Funeral to Finish

  Another one of those acts with more influence than fans, the New York Dolls paved the way for so much glam rock and hair metal and punk.  Kiss owes their entire existence to the Dolls.   I liked, not loved, this album.  It's weird, I don't think I've ever heard it all the way through, but I definitely knew the song "Trash," which is a pretty great song.  What was strange was I know I knew the song from somewhere but I couldn't place where at what point in my life I knew it and it felt strange and disconnected, like another person had once known the song.  Memory is a trip. This would be a good time to point out that the Dolls were snubbed this year for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame which, I'm sure, they're probably proud of.  I've had ongoing debates with people for years about the HOF and whether it means anything and we've never come up with a good answer.  I tend to think getting inducted into a rock hall of fame is probably the uncoole...

  I mean, it's a well-known fact that Neil Young has put out more albums than a single person could listen to in an average lifespan, but not only is this the second Neil Young album we've seen on the List in the past three weeks (and past 10 spots), it's the second one that deals with the overdose deaths of his friends Danny Whitten and Bruce Berry.  This one was recorded before On the Beach but released after, and it's an even more stark yowl of pain and sadness and longing and emotion. The first verse in the first song sets the mood: Bruce Berry was a working man He used to load that Econoline van A sparkle was in his eye But his life was in his hands Berry was a roadie for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and a popular fixture in the LA music scene.  He OD'd just a couple of months after Whitten, who was the former guitarist in Crazy Horse until the drug use got out of hand.  Obviously their loss shook Young to the core, as it would anyone. To say this album is...

  These fuckin Swedes just would not quit.  This album is a collection of basically all their singles between 1972 and 1982, when they were busy dominating pop charts with their unique, chirpy, shimmery synth-pop that was so earwormy I was initially afraid to listen to it because I know a bunch of the songs will be stuck in my head for months.  Also, it's well over 2 hours of ABBA and after about an hour you start to get ear-tired of the, let's face it, very uniform sound. So of course there are all the songs you already know, you got your "Dancing Queen" and your "Fernando" and your "SOS" and your "Take a Chance On Me" and so on and on and on.  I'm being snarky, I know, but has any other group successfully injected so many instantly catchy songs into the public consciousness in such a short amount of time?  Why are Swedish people so good at this? The collection proceeds roughly chronologically, which is a trip because I had never hea...

  I got to the third track on this album, "Grandma's Hands," and this was literally me: The intro is the sample that's the backbeat of " No Diggity "!  So that's where it came from!  But far from being just used for parts in another song, "Grandma's Hands" is a great song in its own right, an easygoing folk-soul ramble about the singer's grandma, naturally, a beautifully written and sung tribute.   This whole album is great!  Of course there are canonical songs like "Ain't No Sunshine," but there are also songs like "Sweet Wanomi," which just feels like a song you know by heart, even if you've never heard it before, like I hadn't.  This was Withers' debut album, and it shows that he arrived as a fully mature songwriter, absolutely sure of himself and the unique blend of soul and rock and jazz and blues and folk that he was fashioning.  As would be expected at the time this album was made, there are a ...

  This collection of deeply stupid songs was nonetheless a required feature in the record collection of myself and every other Gen X boy I knew in the late 70's.  Recorded semi-live in the American heartland, you can literally smell the shitty pot smoke and see the feathery moustaches in the crowd.  I say "semi-live" because there were, to put it mildly, considerable overdubs recorded because Kiss wasn't very good at playing their songs live at this point.  Even the cover, clearly shot in a studio and not at any concert, is a fake. Although the songs are indisputably stupid as hell, this album does showcase what Kiss did so well, and that is fucking rock.  If you ever wonder about how influential Kiss was, this album will clear that up.  I hadn't really realized the extent to which all or most Southern rock is indebted to Kiss, and maybe even specifically this album, until I relistened.  Sure, it's dumb, but there is something so primal and so powerful...

  Just feast your eyes on that cover.  Al Green, resplendent in a crisp white suit, the amount of jewelry appropriate for a soul singer of his caliber, impeccable white shoes and black socks, seated luxuriously in a white wicker chair, accented by a couple of plants and the green lettering.  To today's eye, he looks like the logo of the coolest cannabis dispensary on the block.  I'm sure those allusions weren't lost on the record buying public of 1972.  This cover is absolute fire. Now, how can you not love Al Green?  Answer: you can't not love Al Green, because there's nothing not to love about Al Green.  HOWEVER, because I am a dick and I just can't help myself, I have to say, this is the third Al Green album in the first 195 albums, including Greatest Hits, and that's a lot of Al Green and even some of the same songs.  So maaaayyyyybe I didn't love it as much as I could have?  Plus, and absolutely no shame to Al Green for this, but a lot o...

  For whatever reason, the cosmos has been interested in sending the song "Summertime" across my path a lot lately.  First there was the Lana del Rey album, with its "Doin' Time" which is actually a cover of Sublime's "Doin' Time," which is built on a sample of Herbie Mann's "Summertime," which is a cover of the Gershwin original.  Lana's cover has her referencing "Ras MC" and talking about the "LBC" all in her sultry white girl voice.  It seemed silly to me.  Then I read this really excellent article about Sublime called " The Sun Gods of the LBC " in The Ringer that made me grudgingly appreciate Sublime a little more even as I recoiled in horror at their drunken, drug-fueled antics that endeared and alienated them to all the right/wrong people. So it was no surprise that the universe served me up yet another "Summertime," this one a pretty straight cover of the original in Sam Cooke...

  Brian Eno again!  I'm not much of a prog guy, and you may remember that I did not like the last Eno project on this list very much .  This one is better than that one in the sense that it has coherent songs, some of which even have verses and choruses! The opening track, "Needles in the Camel's Eye," starts out promisingly enough, a noisy squall of guitar and god knows what else over a driving four-on-the-floor drum beat, a catchy melody.  Some of the songs, like "Cindy Tells Me," have a bit of a 50's vibe.  That song in particular is moving along just fine before Eno just has to do something crazy like insert a sound like an angry swarm of bees about halfway through.  Later, there's "On Some Faraway Beach," an actually lovely song that builds and builds.  You know what?  A lot of it vaguely reminds me of late-stage Beatles, like some of the fragments on Abbey Road . After my last Eno-cussion, this was a mostly pleasurable experience.  I ...

  What could be more perfect for a gray (here in SF, anyway) Monday morning than Joy Division's Closer , an album so depressing it was released after the singer's suicide with a cover featuring three figures mourning a fourth? By now, you know the story: Ian Curtis, the lead singer of the band, with the odd, solemn voice, hung himself on May 18, 1980, on the eve of the band's first North American tour.  This, of course, transformed the band from what they likely would have been - a good post-punk band - into a legend.  Not that this album doesn't deserve every accolade it gets!  It's a haunting, moving, genuinely unnerving piece of work.  The instrumentation is sparse, driven by drums, with Curtis' voice floating above it and commanding the scene.  My history of listening to Joy Division started with "this voice is just too weird" and evolved to "I cannot imagine these songs sung by someone else."   By this point in his life, Curtis was strug...

  Wire is like the Velvet Underground of the UK - loved by record store clerks, a big influence on a lot of people who started bands, and never really cracked the mainstream.  This, their debut album, never charted on its initial release, but is now widely considered a punk, or post-punk, I guess, masterpiece. Even if you don't like a song, don't worry, there's another one about to happen; the longest song on here is "Strange," at 3:59, but most of them are under 2 minutes.  In contrast to yesterday's audio marijuana, this is not a soothing album at all.  It's all pretty fast tempo-wise and that weird affected British punk vocal style and punchy distorted guitars.  I'm saving up the word "angular" for Gang of Four, but this is at least "pre-angular." There are so many covers of songs on this album!  R.E,M. covered the aforementioned "Strange" on Document , for example.  Well, "covered" isn't exactly the right...

  I am neither a Neil Young super fan nor a Neil Young detractor.  I am a Neil Young semi-fan.  I had a battered vinyl copy of Harvest ; "Pocahontas" was one of the first songs I ever learned on guitar and warbled during my first attempts at playing and singing.  I've been to a few Bridge School benefits, and was there for the Neil/Pearl Jam collab at GG Park .  Which is to say, I had heard of this album, but never heard it.  Apparently it was out of print for a long time and became a bootleg classic that was passed around and gained a certain underground cachet, which should neither enhance nor diminish this fact: This is a beautiful album. Sometimes I get an album on the list and I listen to it once, maybe go back to a couple of tracks that stood out, and then write it up.  I've been listening to this over and over for days, and I think I like it more every time.  Recorded in the wake of  Harvest , which was a giant success, as well as the...

  There are not many people who could stand to be, you know. Beyonce's little sister, but this album is so beautifully crafted and exquisite that Solange went one better and made an album as good as or better than any of her sister's.  It stands fully on its own, a beautifully realized statement about what it means to be a Black woman in America today.  It doesn't hurt that Solange started writing songs as a teenager, was in Destiny's Child, and released her first album at 16 years old.   The first song I heard off of this album when it first came out, "Cranes in the Sky," is a good synecdoche of the album, with its sparse but intentional production and perfectly restrained instrumentation and, above all, Solange's gorgeous voice floating over the whole thing.  A song about trying to bury your emotions in drinking or partying or whatever, I always pictured cranes - the bird - flying through the sky as a metaphor for unrealized feelings, but I recently lear...

  PJ Harvey, who is such a big deal that she got an MBE for "services to music," has put out nine albums.  Any time an artist puts out nine albums, they're not all going to be gems and, I'm sad to say, this is not one of her gems.  (I already checked and a definite gem is later on the list.)  I guess it's her New York City album.  Everyone's gotta make an album about how much they love New York City, and here you go.  Spoiler: it's not exactly packed with incisive truths about the city that no one's thought of before. The whores hustle and the hustlers whore  Too many people out of love  The whores hustle and the hustlers whore  This city's ripped right to the core Tough town, man.  You don't say?  Plus she lets Thom Yorke sing a song and when you're not expecting Thom Yorke and he pops up it's disconcerting. Of course, this is just my personal thing.  I know a lot of people absolutely adore this album and hey, that's great!...

  Poor Aaliyah.  Signed to a record deal at 12 years old and introduced to R. Kelly, who is pretty much the last person on Earth you want to introduce a 12-year-old to.  Sure enough, he married her at 15 (maybe - accounts vary on this, but there certainly was something going on) and produced her first album, the extremely creepily titled  Age Ain't Nothing but a Number .  For this album, however, she worked with Missy Elliott, who is probably underrated as a songwriter, and Timbaland.  Then she made a couple more albums, was in some movies, then got in a plane crash and died.   Today Aaliyah is regarded as a groundbreaking R&B artist.  I always wonder the extent to which dying helps out your artistic cred; would she still be regarded as a hugely important R&B figure if she hadn't died?  Would the Doors have been so highly regarded if Jim Morrison had lived?  No to the second one, but there's no way to run an A/B test. Anyway...

  Here again we have something so wildly outside my area of knowledge that at first I was like "how can I even write anything about this?" but then I just kept listening any you know what, this is wildly outside my area of knowledge but I still kinda liked it.  The title apparently means "The Bad Loving" and was Rosalia's thesis at the Catalonia College of Music.  She passed, btw.  The album is based on a 13th century novel called "Flamenca" and so all the songs are chapter titles.   I speak/understand almost zero Spanish beyond carne asada so the themes and stories behind the songs are a complete mystery to me.  Nevertheless, I enjoyed the production of this album quite a bit, and the way it marries traditional flamenco styles with Latin R&B and reggaeton.  Here, check out the video for "Pienso en Tu Mirá" to see what I'm talking about: Pretty cool, even if it's not my thing.  Anyway, I'm sure this album is good and groundbre...

  If the Beatles were the overachieving, extra credit kids in the late 60's rock and roll school classroom, and the Stones were the back-row, smoking pot behind the gym troublemakers, the Who staked out class clown territory with this album, a loose "concept album" that mimics the offshore, unlicensed pirate radio stations that made them famous, down to fake ads.  In fact, one whole song, "Odorono," a sad tale of unrequited love, turns out to be an ad for deodorant.  Very Monty Python (members of which were already appearing on a satirical BBC show called "The Frost Report" when this album was released, it was a very cheeky time). The centerpiece of the album is, of course, "I Can See For Miles," a monster hit that became one of the band's best-known songs.  And it's easy to see why; there's an anthemic chorus and ripping power chords that feel a part of, and somehow ahead of, 1967 rock.  Is it about realizing during an acid trip ...

  There are going to be albums on this list - already have been albums on this list - that I am going to listen to and appreciate and respect the importance of but just not like .  This is one of those albums.  I certainly respect Billie Holiday and the influence she had on everyone from Frank Sinatra to Amy Winehouse (Frank: "It is Billie Holiday, whom I first heard in 52nd Street clubs in the 1930s, who was, and still remains, the greatest single musical influence.") but this album just didn't do a thing for me.  Yes, I am a cretin, a lowlife who knows nothing of the finer things, this is true. I'm kidding (about the lowlife part, not the not liking this album part), of course, but it does make me feel some kind of way when an album this revered by a great many people just leaves me absolutely blank.  Speaking of which, I went back and checked the methodology used to create The List and was reminded that Rolling Stone asked "more than 300 artists, journalists...