258. Joni Mitchell, "The Hissing of Summer Lawns"

 


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't really land.  Jazz.

So look, here's a very well-written appreciation of the album in Pitchfork.  Even this piece kind of admits it's not very accessible and you can't really hum along to it.  It's challenging!  When my kid was little, before she was able to pronounce hard C's, she would substitute T for C, so "circle" would be rendered "sirtle."  One day I couldn't figure out a game and she remarked it was "too tomplitated for Dada."  This album is too tomplitated for Dada.

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? No.

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