Funeral to Finish

  I am again in that uncomfortable place where I feel like I don't know enough about a genre to have a really well-informed take on this album, other than to say I thought it was ok?  It had its moments, but never really grabbed me, and I'll probably never go back to it?  Let's focus on the positive, as my Mom most definitely never used to say. The first song that grabbed my attention as I was listening was "Got 'Til It's Gone," which samples so heavily from Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" - specifically the "Don't it always seem to go/That you don't know what you got 'til it's gone" part - that Joni gets a performance credit, along with Q-Tip and Janet.  It's an interesting song that feels almost, or maybe entirely, trip-hop, which I was not expecting.  It's totally a trip-hop drum pattern, at least.  "Rope Burn" is a little trip-hoppy as well, and is pretty explicitly sexual, as the title might ...

The List is gonna do what the List is gonna do but I have to say I'm genuinely shocked to find the Stone Roses debut album just chilling down here in the low 300's like it's a middlingly-important record your best friend's brother loves and not an album that has repeatedly been voted the Greatest Album of All Time (or in the Top 10) by British people.  In 2003, NME readers judged it to be the Best Album Ever ; by 2013, it was only #7 .  STILL!  That is a huge difference across the Atlantic.  Even on this side, it's a Pitchfork 10 .  So what gives? First off, it's a very good album.  There are a lot of good, poppy songs dressed up in the Madchester swirly guitars and matched with Ian Brown's nasally, disaffected vocals.  This album has been retconned as some kind of fusion of rock and rave electronica but I don't think that's really true.  It's more like what the Beatles might have become with thicker production and worse singing.  The only r...

  Fuck yeah!  This album fucking rocks.  Arriving in April 1980 (when Christopher Cross' "Ride Like the Wind" was #2 on the Billboard Hot 100, right after "Call Me" by Blondie which, admittedly, still kicks ass), this record heralded a new dawn of American punk.  Produced by Ray Manzarek, former keyboardist for the Doors.  Maybe that's why there's a cover of "Soul Kitchen" which is about as similar to the original as a Hot Pocket is to Beef Wellington.   Perhaps you know "Johny Hit and Run Pauline," a  catchy song "about a guy who takes an imaginary drug that allows him to have sex once an hour for 24 hours."  The title track, about a racist woman who leaves LA because of its diversity, drops the n-word and became notorious for doing so.  But really, there are no bad songs on this classic album.  ("Sex and Drugs in High Society" is my favorite, though.) TOTALLY (OR MOSTLY) UNRELATED CONTENT: Last night we watched...

  Recency bias!  That's why the greatest album of all time was judged by NME readers to be The Smiths' 1986 album The Queen Is Dead when their list was published in 1988, but by 2003 it was the Stone Roses' self-titled debut.  I suspect recency bias is at work here, too, since this 2019 album is certainly worth listening to but is in no way the 321st best album of all time. This is a Jack Antonoff-produced joint and man can't you tell.  Jack has this particular way of working with attractive white women and making albums that sound ethereal and cold and lonely.  He did it with  Taylor Swift and Lana, both of them multiple times.  I'm not saying they all sound exactly the same but my God they sure live in the same neighborhood.  He could probably take me into the studio and my record would sound like Lorde on a methadone bender. Anyway, this album.  I don't know, it's fine.  Like I said, it's very cold and very sparse and there are a lot...

  By 1968, Elvis was mostly washed up.  After he got out of the Army in 1960, at the direction of manager/Svengali Col. Tom Parker, he embarked on a series of movies and accompanying soundtracks that became increasingly unsuccessful and cringeworthy as the decade dragged on.  Just imagine, the King of Rock & Roll reduced to singing crap like "No Room to Rumba in a Sports Car" and "Rock-A-Hula Baby." Parker must have known that the golden goose was about to  croak and arranged a TV special, called simply "Elvis," that aired in December 1968.  Now known as the "Elvis Comeback Special," it was a sensation.  Elvis looked and sang great, hearkening back to the rock days of the 50's that made him an icon.  If you haven't seen it, it's worth watching at least some of it.  It's great, no joke.  Here's a sample: Following the success of the Comeback Special, Elvis wanted to record a new album.  He didn't go to his usual studios...

  Hey look it's the Talk About Sandinista Without Using the Word "Sprawling" Challenge! OK, I'll try.  How do you follow up London Calling, one of the greatest albums in rock history (which, I haven't checked, but I'm sure will be in the top 20 or so on this list, I mean it better be )?  You smoke a ton of weed and your only instruction to the engineer is "just keep the tape rolling no matter what happens, mate."  That's how you end up with this three-disc mess of an album(s), just a sprawling - FUCK - ongoing melange of reggae, rockabilly, folk, jazz, maybe disco?  Whatever it is, it's certainly not punk, which is to say that the Clash were first known as a "punk" band but this album should disabuse anyone of that thought. So yeah, there's a lot going on here.  And no, it's not all great.  But I tend to agree with this article that you could make a fantastic single album out of it .  This guy suggests some of the followin...

  A safe respite for Volvo SUV dads who think Foo Fighters is "hard rock," this album sounds like if you put a mediocre Radiohead album into one of those rock tumblers to smooth off all the edges and get a shiny, flat, featureless stone.   Sometimes you need that though!  I mean, there are some moments on here.  "Clocks" has that instantly recognizable din-dun-dun din-dun-dun piano riff that repeats and builds and I guess it has an emotional center that can pull you in.  "In My Place" was a monster hit, again built on a memorable riff, this time on guitar, but it really sounds like that song on a movie soundtrack when the couple has broken up and the girl is looking through a rain-streaked window and the guy is out with his friends but pauses and looks meaningfully into middle distance because HE'S THINKING ABOUT HER. A lot of the songs sound very similar.  To some, that's a "cohesive sound."  To others, that's "a lot of these so...

  There's a scene in the 2005 Johnny Cash biopic where young Johnny is playing a show and is up right after Jerry Lee Lewis.  In a brief, memorable moment, Jerry Lee comes offstage and snarls "Nobody follows the Killer" to Johnny.  (It's at the end of this clip, which is worth watching.) Fun fact: Jerry Lee was played by Waylon Payne, son of Willie Nelson's former guitarist Jody Payne and singer Sammi Smith.  Waylon is a country artist in his own right, and just released an album this year with the Fiona Apple-esque title Blue Eyes, The Harlot, The Queer, The Pusher & Me .  It's actually really good!  (Check out " Sins of the Father ," for example.) But I digress.  We're here to talk about this album, an anthology, really, that appears to roughly trace Lewis's career chronologically from the Sun sessions and early rockabilly like "Crazy Arms" and "It'll Be Me," up through his much longer country career, and his (no...

  I'm not sure there's much doubt that Prince was one of the most gifted and talented songwriters and performers who has ever lived.  I have no doubt that if he had been born in Vienna in the 1700's he would have mopped the floor with Beethoven.  His influence on modern music is huge and wide, and this is really the album that kicked it off.  Not only did he write all the songs, he played (almost) all the instruments and recorded the whole thing, pretty much, by himself.  Just mind-blowing. He made this amazing album by synthesizing funk, R&B, new wave, and pop, and instantly influenced every one of those genres.  The most familiar song on thgis record (to me, anyway), "When You Were Mine," is a perfect example.  It's got that keyboard riff running through it like we would hear so many times later in the 80's, and that incredible funk backbeat, but the star is really Prince's voice, super high-pitched but strong and assured.  It's instantly hu...

  Just wow.  I haven't heard this album in what seems like forever and I had forgotten about its raw power, the sheer force of a band playing at their peak.  Widely regarded as the best live album of all time, it literally crackles with electricity.  Upon my (much overdue) relisten, and as an older and wiser Rock Music Fan, a couple of things stood out: Roger Daltrey's voice still sounds raw and a little unpolished.  He doesn't have the high gloss that he'll have later in the Who's career.  I don't mean to suggest that his singing isn't great; it is!  It's just not as polished as it will become.  For this record, that's exactly the right sound. This band is extremely tight.  They've obviously been playing and rehearsing together nonstop, and there's barely a note or a drum hit out of place.  At the same time, there's a wildness and an intensity to it, like it doesn't sound OVERrehearsed, and there's obviously a lot of freedom fo...

  Vampire Weekend is maybe the last of the Hipster Bands, back when "hipster" as a term had the power to divide and anger, which seems absolutely quaint now in light of four years of True Life: The Madness of King Donald and Worldwide Pandemic and Oh Hey Here's Another Recession Just In Case You Forgot About the Last One Like 10 Years Ago.  Hard to care about whether American Apparel opens a store in your neighborhood when breathing can kill you. So in their early years they were almost shorthand for white, overeducatred, appropriative, bratty kids except they also managed to make fun, inventive, exciting music.  On this, their third album, they look ahead from the arch observations and class signifiers of college kids on the quad and spring into young adulthood.  I liked this album a lot from the day it came out and we listened to it a lot in our house, so I'm not an unbiased observer here. Vampire Weekend The Early Years was always built on the interplay between fr...

  Let's say that I was deeply steeped in 90's hip hop and the DJ culture of the time.  Let's say that I'm Chris Dahlen, who gave the reissue of this album a perfect Pitchfork 10 in 2005 .  Let's say that I know what I'm talking about when it comes to instrumental hip hop at all.  We would have to say any of these things for me to truly GET this album. I have read a not inconsiderable amount about this album, so let me convey what I've learned: "It changed the musical landscape in so many ways . There would be no distinct sound to Radiohead's OK Computer without it, and it ushered a gigantic leap forward in the way sampled production could sound." "Stitched together with samples from every conceivable nook and cranny of musical endeavor, Shadow’s debut invented, established and legitimized instrumental hip-hop music in one fell swoop." "Some under a minute, some over nine, the 13 tracks are designed for headphones--Apollonian eve...

  This album - the US version, anyway, which is the one on this list, not the UK version - kicks of with "Paint It, Black," one of the most iconic psych-rock songs in history, and personally one of my favorite Stones songs.  There's been a thread on Twitter recently of "TV shows that only you remember," and although I didn't enter this one, how about "Tour Of Duty," a Vietnam War drama which ran on CBS in the late 80's and featured this song in the opening credits? "Under My Thumb" and "Lady Jane" are also on this record, along with "I Am Waiting," which memorably appears in "Rushmore," one of my favorite movies, so a lot of favorites going on here. The album itself is remarkable, for a couple of reasons.  It's the first Stones album in which the songs were all written by the band, and that means Jagger and Richards, essentially, although the soon-to-be-dead Brian Jones contributed some of the weirdo...

  Short version: This album is fantastic. Long version: I've loved "pop music" as long as I can remember, even as I have long struggled to come up with a definition of "pop music" that can contain Big Star and Teenage Fanclub and Jellyfish and this album.  What I can say is that there are different flavors of pop, some that I like (power pop) more than others (whatever it is Mariah Carey does).  This album is surely pop, and it is not the kind of pop I normally gravitate towards, but it is absolutely incredible.   First of all, there are a bunch of songs on here that you - and by "you" I mean "I" - already knew well, like the title track and "Cherish" and "Express Yourself," which are all certified bangers and I don't even think I was embarrassed for liking when they came out and my identity as a Replacements-loving torn-jeans indie-punk rejected anything high-gloss sheeny from LA or that appeared to be from Big Music,...

  This came out in 1955 and is obviously not the first "rock and roll" record, but it was the first one to sell a million copies and to reach #1 on Billboard's Top Pop albums chart.  It's a mix of stuff Elvis recorded for Sam Phillips at Sun in Memphis and later recordings done at RCA Studios in New York.  Although I doubt this distinction existed at the time, it's all "covers," in that Elvis didn't write a single song on this record, and in fact, as far as I can tell, all the songs had been previously recorded.  In fact, "Blue Suede Shoes" had already been a regional hit for Carl Perkins.   (In fact, if Wikipedia is to be believed , Elvis wrote or co-wrote a total of nine - nine!  - songs in his career.  I've written more than nine songs and I never had a Vegas revue.  And even those nine are in doubt, since he got co-writing credit for doing basically nothing.  I'm not saying every performer has to be a songwriter, but it's ju...

  Do you remember the first time you encountered "Lean On Me"?  I do.  It was the 80's, and it was Club Nouveau's cover version , which takes Bill Withers' original, from this album, runs it through an 80's music processor, and blasts it into a club banger or whatever they called them at that time.  I didn't realize it was a cover until shortly thereafter when I heard Withers' original on the radio.  "Lean On Me" has been covered dozens of times  I think because it's so open to musical reimagining and expresses a sentiment you don't get a lot in popular, which is that friends are very important! Any album with the original "Lean On Me" is bound to be good, but this album is better than that.  Withers was smart enough to see that other black artists of his era were getting ripped off because they either didn't write the songs they recorded or didn't own the publishing rights and so they didn't make the real money....