Funeral to Finish

  When it came time to pick a punk name, guys would usually go for the abrasive (Johnny Rotten) or the arty (Lux Interior) or the gangy (Ramones), but Peter McNeish borrowed the name of his favorite Romantic poet, Percy Bysse Shelley, and christened himself Pete Shelley.  This gives you some clue about what the Buzzcocks were up to.  Solidly punk - more recognizably "punk" than the Clash, they absolutely go hard - but with a melodic edge and a rejection of the utter nihilism that dominated a lot of British punk of their era. That melodic edge is all over this album, a collection of singles released in the US in 1979 and immediately influential on a lot of American proto-punk bands.  Just check out "I Don't Mind," which is kind of all over the place but which has a vocal melody that is just out of this world: The second song, "What Do I Get?' became famous again after it was used in a few commercials, like for McDonald's in the UK and Toyota here in ...

  "Rocket Man," track 5 on this record, is, of course, one of the best-known songs in rock history and a staple of jukeboxes and karaoke machines worldwide, but I want to talk about a different song, one I have listened to far too many times in the last four days to be healthy, "Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters," maybe the finest song John and lyricist Bernie Taupin  ever wrote. The song starts quietly, with just piano and John's vocals: And now I know Spanish Harlem are not just pretty words to say I thought I knew But now I know that rose trees never grow In New York City Until you've seen this trashcan dream come true You stand at the edge while people run you through And I thank the Lord There's people out there like you I thank the Lord there's people out there like you Obviously, it's a callback to Ben E. King's "Spanish Harlem," but what the hell is going on here otherwise?  What is a trashcan dream?  I mean, this is clearly about ...

  Listening back to this for the first time in many years, I was struck by how much this album reminded me of Gang of Four's Entertainment , which came out the following year.  Both are - here comes the rock critic word - angular, kind of herky-jerky, with undeniably weird vocals and a slyly critical take on modern mores (ok, Entertainment  isn't sly about its critique, but you get my point).  I feel like before Devo was the "Whip It" Devo, the flowerpot hats Devo, they were a post-punk band with a lot of interesting musical ideas but not yet a thing. Devo started up in Akron, Ohio in the mid-70's and were probably too advanced for the public at that time.  They really came into bloom later during the 80's when irony was invented, but that's beyond the scope of this entry.  Anyway, their demo found its way to David Bowie and (of course) Brian Eno, who brought the band to Cologne, West Germany to record this record.  In a year when five of the top 100 s...

  Syd Barrett's crowning (well, only) achievement with Pink Floyd, this 1967 release has been hailed as a psychedelic masterpiece and a visionary recording, which is great because I fucking hated it.  OK, maybe that's too strong.  I really did not like it at all.  It combines all the worst parts of jazz and endless noodling and bad singing and unfinished songs into one painful package.  It is truly hard to believe that the band that did this put out something like The Dark Side of the Moon five years later. I must admit, my exposure to early Pink Floyd has been extremely limited - I do like the song "Fearless" from Meddle , a few years after this album - and it's always hard evaluating something I'm not super familiar with and am immediately turned off by but this is just so not in my wheelhouse that it's hard for me to be objective.  There's some stuff that I kind of liked, like the descending bassline on "Lucifer Sam," which starts out sou...

  Longtime readers will know that jazz is my weakest genre in that it's the one I know the least about and, let's be honest, like the least, so when a jazz album shows up on the list I usually sigh heavily and then put it on while I'm working and try to just get through it.  I was expecting pretty much the same here. I was wrong.  The first song, "Chameleon," starts out with a synth bass line that's immediately catchy and then the other instruments build in, assembling a funk-inspirred groove that does not let up.  I've since found out that it's a jazz classic, and I can see why.  There is a ton going on here, multiple layers, with new sounds introduced just as you've gotten used to the last new sound. "Sly," the third of four songs on the album, is named for Sly Stone, whose influence on this album Hancock acknowledged.  It also sits somewhere in that Venn diagram between jazz, soul, and funk.  The last track, "Vein Melter," re...

  Did you notice that every other record so far this week was by a female artist or group?  And now dumb old Bob Dylan comes crashing in on Friday to ruin our Grrl Power vibe.  Oh well. This is the album that turned Bob Dylan into BOB DYLAN,  It was only his second album, but it's full of songs that became nearly instantly famous and remain that way.  Everybody was like "Bob how did you write all these songs so fast?" and he literally said (actual quote) "The songs are there. They exist all by themselves just waiting for someone to write them down. I just put them down on paper."  Which is kinda true because like half of the melodies are lifted or reworked from older songs.  The melody of "Blowin' in the Wind," for example, is based on an old spiritual called "No More Auction Block."  I do not happen to love "Blowin' in the Wind" but that's probably because of the saccharine Peter, Paul & Mary version.  Bob's ver...

  I absolutely remember how inescapable this album was in, for me anyway, 1989 (even though it came out in 1988).  It was just everywhere, especially the first two songs, "Talkin' Bout a Revolution" and "Fast Car," the song that really launched Chapman into the stratosphere.  This album sold 20 million copies. You have to remember that 1988 was an era of slickly-produced pop.  The Top 3 singles of 1988: George Michael's "Faith," INXS's "Need You Tonight," and George Harrison's "Got My Mind Set On You."  All perfectly fine songs in their own regard, but this album offered such a contrast to that highly-produced sheen that it was irresistible to people. (Small digression, but I don't think I realized that "Got My Mind Set On You" was George Harrison, like George Harrison from the Beatles?! I think I just filed it in my mind under "mainstream pop" and didn't think about it.) The first song, writt...

  Way before Dolly was DOLLY, an icon of not just country music but American culture writ large, she was a working (extremely hardworking - 15 albums in 4 years around the time of this one) country songwriter and musician and singer, and this album is a perfect snapshot of this era.  Unlike most country artists (and probably most pop artists), she wrote almost all the songs on this album herself, with some offerings from Porter Wagoner, her longtime collaborator and possibly unfulfilled romance. The title song is a classic, a true story about Dolly's impoverished childhood and how her mother sewed her a coat out of rags that she wore to school, only to be teased by other kids.  Lots and lots of country artists have songs about their hardscrabble childhoods, but this is one of the most affecting and maybe even defiant you'll ever hear.  Dolly swears it's true; you can even see a reproduction of the titular coat at the Chasing Rainbows museum at Dollywood in Pigeon Fo...

  Potentially another lobster album , although I don't have a clear sense of how many people like this album.  (To refresh, a lobster album is one that people love but that I don't particularly like.)  OK, so I know some about Joni Mitchell, of course know a few songs, but had never heard this album before.  Let me cut right to the chase; I did not like it.  I'm not a huge jazz person, and a lot of this sounds suspiciously jazzy to me.  It's apparently the album where Mitchell broke from her folk/pop roots and started going wild and doing her own thing and whatnot.  More power to you, Joni, but this is not it for me. There is one song on here that I thought was kind of cool, "The Jungle Line," if for no other reason than because it has sampled drums, which may or may not be the first use of sampling in a major-label release.  The drum sound is cool, but again, there's that unleashed melody that just kind of free-floats all over the place and doesn...

  This album - Janis' second and, tragically, final solo record - opens with a fast drumbeat, soon joined by guitar and then that voice , that otherworldly voice that sounds like no one else before or since.  Really, this entire album is a tribute to Janis Joplin's amazing instrument, which she had complete control over and the ability to modulate between a raspy whisper and a full-throated yawp.  Just an incredible voice. Recorded in LA in 1970, it came out in January 1971, three months after Janis OD'd in a hotel room at the age of 27 .  It's a blues/soul pastiche, really well-recorded and expertly produced by Paul Rothchild.  Janis is backed up by her road band, the Full Tilt Boogie Band, who are clearly tight from a lot of shows together. But let's cut straight to the outlier, an a capella song that's so well-known that my Dad, who was a hardcore country music fan and whose interest in rock extended only as far as Roy Orbison, knew all the words to: "Me...

  I've been really lucky during the now-year-plus course of this project, because I've discovered some great stuff I otherwise wouldn't have heard; revisited some old favorites; and learned to appreciate things I didn't particularly like.  This one, I have to say, is a tough one, because I really, really, really, disliked this record. I realize that this album has been lauded as a masterpiece of post-punk and gotten the Cobain seal of approval (for the song "Typical Girls," specifically), and I'm probably going to come off as a music idiot for not liking it, but this just did not resonate with me in any way.  Let me just say I was unsurprised to learn that " [w]hen the group first formed, they couldn't play their instruments for shit ."  A lot of the songs sound like a group of people who have never written, or maybe even heard, a song before.  There's a lot of playground, sing-songy stuff that approaches "singing" but is so ant...

  After the disappointing sales of Paul's Boutique (an album that will surely appear later on this list), the Beastie Boys did what any self-respecting rap/rock band would do: bummed around LA for a few years, rented a former ballroom on Glendale Boulevard, threw parties, and listened to lot of records.  After a while, the stuff they were listening to - the Meters, Sly Stone, Lee "Scratch" Perry - started to creep into the songs they were working on, and this album is the result.  It sounds like a mash-up, a pastiche of genres and stylistic experiments, and the Beasties went back to playing instruments and being a band again after the mostly sample-driven Paul's Boutique . The results are mixed.  There's some unquestionably good stuff on here, like the singles "Pass the Mic," "Jimmy James," and probably the best-known song "So What'Cha Want."  I like "Jimmy James" in particular; it's built entirely on samples, as fa...

  When you hear the opening riff to "Age of Consent," the first song on this album, do you immediately think you're in an 80's movie?  Are you trading barbs with John Cusack or maybe plotting to bring down Molly Ringwald?  She thinks she's just so great, doesn't she?  No?  Oh, I don't either. You know the story by now.  Joy Division ended when Ian Curtis, the lead singer, killed himself, and then the remaining members formed New Order and became more popular than Joy Division ever was and are absolutely iconic now.  So this was New Order's second album and the company line on this one is that it's a move away from Joy Division's sound and into their own, more poppy, dancey sound.  Listening back to it now for legitimately the first time in 30 years, I can sort of see that but I was also struck by how much some songs sound like Joy Division with a higher-pitched singer, like "Ultraviolence."  Take Bernard Sumner's voice down like 3...

  Remember when we talked about Help around a week ago and I talked about how bitter and dark it is about relationships?  Everyone's breaking up and no one trusts each other?  This album (which predated Help by about a year) is from when the relationship was still good.  The songs are mostly about how much the singer is in love and loves her and she loves him and so forth.  (The exceptions, of course, are John Lennon songs.)  So in the very first song (at least on the UK version), the title track, we hear: You know I work all day to get you money to buy you things And it's worth it just to hear you say you're going to give me everything So why on earth should I moan, cos when I get you alone You know I feel OK When I'm home everything seems to be right When I'm home feeling you holding me tight, tight, yeah Aww, that's sweet.  It also occurs to me that this is kind of a transactional relationship!  He gives her money to buy things, and she gives...

  [PROGRAMMING NOTE:  Funeral to Finish will be on hiatus until probably Tuesday of next week due to me being out of town and not listening to albums probably.  Have a great weekend and see you next week. ] Beloved by stoners and teenage malcontents everywhere, this album has always lived in the shadow of its predecessor, The Dark Side of the Moon .  But it's all relative; this album sold 20 million copies. Pink Floyd is so successful on their own terms that they can sell 20 million copies of an album that's mostly unplayable on radio and opens with a 13 and a half minute song that doesn't have any vocals until almost nine minutes in.  That song, "Shine On You Crazy Diamond," is widely interpreted as being about one of the band's original members, Syd Barrett, whose sharp mental decline led to his removal from Pink Floyd.  Barrett wandered into Abbey Road studios in London during the recording of this album and the event was apparently so distressing and di...

  Pavement released Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain in 1994 and seemed poised for mainstream success.  Although CRCR was by no means a mainstream commercial album, it produced a minor hit ("Cut Your Hair"), landed the band on MTV, and had people convinced Pavement was on the brink of breaking bigtime, like their contemporaries Smashing Pumpkins or Stone Temple Pilots.   So what did Pavement do to capitalize on this budding success?  They recorded this album, a willfully inaccessible, meandering and genre-free musical exploration that was met upon release with reactions ranging from "what the fuck" to "huh" to "oh god what is this."  NEVERTHELESS as the years have passed its reputation has only improved and now it is widely regarded as one of, or maybe just, Pavement's best albums.  I was a hardcore CRCR stan and, like many others, was taken aback by this album and didn't know what to make of it.  I miust confess that I have barely listened to...

  This video was going around music Twitter last week.  It concerns Ringo Starr and is worth watching: The basic idea is that Ringo gets slagged off a lot for not being a very good drummer, but he was in fact a very good, very inventive drummer.  I don't think I know enough about drums to be able to speak definitely on that, but after seeing this video and then listening to this album - the Beatles' fifth studio album - I definitely noticed the drum parts a lot more and yes, they are much more inventive and creative than I had realized. Seven of the songs on this album (well, the British version of this album) were songs on the soundtrack of the movie of the same name, which I have never seen and did not want to watch just for this project. You probably know most of the songs on this album because, like most Beatles songs, they are just part of the cultural lexicon.  I mean, the title track is so woven into general consciousness that a camp my kid went to when she wa...