fracturing under the strain.  I guess it's the definitive trip-hop album but it really defies description.  Just listen to something like "Teardrop," with its heart-rending melody, sung by the Cocteau Twins' Elizabeth Fraser, on the day she found out that her estranged friend Jeff Buckley had drowned.  That kind of bleakness suffuses the whole album.  It's an Internet cliche by now to say that something is a "mood" but this album is a fucking MOOD.  It produced four UK singles, including "Teardrop." It wasn't as big a hit in the US but I feel like it was just everywhere for a while.  It's also connected to a certain point in time for me, namely the early aughts in San Francisco.  Cast your mind back to that time, when my sister was dating a DJ, because if you weren't dati

  Were the Kinks better than the Beatles?  Some people think so!  I do not want to get in the middle of a Boomer fight like that and get run over by someone's midlife crisis BMW Z4, but I will just say that this album is a good argument in favor.  Kicking off with the sort-of title track, this album goes all kinds of weird and great places.  The one you almost definitely probably know is "Picture Book," from that HP commercial back in the early '00s.  It's one of the hookiest songs of all time, with a guitar riff that arrived straight from heaven.   Good luck not humming that all day.  But there's so much more!  "Last of the Steam-Powered Trains" is fascinating because it uses what, for all intents and purposes, is a sample, decades before "sampling" was a thing, in this case of Howlin' Wolf's "Smokestack Lightning."  I mean, they just picked up the riff, changed it ever so slightly, and brought it right into their train s

  The Ramones are indelibly etched not just into American music but American culture, and you no doubt know a number of songs on this album, like "Sheena Is a Punk Rocker" and "Rockaway Beach."  Maybe you know "Teenage Lobotomy" (in which Joey confuses the procedure with the patient, singing "I'm a teenage lobotomy") and their covers of "Do You Wanna Dance" and "Surfin' Bird."   Of course, this album was incredibly important, and was obviously an influence on everyone from The Clash to Green Day to the Strokes.  The songs are full of hooks and catchy as hell.  What's not to like? Welllllllll......it wouldn't be any fun if there was NOTHING not to like, so let me do it.  With the obvious caveat that this was a blast of fresh air when it came out, it sounds dated as hell now.  A lot of the songs sound the same.  There's a lot of the one-two-three-four tempo and the same four chords arranged in slightly differ

  I had a bit of a journey with this album because (1) I had never heard it before, and (2) at first, I didn't really understand what it was .  Like, it's not something I would normally listen to so I started out a bit crazy, like "What box do I put this into?" and "This sounds like something played in the background at a Valencia Street restaurant in 2008."  But then I tried to put aside my preconceptions and listen to it on its own terms and it's enjoyable for a while, even if it's not something I'd normally listen to. Here's the story: J Dilla put this together this instrumental hip hop album while hospitalized for a rare blood disorder and died three days after it came out.  It's a melange of all kinds of stuff, with samples from soul classics and 60's rock and clips from movies and fuck, I don't even know.  For me, there were some truly interesting moments, and some songs that I liked, but on the whole, I'm not gonna be l