Funeral to Finish

  This revolutionary - in every sense of the word - double album made me rethink what "punk" was.  Before I heard this, I thought punk was like, Black Flag or Sex Pistols only - it had to be loud and fast and aggressive.  This didn't sound at all like that!  The drums sound like jazz sometimes, or prog, and the guitars are sometimes not even distorted  and D. Boon isn't screaming at all; in fact, he's barely even singing .  This made me realize that punk is an ethos, a framework, a way of approaching music, if not life itself.  This album is punk as fuck. But wow, it is wild.  George Hurley's drums scatter around, full of verve and ideas.  There are a million different guitar sounds, and that bass pops like it's in a funk song.  D. Boon's voice sounds like exactly what he was - a kid from San Pedro, yelling about the truth.  Then you get something like "Cohesion," a gentle acoustic instrumental that sounds like Segovia from the LA b...

  Randy Newman is probably best-known today for his Toy Story songs, those lovable, heart-warming gravelly-voiced songs that play as Woody is trying to rescue the space guy or whatever.  But back in the day, he wrote the same kind of sounding  songs, but way darker.  He's famous, of course, for "Short People," a long joke about prejudice that many people interpreted as literally a direct slur on short people.  People are dumb. This album has some of the same kind of weirdo shit that walks right by you because it's sung in that New Orleans show tune style that's particular to Newman.  "Political Science," for example, advocates the use of nuclear bombs to destroy the rest of the world, except for Australia: Asia's crowded And Europe's too old Africa's far too hot And Canada's too cold And South America stole our name Let's drop the big one There'll be no one left to blame us We'll save Australia Don't want to hurt no kanga...

  This album is a fucking pipe bomb.  I remember hearing it when it came out in 2013 and then listening to it straight for a month, trying to puzzle out the words and the beats and the sounds and just the overwhelming sound collage Ye throws at you. You have to go back to that time, when Kanye was just knocking on the door of being KANYE, or whatever fame-addled cultural iceberg he is now, to kind of begin to get it.  Poised at the precipice of something enormous and beyond his control, Kanye put out this jarring, abrasive, occasionally beautiful album.  The very first thing you hear, in "On Sight" (coproduced with Daft Punk) is synth, followed by drum machine, then Kanye's angry, aggressive, explicitly dirty vocal.  Halfway through the song there's a sample of a chorus that doesn't fit at all but seems natural anyway.  The second song, "Black Skinhead," which can only be described as industrial rap, is an interesting meta-commentary on Kanye's caree...

  Look, I like Kacey Musgraves.  I first got into her stuff after the release of her first major label album, Same Trailer Different Park , in 2013.  Saw her at the Fillmore on that tour; thought she was great.  I continue to enjoy her music.  I think she's got a great voice and a wry sensibility. That being said, this album does not belong on this list and I'm not sure how it ended up here.  Don't get me wrong; it's a nice album.  There are some good songs (and some duds).  But it's not even the best Kacey Musgraves album, let alone better than Houses of the Holy or, for Chrissakes, Coal Miner's Daughter .  I don't even think Kacey Musgraves thinks that. (I continue to be perplexed at how Coal Miner's Daughter ended up at 440 when it is so far clearly superior to a lot of other albums between here and there, but water under the bridge I guess.) Back in the day when Jann Wenner still had day-to-day control of Rolling Stone, it was pretty mu...

  Don't you feel the magic, the mystery's in the air Lets go down to lover's lane with the love we shared Sadly, Mary, I don't.  This album - or at least all the songs until the very last one, which happens to be the title track - did not work for me at all. Every night and day I dream of another way To tell you something good I don't think that I'm understood Yeah, honestly, Mary, I think you're right.  It's not your fault; I'm not understanding you.  It's a me problem.  I've written a lot about how R&B is just not my jam, and this is a lot of R&B.  What's more, it's not nearly as good as some of the other R&B that's lower on the list.  At least to me. It's all gone The love I thought we shared is gone away Maybe it's better that we didn't stay together Probably so.  Speaking of, the lyrics on this album - other than the rap parts, which we'll get to in a second - are, to put it mildly, unexciting.  Th...

  This noise bomb was dropped on an unsuspecting world in January 1968, and that world universally said "what the fuck" and ignored it.  Now, of course, it is rightly regarded as a seminal, wildly influential record.  I'm not going to repeat the famous trope about people buying Velvet Underground records and starting bands, but everyone from the Buzzcocks to the Strokes started here. For all its reputation as an avant-garde art-rock Factory production, it's sort of surprising how conventional a lot of the songs are, at least in conception and structure.  Take the title track, the first song on the album, which, while it's about shooting speed, clearly has roots in 50's rock like Chuck Berry.  The Velvets, of course, were no Chuck Berry, and they take that rock 'n roll template and add fuzz and dirt and a weirdo extended bass solo at the end.  "I Heard Her Call My Name" has these nice harmony backing vocals but the rest of the song is noise and wa...

  Oh no, it's one of my Lobster Albums.  You know how everyone loves lobster, the go-to decadence food?  Say "fried rice" and people shrug, but say "lobster fried rice" and everyone goes "ohhhhhh that sounds amaaaaaazing, must have."  Lobster is just shorthand for rich, indulgent eating.  Except I don't really care about lobster.  It's not the apex of fine dining to me.  It's a midgrade crustacean, not really that much better than shrimp and probably not as good as crab.  It's just lobster. Which is to say, everyone loves this album but it really doesn't do much for me.  I know, I know, it's incredibly influential and a Super Important post-punk album and maybe the biggest example of "angular," a rock critic word I saved especially for this album , but I don't really like any of the songs.  (This is probably also a Third Rail album so I'm doubly fucked for not liking it.) So let's take a representative son...

  Long before No Depression magazine or an "Americana" category at the Grammys, there was this album, arguably the first Americana album of them all.  In 1967, Roger McGuinn, who was by then one of only two remaining original members of the Byrds, planned what was essentially a tribute album to American music, with country, jazz, R&B, and other genres showing the development of music in America.  Short on members, he invited doomed angel Gram Parsons to join the band and, happily for the rest of us, Parsons derailed McGuinn's original idea and convinced them to decamp to Nashville to record this album, a groundbreaking work that fused pure country with rock, probably the first well-known country-rock, or Americana, album of all time. But enough about the concept.  Are the songs any good?  Reader, they are.  As with most Byrds albums, it's heavy on covers, but the covers are so well-played and realized that they're now identified as Byrds songs more tha...

  When the first song on your album is called "(Don't Worry) If There's a Hell Below, We're All Going to Go" and starts with Curtis Mayfield yelling "Sisters! N-----s! Whities! Jews! Crackers! Don't worry, If there's a Hell below, we're all gonna go!" you know Mayfield has more on his mind than just having fun.  Nevertheless, this album alternately goes so hard and then so smooth that you can't help but absorb that message, whether or not you want to.  (Watchers of mediocre HBO dramas will recognize this song as the theme from "The Deuce.") So that opening song is a rocking funk jam, but the album then moves into the psychedelic soul it's known for, with "The Other Side of Town."  Later we get "Move on Up," an absolute banger that you almost certainly have heard.  The constants throughout are the social message and Mayfield's beautiful voice.  The vocal is higher in the mix than it is on most records,...

  It may be hard to remember now, what with Radiohead being the premiere avant-rock band in the world and Thom Yorke doing whatever the fuck it is he does, but they used to be an indie rock band, albeit a very good one, and this album was their last in that incarnation.  Which is to say, it's a very good indie rock album, the last one Radiohead would ever make. I say it's a very good album because of all the good songs.  "Bones" is one of my faves, an absolute jam where Jonny Greenwood's fuzzed out guitar rides a pumped up bassline and Phil Selway's pounding drums while Yorke absolutely belts an instantly memorable chorus.  It sounds like they spent months on it, and they probably did.  "Black Star" is borderline magical, soft verses that launch into a majestic, anthemic chorus rife with astronomical references ("Blame it on the black star/Blame it on the falling sky/Blame it on the satellite/That beams me home"), a song that seems to be ab...

  If you've been reading this project for a while, you will know by now that the one genre I'm not really comfortable with my knowledge about - and in fact, don't really like all that much - is R&B.  I was never really exposed to much R&B, so I've never gotten totally familiar with it.  I mean, I can appreciate it, but it's really just not my thing. So this album really was not my thing.  But that doesn't mean it's not great or doesn't deserve to be here!  Maybe it's just my lack of understanding.  Except contemporary reviews are also decidedly lukewarm.  From the Guardian :  "Her album seems similarly straitened: there are a handful of great moments, where risks are taken and ground is broken, but too often it opts for the familiar and the bland. Listening to The Diary of Alicia Keys, you can't help but wish she threw caution to the wind a little more often."  Even slavishly artist-friendly Entertainment Weekly piled on : ...

I tend to think of this as Zeppelin's hippie album, even though there's only one track that's really a hippie song ("Over the Hills and Far Away").  It's just kind of looser and less ponderous than the first four Zeppelin albums, which were either crunchy blues-rock or weirdo mushroom mysticism.   This one sounds like they just all got together and said "fuck it, let's do a little bit of everything."  So we've got "The Crunge," an obvious James Brown tribute, with a drum part John Bonham wrote to intentionally be impossible to dance to.  (More on Bonham later).  Zep's stab at reggae, "D'yer Mak'er."  "No Quarter," a long jam of a song with John Paul Jones' mellotron and synth work throughout.  That song is kinda boring, actually, but I bet it's awesome if you're stoned on shitty ditch weed in your best friend's older brother's basement room and looking at a black light poster of a ...

  Sometimes the context of a piece of art endows it with a meaning unknown to the artist at the time.  When Nirvana gathered at Sony Music Studios in Hell's Kitchen on November 18, 1993, to tape this set for MTV, Kurt Cobain was less than six months away from killing himself, and this stark, chilling performance feels funereal. Perched on a stage decorated with black candles and stargazer lillies (at Kurt's request, it was designed to look "like a funeral"), the band made their way through a set of deep album cuts, covers, and a mini-set of Meat Puppets songs, accompanied by members of that band.  It's not actually acoustic; Kurt's plugged into an amp, and using effects, but mostly so.  (Ironic side note - Kurt mentions during the show that Leadbelly's estate was trying to sell him Leadbelly's guitar for $500,000, and he jokes that he asked David Geffen to buy it for him.  Later, the guitar Kurt played for this show - a Martin D-18E - sold at auction f...

  This is a solid rap album.  It was the biggest-selling album of 2003, sold over 9 million copies, and probably still sells today.  It's not hard to see why; 50 has a drawling, syrupy flow that's immediately appealing and the lyrics have a lot of prototypical gangsta shit.  Maybe  - maybe - it's a Top 500 album.  It is not a number 280 album, though. Like I said, there's a lot to like about this album.  The first song, "What Up Gangsta" has this great lyrical callback to Patti LaBelle and the Temptations: The rap critics say I can rhyme, the fiends say my dope is a nine Every chick I fuck with is a dime I'm like Patty LaBelle, homie, I'm on my own Where I lay my hat is my home, I'm a rolling stone I also liked the steel drums and the overall Caribbean feel of "P.I.M.P."  And Eminem, one of the co-producers of this album, drops a very Eminem-sounding verse on "Patiently Waiting."  There are not one but two 9/11 references on th...

  Remember on "Lost" when they'd show Desmond in the Hatch and he'd get up and put on a record and it would be something like Petula Clark or Cass Elliott's "Make Your Own Kind of Music" or something like that?  This album sounds like that, like that bright, brassy 60's pop, which is exactly what it is. Harry Nilsson is such a weird figure in 60's & 70's music.  He sold a fair amount of records, and was drinking buddies with John Lennon and Ringo Starr, but you don't hear much about him any more, or I don't, at least.  I think that might be because his music is certainly influential, I'm not sure it's widely listened to.  Except by indie acts; The Walkmen covered the entire Pussy Cats album he made with Lennon.  Ty Segall released a bunch of Nilsson covers on his Bandcamp .  And so on. Nilsson jumped back into the spotlight a couple of years ago when "Gotta Get Up," the first song on this album, was used repeate...

  Why so blue, Frank?  Because you're breaking up with Ava Gardner and everybody's cheating on each other?  That's the story, anyway. This album is very much not my thing.  It's all Great American Songbook stuff, except for the title track, and let me betray my simpleton nature by saying it's kind of a fucking drag.  There's a lot of Rodgers and Hart, Hoagy Carmichael,  a Cole Porter.  The songs all sound very similar - Frank crooning over sparsely arranged strings - and there's not a ton to differentiate them.  Maybe it would be good background music at a dinner party in 1957. The only song I really could say I liked a lot on this album is the title track, which of course I was already familiar.  It really does do a good job of depicting that feeling when you're awake in the middle of the night brooding over a girl (or guy, I suppose, it's the same feeling I'm sure).  The cover art is also bomb. (If you want to read a very good, excelle...

  This album was recorded in 1979 and sounds like what if cocaine went to a party at the Playboy Mansion.  It is somehow better and worse than what I expected. It was obviously meant to be a set-it-and-forget-it party album; there are almost no breaks between songs, so you can throw it on and let it just keep doing its thing, which is pumping out Giorgio Moroder synths and Donna Summer's brassy voice at 120 beats per minute.  You all know, of course, "Hot Stuff" and the prostitution anthem "Bad Girls," the first two songs on the album, and they are both certified bangers.  The rest is, to me anyway, mostly generic disco; I'm sure people with a deeper understanding of dance music would dispute that.  There are a couple of slow jams too.  Gotta have some slow jams in there. It's a very L.A. album.  In fact, the last song, "Sunset People" is explicitly about people, yes, on Sunset Boulevard.  It's incredibly cheesy, in that 70's way.  (Sam...

  Merle Haggard could write a country song because Merle Haggard's whole life was a country song.  The child of real-life Okies, he grew up in the Central Valley and never forgot that place.  Songs like "Tulare Dust" and "Kern River," both on this 4-disc collection, hearken back to that youth.  Haggard was in and out of juvie, hitched rides on freight trains, and eventually ended up in San Quentin, where he saw Johnny Cash perform and was inspired to finally put his musical talent to good use.   This collection is a tribute to the "Bakersfield Sound," a stripped-down, twangy version of country that was a reaction to the "Nashville Sound," which was seen, not completely unfairly, as overproduced and inauthentic.  And let me say, even at 4 discs, this is an absolute pleasure to listen to.  Not only did Merle have a beautiful voice; he was also a gifted songwriter, as this collection makes clear.  It starts with his earliest songs, like 1960...