Funeral to Finish

  Do you ever think about the confluence of events that had to transpire exactly right to produce a specific moment?  The fact that you are wherever you are right now reading this is the product of a series of increasingly improbable consequences, piled up on top of one another.  If I hadn't finally reached a breaking point and broken up with my ex the exact time I did... years later, no 9-year-old sitting in the room next to me playing Pokemon on a Nintendo Switch.  No Nintendo Switch, probably. And so in January 1964, the Afro-Shirazi Party overthrew the Sultan of Zanzibar and established a new government in the former British protectorate.  The Bulsara family, like many other ethnic Arabs who lived in Zanzibar, fled the resulting violence and emigrated to England, where they lived in Middlesex and then London.  Farrokh, the oldest Bulsara child, who had been going by Freddie, graduated from Ealing Art College in 1969 and joined a succession of bands befo...

  First off: love the subway tile!   This album is as stark an example as I've seen here of the difference between how an album hit me when I was 14 and how it hits now.  When I was a sullen teen, I thought this record was so fucking deep  - you know, man, we really do build a Wall between ourselves and the world, this is so amazing, how do they know exactly what I'm feeling?  I had the whole cliche down - lying on my back in my room with The Wall  blasting in headphones and just reveling in my suffering and aloneness.  Typical privileged suburban kid.   So yesterday I listen to this album again all the way through for the first time in like 30 years and now it doesn't sound like a monumental work of art that also happens to just get me.  Now it sounds like an incredibly self-indulgent, overwrought work of art with some definite high points but also some serious flaws. To back up, this album is, of course, one of the best-selling re...

  Every once in a while on Twitter or a music forum somewhere, someone will ask "Hey, what's the best three song sequence to open an album ever?"  And people will give reasonable answers (Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band -> With A Little Help From My Friends -> Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds or Who Loves the Sun -> Sweet Jane -> Rock and Roll) and some people give ridiculous answers (The Changeling -> Love Her Madly -> Been Down So Long [from the Doors' LA Woman , God help us]), but the correct answer just might be the first three songs on this album.  Feast your eyes: 1999 Little Red Corvette Delirious I mean, are you kidding me?  Any one of those would be a career-making song for any other artist, and Prince just casually stacks them one after another on this, one of the best albums of all time, somehow here at 130 and not in, say, the top 50.  This album, released in 1982, paved the way for black artists to appear on MTV, a huge deal at t...

  Sorry about Friday, but I just didn't feel like it was right to do my dumb album review on one of the saddest, most profound days in American history, the day when 6 judges, 3 of whom were picked by a President who lost the popular vote twice, decided to take away the right of a woman to control her bodily autonomy.  Since then, I've been awed by the voices of women and men who are determined to fight instead of just bummed out and kind of lost feeling like me. Which brings us to Dummy, Portishead's debut album, an album NME called "a sublime debut album.  But so very, very sad."  NME is not wrong.  This album is so suffused with melancholy and longing that it practically makes you want to weep.  It has probably made many people weep. Although this wasn't by any means the first trip-hop album, or even the first big trip-hop album, I think it represented such a leap forward in the genre that they became intimately associated with it to the point that even ...

  I just can't.

  As regular readers are aware, there has been a serious lack of country and country-adjacent music on this list, so I am cheered to see any country representation, even if it is a compilation/greatest hits album.  So this album - really a double album, released in 1978, the 25th anniversary of Williams' death - was a joy to listen to, a pleasant trip through (mostly) familiar songs.  When I was a kid, we had a record player and I had access to my Mom and Dad's records, which means I listened to a lot of Broadway cast recordings and old country.  Were my musical tastes shaped by Jesus Christ Superstar and 1968's Hank Williams' Greatest Hits ?  Maybe! This collection progresses in roughly chronological order, and it is stunning to realize that these songs were almost entirely recorded in a five-year stretch between 1947 and 1952, and almost all written entirely by Williams himself.  The first track, "Move It On Over," recorded on April 21, 1947, may well ha...

  I maintain two Best Of lists in my head that sometimes overlap.  Like I have a mental list of the Best Albums of All Time, and it sometimes, but not always intersects with My Favorite Albums.  (We'll see how much it intersects with this list.)  To take a recent example, I'm sure Frank Ocean's Channel Orange is a brilliant album, but it just didn't speak to me .  (I was gonna make a snarky comment about the Grammys' Best Album of the Year always being dreck but looking back on it now, they got it right a surprising amount of times!  Last year was Taylor Swift's folklore , an album I absolutely adore, and they gave it to The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and Speakerboxx/The Love Below .  There are a lot of really bad misses, but they occasionally hit!) This is all a really really long and boring way of saying that I guess this album is critically revered and people love it or whatever but I fucking hated it so much that every second listening to it fel...

  I t's wild, I always thought of this as kind of an underground classic but come to find out it's not just one of the best-selling rap albums of all time, it's one of the best-selling albums of all time, with like 22 million copies sold.  And I am overjoyed to report that unlike some of the best-selling albums, this brilliant record deserves every unit moved.  It's an absolute pleasure to listen to. Let's start with the singles.  "Fu-Gee-La" starts with a verse by Wyclef Jean, and then the high melodic chorus sung by Miss Lauryn Hill, who also takes the next verse.  It's really a lovely chorus, and the whole song has that kind of moody trip-hop sound that was all over rap in the mid-90's.  (This album came out in 1996.)  The second single was "Killing Me Softly," a cover of the Roberta Flack classic that shows off Hill's perfectly tuned voice, with the trip-hop drums gassing up the original version.  "Ready or Not," the thi...

  Ironically, my wife, who's Irish (like grew up in Ireland Irish, not "my grandfather from Boston emigrated from Dublin" Irish) can't stand U2.  She thinks they're bombastic and self-important and I guess they became that way, and it's easy to forget they started out in what would be "alternative rock" in the 80's, gradually becoming more and more mainstream.  This album might be the one that catapulted them into full-on superstar status. This is also I think the last U2 album I either bought or paid attention to.  But man, I have to hand it to them; this is a pretty great album.  I mean, it starts off with "Where the Streets Have No Name," a magnificent, soaring song that I think will always be the ur-U2 song to me; it's got the Edge's chiming, ringing guitars, the big booming singalong chorus, the lyrics that seem important but that you can really read anything into.  There's also the iconic video, obviously inspired by t...

  I strongly suspect that I am not cool enough for this album.  It is wild , and I fear I don't have the background or maybe the experience with hallucinogenics required to fully appreciate it.  Here's what we do know. This was the third Funkadelic album, recorded by the legendary George Clinton in Detroit in late 1970 and early 1971.  It starts off with, and is most famous for, the title track, a 10-minute guitar solo played by Eddie Hazel; originally it had other instrumentation, which you can hear traces off, but it's largely just Hazel's inspired, incredible, obviously Hendrix-influenced guitar.  Clinton famously told Hazel to play like he had just been told his mother died.  Both of them were tripping on LSD, and Hazel turned in this piece of work that sounds alternately like wailing and crying and like someone wandering in the desert.  It's a harrowing, emotional piece of work. Try as I might, I just can't love 10-minute guitar solos, so the albu...

  This monster album is, so far, the best-selling record of the century, and one of the best-selling albums of all time.  Besides "Rolling in the Deep" and "Someone Like You," I had never heard it, and you know what?  It's okay.  It's like Amy Winehouse with all the sharp edges shaved off.   You have to start off with Adele's voice, a huge, brassy instrument that can vary from a careful whisper to a booming, arching, crescendo of sound.  It's not all pyrotechnics; there's also an interesting, ragged edge that suggests a world-weariness you would not expect from a 21-year-old.  The album is famously a breakup album, and remember how hard breakups were in your early 20's?  Absent any life experince, getting rid of that loser feels like the most traumatic thing that has ever happened to any person, anywhere, who has ever lived on Earth : I let it fall, my heart And as it fell, you rose to claim it It was dark, and I was over Until you kissed my ...

  It's wild to think there have only been a few albums on this list where I absolutely knew every song, and most of them are albums that I absolutely love, like In the Aeroplane Over the Sea .  And then this one.  Yes, as we were driving back from dropping our kid off at sleepaway camp for the first time yesterday (I'm ok, thanks for asking) we listened to this album and IMAGINE MY SURPRISE to learn that I knew every song on this album with one exception - the last song, "Rescue Me," which I cannot recall ever hearing. Let me be clear: I have never owned a Madonna album and, as far as I know, never listened to a Madonna album all the way through until I did Like a Prayer in July 2021.  This is a compilation album, so it's pretty much just hits, including "Like a Prayer" and "Like a Virgin" and orher songs that aren't about things being like other things. Here is a quick rundown: "Holiday," "Lucky Star," "Borderline...

  This past Saturday I went, as I do most years, to the Huichica music festival in Sonoma, which usually has an eclectic lineup and a mellow, stoned crowd.  This year, one of the most fun bands was Starcrawler, who have been described as "blending the sludgy, doom-laden riffs of Black Sabbath with the urgent pop-punk of the Runaways."  (They were great, btw.)  I bring this up to note that Black Sabbath still continues to cast a lengthy shadow on today's music, one long enough to reach a female-fronted glam-rock band from LA. This album, Sabbath's second, is also their best-selling and most well-known.  It is just chock full of metal goodness.  The band originally wanted to call it "War Pigs," after the opening song of the same name (which Ozzy Osbourne originally wanted to title "Walpurgis," after some Satanic thing or another, just imagine), but their label heard the song "Paranoid," thought it would be a hit, and insisted on the name ...

  There is something so hypnotic and soothng about reggae that it can lull you into a pleasant torpor while the song is about skulls being crushed in the slums of Kingston.  Although this was the Wailers' fifth studio album, it was the one that really launched the group, and frontman Bob Marley, and reggae in general, into the Western musical consciousness.  And this shit is dark .  Take "Slave Driver," the second song on the album.  Set over a typically langorous reggae beat, Bob sings: Ev'rytime I hear the crack of a whip, My blood runs cold. I remember on the slave ship, How they brutalize the very souls. Today they say that we are free, Only to be chained in poverty. Good God, I think it's illiteracy; It's only a machine that makes money. Slave driver, the table is turn, y'all. Ooh-ooh-oo-ooh. Real shit, not some metaphorical "slave driver."  But with Marley's bewitching high tenor and the absolutely lovely backing vocals, you almost forg...

  There comes a time in every indie kid's life when he or she has to pick their favorite Pixies album and reader, this is mine.  I remember buying this record when it came out in 1989 and listening to "Monkey Gone to Heaven" over and over and over.  I don't know what it was about that song - I mean, it's a great song, don't get me wrong - that just transfixed me but it sidetracked me for a while before I moved on to the rest of this beautiful album. It's not hard, of course, to pick this as your favorite Pixies album; it's easily the most accessible and pop-adjacent of their oeuvre.  The first song is Debaser!  How can you get more radio-friendly than "Debaser" (by Pixies standards, I mean)?  And those lyrics! Got me a movie I want you to know Slicing up eyeballs I want you to know Girlie so groovy I want you to know Don't know about you But I am un chien andalusia Talk about appealing to artsy 80's kids who immediately picked up the ...

  Look, I am an indie music nerd through and through.  I love Neutral Milk Hotel and I've seen Kingsbury Manx live and have owned multiple copies of Bee Thousand and I don't care if this makes me a normie but this album is fucking great (with one exception, which we'll get to) and I bought it when I was a kid and I was ready to put it on for the first time in decades and smirk at my wide-eyed naive younger self but it absolutely holds up (with one exception, which we'll get to) and the songs are great and it's great. This album is basically the matter to Nebraska 's antimatter.  They were both written and recorded around the same time, and both are actually dark as hell, but Nebraska wears it darkness on its sleeve, while this album dresses it up so much in outstanding, exciting, pounding rock that you may not realize it's as dark as it is.  Look at what happened to the title track!  "Born in the USA" is about the evisceration of the working class...

  After the noisy squall of White Light/White Heat , John Cale left the Velvet Underground and was replaced by Doug Yule.  They then invented dream pop. The first four songs on this album are as solid a set as has ever existed in rock music: "Candy Says," sung by Yule, about Warhol's Factory favorite Candy Darling ("I've come to hate my body/And all that it requires in this world"), a gentle, soft song that sets the tone for the album, with its heartbreaking high note at the end of the chorus ("What do you think I'd see/If I could walk away from me").  "What Goes On," taking the energy and tempo up, with one of the best choruses of all time ("Baby, be good, do what you should/You know it will work alright") an incredible guitar solo by Lou Reed, and Yule's long long organ solo at the end.  Then "Some Kinda Love," a swaying, nodding meditation on love, punctuated by cowbell and kick drum.  And finally "Pale...

  Let's get this out of the way right off the top: yes, this is the album that "Kashmir" is on.  (And yes, in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," Mike Damone tells Mark Ratner to play side one of Led Zeppelin IV to woo a girl and instead he's playing "Kashmir," a continuity error noted by generations of potheads.)   Remember the 70's?  Probably not.  It was the Age of the Double Album, when the view was "if you can record twice as much music, you can make twice as much money."  And that's what this album is, a single album's worth of good songs and another single album of filler.  It's rock at its most bloated and self-indulgent, and I don't even necessarily mean that in a bad way.   So the good stuff is very good.  There's "Kashmir," of course, an absolutely iconic rock song, with the driving rising guitar and the strings and the whole feel of weighty importance.  My favorite song on here is "Houses of...

  This sullen, angry blast of rage and contempt is quite a change from yesterday's sunny new wave dance-pop.  Even in a genre that pulls no punches in dealing with difficult topics, this record is particularly bleak and angry.  There are some raps that are dope as fuck, however. After Eminem shot to fame with the Slim Shady LP , he became obviously paranoid about being perceived as a one-hit wonder, and this album repeatedly speaks to that.  On "The Way I Am," the song that got him his first producer credit (and which he wrote, not coincidentally, after a meeting with label execs), he raps: I'm so sick and tired of being admired That I wish that I would just die or get fired And dropped from my label, let's stop with the fables I'm not gonna be able to top on "My Name is... " And pigeon-holed into some pop-py sensation That got me rotation at rock'n'roll stations Of course it seems ridiculous in retrospect, but who knew then if the world was ...

  I think I first realized I was straight from looking at Debbie Harry on the cover of this album (or maybe this issue of Hit Parader , who knows), an incredibly fun and even groundbreaking album that fused new wave and punk and pop and still sounds totally fresh today. Of course, Blondie emerged from the new wave scene in New York in the 70's because where else.  This was their third album, their first real success, and it went on to sell something like 20 million copies.  "Heart of Glass," the big single, dropped right into the middle of an America hungry for disco and cocaine and sex and of course went to number 1.  Drummer Clem Burke says the backing beat was inspired by the Bee Gees' "Stayin' Alive" and you can certainly hear that.  Listening to it yesterday, I was struck by just how good a song it is .  Not just the beat, but the backing tracks - especially a great guitar tone - and of course Harry's vocals.  You could write a book about her si...

  Like the vast majority of other people, the only Jeff Buckley song I had ever heard was his gorgeous and aching cover of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," a cover so ubiquitous that I was in my 40s before I learned Buckley's wasn't the original version.  I had heard of this album, of course, but never heard it, and I guess I was expecting more broody, guitar-based singer-songwriter stuff. Boy was I wrong.  This album is WILD.  I'm not even sure WHAT it is.  It's kind of bombastic orchestral rock like Muse or Queen but somehow weirder?  Take the title song, track two.  It starts out deceptively simple, but quickly veers off with Buckley showing off his truly amazing vocal range (supposedly four octaves, which is a lot).  The melody dodges and weaves in unexpected ways, nodding at jazz one minute and maybe Andrew Lloyd Webber the next?  "Last Goodbye," the second single released after the title track, shows off more of Buckley's voice and the dri...