289. Björk, "Post"

 


I had a really interesting (and unusual, for this project) experience with this album, which I had never listened to all the way through before.  The first time I listened to it, I noted the standouts, like "Army of Me," the album opener, which I had heard before and liked quite a bit, and "It's Oh so Quiet," which I had also heard and did not like, specifically its Gap-ad brassiness.  The rest of the album, eh, not so much.  There was some interesting trip-hoppy kind of stuff, and some just avant-weird shit that turned me off.

Then I went to bed and then I listened to it again today and I have changed my mind.  This is an excellent, fascinating album.  Maybe I just needed to pay better attention!  In fact, I'm listening to it again right now and I think I like it even better every time.  Everyone knows Bjork has a magical voice, but it's really put to great effect here, really all over the place in the interest of illuminating the songs.  Even in that big band jazz song "It's Oh so Quiet," she belts it out like a Broadway pro but also yelps and yowls like a trapped animal.  Just fascinating.

The trip-hop here is strong.  Take "Enjoy," for exanple, which sounds almost industrial but is built on a trip-hop skeleton.  "Possibly Maybe," quieter, more reflective, is that kind of floaty song you could imagine slipping quietly behind an intense conversation over the second bottle of wine at a very small table.

"Headphones," the album closer, could speak to anyone for whom, like me, music was absolutely formative growing up.  ("My headphones/They saved my life/Your tape/It lulled me to sleep, to sleep, to sleep," uh huh.)  

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? Yes.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

103. De La Soul, "Three Feet High And Rising"

Image
  Sorry for the service interruption!  Monday I had, like, work stuff to do and yesterday I was picking my wife up at the airport and they lost her bag and we had to file a claim about that and by the time I got home it was well into my Work Hours and you know, I'm just sorry.  (This was tail end of quite a journey for my wife that found her taking off in Ireland and landing in Newark, New Jersey, and then sitting in a plane for almost three hours and then the flight just getting cancelled and then staying in the Courtyard by Marriott in downtown Newark, NJ [not recommended, she says] and then getting on a flight to SFO at 6:30 am and finally getting back here a solid 14 hours later than expected.) Speaking of the greater New York City metropolitan area, a group of kids from Amityville, Long Island, got together in 1988 and started making songs and released this album, one of the best in hip hop or any other genre, in 1989.  De La have been called the "Beatles of hip hop"
Read more

3. Joni Mitchell, "Blue"

Image
  Do you want the good news or the meh news first?  The good news is that this album is better than the other Joni Mitchell albums we've seen , or at least better for me.  I hated one of them and barely tolerated the other, so I was not expecting to like this, and after three listens yesterday, it was not as bad as I'd feared it would be.  The meh news?  I still don't love Joni Mitchell and I don't particularly like this album. Obviously, since it's the number 3 out of the Top 500 albums ever made, a lot of people feel differently.  Pitchfork called it "possibly the most gutting break-up album ever made," which may be true, who knows, but if it is it's about breaking up with a whole series of dudes, from Graham Nash to James Taylor to some guy named Carey.  (In Pitchfork's estimation, this is the 86th best album of the 1970s, so not exactly in number 3 overall territory). One thing that bugs me is Joni Mitchell's voice, which I find kind of g
Read more

1. Marvin Gaye, "What’s Going On"

Image
  500 albums later and we're out of albums.  This album was number 6 on the last iteration of the Rolling Stone list and has now moved up to number 1 (displacing Sgt. Pepper , which was the last album to hold that spot).  I think it's a lovely album with maybe three absolutely incredible songs, a fair amount of average-to-good, and some not great songs.  I'm not a voter and will never be a voter but I just don't think this is the best album of all time. In fact, I would be perfectly fine with this list if they just sawed off the top 3 and left the rest as is: 1. Stevie Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life 2. Beatles, Abbey Road 3. Nirvana, Nevermind 4. Fleetwood Mac, Rumours And so forth.  But let's take this album on its own merits. The first of the three absolute bangers is the title track, "What's Going On," the scene-setter for the rest of the album, a loose concept album that's told from the point of view of a Vietnam vet returning to a country th
Read more