Funeral to Finish

  Try as I might (which is admittedly not very hard), I have not been able to get my shit together to listen to the next album and so I'm going to put the whole thing on hold until Monday, January 3, 2022.   I also want to listen to some of the stuff on various year-end lists.  Doing this project has largely deprived me of the opportunity to keep up with new music, although I guess almost everything here has been "new music" but you know what I mean. Thanks for reading, and see you in a few days!

  Through no fault of Black Sabbath's and for reasons too mundane to detail here, I only got like four hours of sleep last night, perfect for this drony slab of sludge metal.  (It's kind of an amazing coincidence it comes right after that Metallica album, which is its direct descendant.)  Appropriately enough, this record kicks off with "Sweet Leaf," a plodding ode to marijuana that seems absolutely quaint now that you can buy THC drops in a brushed wood boutique and your general bud off the street is like 20 times more potent than anything Ozzy dreamed of in 1971.   Look, I listened to this with an open mind and all but let me just say that it struck me as more of a vehicle for influence than an actual album I would sit down and enjoy.  I mean, there are entire genres - not just bands - that copped their sound from this album.  That being said, it's kinda boring and Ozzy's lyrics are... well, Ozzy was never known as a great lyricist.   There...

  Regardless of how you feel about this album or Metallica or heavy metal in general, we all have to agree that "Enter Sandman" is an absolutely kick-ass song.  Just a fat slab of pure rock and roll.  So good that cello quartet Apocalyptica can do a deliriously great gothy cover of it. OK so I'm not a huge metalhead or anything but I really enjoyed listening to this.  I mean, sometimes you just need that pure headbanging shit, am I right?  Not only was this Metallica's best-selling album, it's one of the best-selling albums of all time , 16 million plus copies.  16 million heshers can't be wrong! I guess Metallica is pretty famous for being incredibly hard to work with, and the recording of this album was contentious, to say the least.  Producer Bob Rock clashed with the band repeatedly, but the results speak for themselves; it's a great sounding album.  OK, James Hetfield will never be remembered as a great lyricist, but I don't think many people...

  Going from Red Headed Stranger to this is more than a little jarring, like jumping from the hot tub into the pool, if the pool was electrified and French and heavily Autotuned.  (I actually accidentally jumped from RHS to tomorrow's entry, then had to backtrack, but you get the idea.)  Even I, the Old Guy Who Knows Nothing About Electronic Music, know that this was a hugely influential and important album, even if I did not know until yesterday that it was New York garage house or French house or maybe post-disco?  I guess I thought everything that came after disco was post-disco but apparently that's not what that means?  Anyway. First song, first side, is "One More Time," a song I became intimately familiar with since it was on Pitchfork's Best Songs of the 2000s (in fact, it was number 5!), and I made a Spotify playlist of the top 30 songs on the list that I listened to almost nonstop in early 2010.  (Just a quick detour here to say that the list is...

  I accidentally listened to the wrong album yesterday. Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? I can't believe this is the first time this has happened. Unclear what the holiday schedule will be yet.  Thanks for reading!

  I have never counted myself as a huge Willie Nelson fan.  Of course, I appreciate the songwriting - I mean, the guy wrote "Crazy" and "Hello Walls" and another couple dozen incredible songs - but I just don't like his voice.  I was approaching this album with a sense of "let's just get through it and move on." Guess what?  I kinda loved it.   It's telling that at first Columbia didn't want to put it out because they thought it was all demos.  (Willie had negotiated a contract with complete artistic control, however, so they put it out anyway.)  "Sparse" would be doing a lot of work describing this album.  It's quiet and contemplative, but with an unexpected weight and depth that I hadn't anticipated.  It's a country concept album, about a preacher on the run from the law after killing his unfaithful wife and her lover.  Not super out there for country music, but there you have it. One of the biggest surprises for me ...

  "Kraftwerk’s 'Trans Europe Express' is the most important pop album of the last 40 years, though it may not be obvious." OK, calm down a little, Randall Roberts of the Los Angeles Times .  First off, I'm not even sure this is  a pop album.  At least not the kind of "pop" that can stand without a synth- or electro- in front of it.  Now, this is certainly an important album, and was certainly influential, but most important pop album of the last 40 years seems like kind of a stretch.  I mean, Thriller  is just sitting there going "Wha?" To me, the funniest thing about this album (well, one of the funniest things, after the song "The Hall of Mirrors," which I'll get to) is the fact that it was recorded at Kling Klang studios in Dusseldorf.  Is there any better example of an album sounding like the name of the studio where it was made?  This album is all klings and klangs and boops and deet deet deet noises.  There is some pop on he...

  One of the downsides of never getting much into hip-hop in the 80's was that I totally missed some records that are now widely regarded as classics, like this one.  In fact, before yesterday, not only had I never heard this album, which is not entirely uncommon in doing this project, but I'm not sure I'd ever heard even a single song from it, which is. It is very 80's sounding hip-hop, all sparse production and James Brown samples and horn blasts and that shouty kind of rapping.  I liked "South Bronx," which had to have been, and probably still is, a neighborhood anthem.  "9mm Goes Bang" has singsongy "La la la la" backing vocals, incongruously set against a tale of urban violence.  It seems especially poignant knowing that group member DJ Scott La Rock would be killed in a shooting months after the release of this album.  "Remix for P Is Free" really shows off the dancehall influence that BDP was known for. So I can appreciate ...

  Imagine a warm January night in 1963 in Miami, a noightspot called the Harlem Square Club, absolutely packed with people ready to party, and here comes Sam Cooke, who by then was already a star, having released one instant classic after another, like "You Send Me," "Cupid," "Chain Gang," on and on.  Imagine further that this show, backed by legendary saxophonist King Curtis and his band, was actually recorded for a prospective live album.  Imagine being in that crowd, hearing a singer and a band at the absolute apex of their talents. Now imagine you're a white record exec in 1963 listening to the tapes and deciding they're too wild for the careful pop image you're trying to sell.  And by too "wild," of course, I mean too "black."  Because if there's one thing this album immediately makes you aware of, it's that Sam Cooke took the energy of a Southern black church service in the midcentury era and turned it secular ...

  Whoops, I totally spaced on this one when it came out in 1991 and so I can't say I was there when Massive Attack more or less singlehandedly created the genre of trip-hop.  In fact, I'd never heard this album before and was only hazily aware that it even existed.  This despite me being very, very aware of Mezzanine , Massive Attack's other album on this list (so far).  So let's dive in! After I listened to it through the first time, I went back and listened to "Unfinished Sympathy" again, mostly because it was the big single, and you know what?  Great song!  I mean, it's hard to listen to this now sitting where I'm sitting and realize how fresh and revolutionary this must have sounded at the time, because now it sounds like, uh, trip-hop, albeit a dancier flavor of trip-hop, which I suppose it was.  I feel like the first track, "Safe From Harm," is really what I think of when I think of trip-hop, that drowsy drums and sliding bass and soul...

  Funny story about "Cool It Down," the fourth song on this album.  Back in the day, our pal Burrito Justice had a show on local radio powerhouse BFF.FM and one time me and my friend Olu went on the show and picked songs from our Top 20 Songs list and put them head to head and people voted on which song they liked better.  One of my picks was "Cool It Down," which swiftly dispatched Olu's pick , Blonde Redhead's "I Am Taking Out My Eurotrash."  And why not?  "Cool It Down" is just a great rock song (not that Blonde Redhead has anything to be ashamed of).  One of many on this album, Velvet Underground's last "official" studio album. OK, not that funny. Is the first song, "Who Loves the Sun," an answer song to the Beatles' "Here Comes the Sun"?  Sure, why not.  It's a blast of sugary pop, all harmonies and light, but with lyrics about the meaninglessness of life after heartbreak.  ("Who loves ...

  Do you want the good news first or the bad news?  OK, good news first: yes, this album is a stone cold classic, widely beloved and bearing one of the best songs ever (which we will discuss in more detail below); a psych-era gem; a record store clerk talisman.  The bad news?  Uhhhh, I guess it's not perfect?  This narrative device didn't work out great. Let's talk about the good part first.  There are some absolute bangers on this album.  The first song, "Care of Cell 44," a song you know even if you don't recognize the title (which appears nowhere in the song), written from the perspective of a guy writing his girlfriend in prison, is a lovely pop confection, with Beach Boys-esque vocals and a Mellotron and the whole nine.  (There's also the deliciously contemporary tidbit that they wanted to call it "Care of Cell 69" and their American publisher wouldn't let them.  NICE.)  "A Rose for Emily" is baroque pop, all piano and delicate...

  Famously recorded following the death of his mother and the breakup of his engagement to designer Alexis Phifer, Kanye's fourth album seemed like a bizarre outlier at the time, a rap album that's mostly sung, a cold and sparse cry from the heart.  Little did we know that it would go on to become a template for an entire genre, spawning all kinds of Soundcloud rap that would eventually take over the world.  Oh, and Drake's entire sound. The 808s of the title refer, of course, to the Roland TR-808 drum machine that Ye used extensively (he only later learned that 808 was also the area code of Hawaii, where a good bit of the album was made), and it's appropriate in that the whole album sounds metallic and cold and machine-made.  Richly instrumented it is not.  The first song, for example, is punctuated by a drum machine track and a "bloop....bleep" that could be a game of Pong or a heart monitor; Kanye's vocals are wildly Autotuned, giving the whole thing an...

  Cocteau Twins is one of those bands that has always rested on the shady periphery for me; I mean, obviously I knew that they existed and I vaguely knew they were influential on the shoegaze/dreampop scene, and I knew the title of this album but I have to confess I had never sat down and listened to it before and you know what?  This is a beautiful album. It starts with Robin Guthrie's guitar, a chimy, chorusy sound, chugging chords, and then Elizabeth Fraser's voice, but just calling it her "voice" really is an understatement.  Not only does she have incredible range, which she shows off on that first song; it's also got an otherworldly quality that carries through the whole album.  It's no wonder that the genre this spawned is called "dreampop;" the whole album sounds like the soundtrack to a dream. After a few listens, I kept coming back to "Iceblink Luck," a perfect little jewel box of a song that shows off everything about this band. ...

  Two words for your Tuesday: Fuck and yes.  This album, which I have been listening to nonstop since last week, is a total blast of early 90's hip hop and fun and good times.  Does the very first track - "The Boomin' System" - sample James Brown's "Funky Drummer"?  You bet your ass it does.  Does this sound like the most spectacular exemplar of Golden Age hip hop?  Absolutely. Hard to believe that at 22, LL was entering Act III of his career but, as he famously says in the title track, "Don't call it a comeback."  Produced largely by Marley Marl and recorded in New York, it's got the huge drums and scratcing and LL's booming tenor and everything else you remember from early Clinton-era hip hop. OK OLD GUY ALERT HERE, as if it wasn't already completely apparent, but let's just compare a couple of verses.  Here's one from the title track: Don't you call this a regular jam I'm gonna rock this land I'm gonna tak...

  I feel like I have to tread lightly here.  After yesterday's blast of pop-punk energy, this restrained, quiet album is a radical change of pace, but I very much want to consider it on its own merits and not be influenced by what I've just been listening to. So I've tried very hard to do that, and to think about it in isolation, but after two listens I can't escape the feeling that this album is slight; not just in the sense that musically it's very open and airy but also in the sense that there's not a ton going on.  I'm not sure what I'm missing that affords this album this (comparitively) lofty position. The music is, I guess, jazz-pop?  It sounds like it's all drum machines, and that gives some of the songs a trip-hop feel, which I quite liked, but most of it is that kind of ethereal airy jazz/soul/R&B.  Some songs, like "Kiss of Life," really lean into the R&B, while a song like "Like a Tattoo" is so sparsely instrum...

  When we last saw Green Day, they had just SOLD OUT by moving from tiny local Lookout! records to Reprise, causing great consternation all over the East Bay.  Well, this album, their seventh, completed the process by moving 16 million units and making them into one of the country's - maybe the world's - biggest rock bands.  Now, as a former sneering indie kid, it would give me immense pleasure to report that this is the ultimate sell-out, an overproduced studio confection, lacking in imagination and packaged to appeal to the lowest and biggest-selling common denominator.  Unfortunately, this album fucking rips, and I can't stop listening to it.  It's fucking great. Green Day's secret power (or maybe it's not such a secret) has been to marry the hardest-driving, crunchies punk guitars to the catchiest, poppiest melodies, vocal tracks so great that Max Martin would cut off his Autotune knob just to write one of them.  I mean, I guess it's not a secret; that...

  I was blown away to be reminded that this album came out in 1985, almost 40 years ago.  Whitney really was the bridge between the 70's soul and R&B singers and the vocal acrobats today.  Without Whitney, there's no girl on American Idol cavorting up and down the scale, doing vocal unimaginable vocal runs, for good or ill. But this isn't really the album where Whitney seemed to be showing off her vocal prowess just to blow people away.  Instead, it's a more self-assured performance, the birth of an important artist rather than the mid-stage dynamism.  I'm sure you know the singles - "You Give Good Love," then "Saving All My Love," then "How Will I Know," the poppiest and most MTV of the singles, the one that really broke her to mainstream audiences.  It's irresistably catchy.  Written by George Merrill and Shannon Rubicam, they pitched it to Janet Jackson, who turned it down.  Good thing, too, because Whitney absolutely brought...