Funeral to Finish

  Before we get started on today's album, I have to let you know that this blog will be on hiatus next week and part of the week after that.  There's no easy way to say this, so I'm just going to come right out and say it: I'm going to Peru. I've never been a huge traveler.  My mother was obsessed with travel and was always off to Thailand or France or Guatemala.  Growing up with a chaotic and unpredictable mother I think left me wanting a sense of order and stability in my life, so I was never the backpack-through-Europe type.  My wife is from Ireland so I've gone to Europe a number of times since I've met her and I've greatly enjoyed those trips, but it never would have occurred to me to go to Peru, which seems like a fine country but is just one I never really think about, except that one of my relatives who is a university Spanish professor has been in Lima since January doing some kind of research or something, I'm not 100% sure, with his whole ...

  I feel like such an idiot for disliking most of Joni Mitchell's stuff as much as I do, but this, her most commercial and probably most accessible album, I even enjoyed in parts.  Look, Joni Mitchell is widely beloved and revered and she doesn't need me or anybody else to like her and I have some glaring musical blind spots and this is just one of them.  Wow I sound defensive but it's just so weird to totally not get something that so many people love so completely.   There is one song on here I liked unconditionally: "Raised on Robbery," a 50s-tinged boogie about a prostitute trying to pick up a guy at the Empire Hotel in Regina, Saskatchewan (Mitchell, you know, being Canadian and all): He was sitting in the lounge of the Empire Hotel He was drinking for diversion He was thinking for himself A little money riding on the Maple Leafs Along comes a lady in lacy sleeves She says let me sit down You know, drinkin' alone's a shame (It's a shame it's a...

  First of all, just feast your eyes on that cover.  It's so 80s it looks like leg warmers married a Rubik's Cube.  The squiggly lines, bright colors, it's got it all.  The cover for the single version of the title track goes even harder: It's like the Berlin Wall is falling all over again.  Anyway, graphic design is not even close to the most interesting thing about this album, a tight 41 minutes of electro-dance-pop mixed with R&B and funk and disco and God knows what else.  The cultural reach of this album is hard to overestimate; I knew like half the songs, and to my knowledge I have never listened to this album before. Thjis album, which came out in 1986, was Jackson's third, following two mostly forgettable and routine pop efforts overseen by her legendarily domineering father, Joe.  With this album, she stepped away from his overbearing presence and worked with superstar producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis.  It seems to have worked...

  OK I guess.  I don't really have any strong feelings for or against this abum.  It's like the VW Jetta or the Rocky Road of albums to me - fine, but I'd never pick it first.   Also part of the problem is that all the hits are mostly frontloaded onto the first disc of this double album, making the second half kind of a drag, at least to me.  So the album starts off like this: "Funeral for a Friend / Love Lies Bleeding" "Candle in the Wind" "Bennie and the Jets" All big hits!  "Funeral/Love" is like 11 minutes long and operatic in scope.  It's a wild choice to start an album, since it takes a long fucking time to warm up and get going, but, incredibly, radio stations would play the whole thing.  "Candle" I did not know at all until it got repurposed as a Princess Diana tribute song in the late 90s.  It's treacly as hell but I actually don't mind it.  "Bennie and the Jets" is about a fictional band, and ...

  Remember a couple of days ago when I was like "oh god where's the Smiths" because we had gotten this far without a Smiths album?  Here's the Smiths. Not my favorite Smiths album (that would be Meat Is Murder , which it would be for Johnny Marr's guitar tone on "How Soon Is Now" alone, never mind the other fantastic songs on that album), but it's usually and widely regarded as the "best" Smiths album.  Not to take anything away from it; it's a fantastic album. Right now we're watching the very trashy/highly enjoyable series "Pistol" on Hulu , a docudrama about the Sex Pistols, and I would love to see the Smiths get the same treatment because Morrissey is such a messy bitch who loves drama.  By the time the band recorded this, their third album, they were already a trainwreck.  Marr was deep in his cups, and Andy Rourke would soon be fired by Morrissey for drug use via a Post-It note left on his car windshield that said ...

  It truly warms one's heart to think that the son of the founder of Elite Model Management and the son of a million-selling songwriter could meet at boarding school in Switzerland and reconnect back in New York City and somehow be able to get started in the music business.  I kid, but this is all true.  What really pisses me off about the Strokes is that the band was born of privilege and opportunity and there is no excuse for them making a record as good as this. The Strokes are largely credited with the garage rock revival of the early aughts.  Kings of Leon, when they first started, were known as the "Southern Strokes" and the Strokes were an obvious influence on the Arctic Monkeys and the Libertines.  I was giving them shit at the beginning, but they came by their acclaim honestly.  They practiced every night and played a ton of gigs around NYC and honed their sound into something recognizable but also brand new in some way.   And, I mean, ha...

  This album, Kendrick's major label debut, is such a fascinating contrast with Kanye's Late Registration that we saw a couple of days ago.  Kanye's is all bombast and big, sprawling sounds, while this album is moody and introspective.  The beats here are subdued and downbeat, completely unlike the lush, orchestral sweep of Registration .  Kendrick's all Nick Drake to Kanye's Queen. This record is loosely structured as a concept album about a day in the life of a kid in Compton, trying to make it as an artist in one of the roughest places in the country.  It is dark and personal and introspective to a degree that starts to feel uncomfortable.  This album is all about Kendrick's voice and his rhymes and his life and it is an intense record. "good kid," track seven, is a good example.  Built on a sample from "We Live in Brooklyn, Baby" by Roy Ayres Ubiquity and with a hook sung by Pharrell Williams, Kendrick raps about how hard it is to stay s...

  As we start to get down to the last 100+ I start to get nervous about who we haven't seen.  Like, there's gonna be a Smiths album on here, right?  RIGHT?   And one of those bands was the Cure.  So here we are. I can't say I love this album.  I think of the Cure, really, as having two related but distinct sounds - the shimmery, bouncy pop of "Friday I'm in Love" or "In Between Days," and the atmospheric Goth that makes up most or even all of this album.  You can guess which Cure I like more.  I mean, the first Cure album I bought, and the only one I listened to a ton, was Standing on a Beach , the collection of singles that favors the Pop Cure. But if you want to be deep in your feelings, boy, this album will take you there and embrace you and maybe whisper in your ear "it's ok, no one understands us, go ahead and give yourself a tattoo between your thumb and finger."  I mean, it starts with an orchestral and majestic intro in "Pl...

  I love this big, sprawling, inventive mess of an album, even though I came to it late.  Always more of a producer than a rapper, Kanye here teams up with Jon Brion, probably best known for his work with Extremely White artists like Aimee Mann and Fiona Apple and for film scores, and the collab turned out to be inspired; we really can't know who contributed what, exactly, but there's a certain playfulness and experimentation here that I like to think Brion helped with.  This may not be Ye's best album (that one, I'm sure, is coming up), but it's certainly one of the most fun. Take "Touch the Sky," based loosely around a sample from "Move On Up" by Curtis Mayfield but thickly layered with other sounds and Kanye's dense rhymes, with a guest turn by then-nascent Lupe Fiasco.  I really love "Drive Slow," ostensibly an homage to cruising in your buddy's car as a teen but with the somber background message of don't try to grow up...

  Uggggghhhhhhh for real? OK, fuck it.  Let's do it.  Hey, are you a thrice-divorced retired orthodontist with a condo in Newport Beach and a midlife crisis Harley you ride once a year?  Did you have some pretty wild times at USC in the 70's?  Is your fave place to take a hygienist with crispy hair on the first date a bar called Sharky's?  Then this might be your favorite album.  This absolute slab of midtempo schlock is so easy going down that it makes Coors Light look like a 14% quadruple IPA.  It's the absolute apotheosis of wildly overproduced completely soulless white man's easy listening, a testament to what Southern Californians with plenty of musical ability and no ideas at all can do. Let's stick a pin in the title track and come back to it, because first we must land on track two, "New Kid in Town," a track so soft and unbothersome an Olson twin could kick its ass.  Don Henley said "It’s about the fleeting, fickle nature of love and...

  Lots of musicians get called "genius," but Sly Stone is an actual musical genius.  As this album amply demonstrates, he fused funk, blues, rock, and psychedelia in hippie-era San Francisco and left an indelible mark on all of those genres.  This album, clocking in at an economical 41-plus minutes (13 of which are a single song, "Sex Machine," more on which later), contains Sly's best ideas in a package that is an absolute joy to listen to. Let's start with track one, the title song, an absolute blast of funk-rock goodness that then moves to a gospel-funk breakdown in the last 40 or so seconds.  I don't even want to type out the name of the second song but it's an exhortation to white people not to call the singer by a racial slur that has become even more incendiary over time.  The overtle racial subject matter is even more fascinating because Sly and the Family Stone were a famously multi-racial, mixed gender band, with a white drummer and a woma...

  Beloved of acoustic-strumming bros at waterfront-adjacent bars and jukeboxes worldwide, this album, Morrison's third as a solo artist, contains probably (well, besides "Brown-Eyed Girl") the best-known songs of his career.  I mean, you know "Moondance," of course, and "Caravan," and maybe "And It Stoned Me" and "Everyone."  After the less-than-inspiring sales of Astral Weeks , Morrison's record label pretty much said "You better come up with some hits," and damn if he didn't. What struck me on this relisten was just how unique and personal a style he had, especially for 1970, the year of Abbey Road, Led Zeppelin II , and Cosmo's Factory .  It's this weird blend of folk, rock, jazz, soul, and blues that I'm not sure anyone has done the same way before or since.  "Everyone," for example, starts with a harpsichord and is driven along not by guitar but mostly by flute.  It sounds like a merry b...

  I'm not even sure this is in my top 3 Elvis Costello albums (now that I think about it, it's not, they're Imperial Bedroom, Armed Forces , and Punch the Clock ), but yeah, like all EC records from his Golden Era of 1977-1987, it's absolutely packed with gems.  How about these: "(I Don't Want to Go to) Chelsea" and "The Beat" and "No Action" and "Radio Radio" and those are just the best-known songs.  This guy would just wake up and songs would fall out of his ass. And this was only his second album!  Notably, it was his first with the backing band that would become known as the Attractions, including a keyboard player fresh out of the Royal College of Music named Steve Nieve, whose mark on Costello's sound was immediate.  So many of these songs have strong keyboard parts - just take the aforementioned "The Beat," where the keyboard not only punctuates the verses with little accents, but in fact drives the main m...

  Nope. Is this album in my personal Top 500? No.

  If you were exposed to FM radio in the 70s or 80s, you may be entitled to substantial compensation, wait I mean, you know every song on this album.  The very first thing you hear when you drop the needle on it or slide the 8-track into your older brother's Camaro is the ultrafamous riff from "Whole Lotta Love," one of the best-known guitar parts in rock, just one of the many iconic moments on this sludgy, heavy record. I think this was always my least-favorite Led Zeppelin album.  Not only does it have a song that's essentially a (let's be honest here) fairly boring drum solo with some great riffing around it ("Moby Dick"), it also has the inevitable JRR Tolkien-influenced lyrics (in "Ramble On"): I ain't tellin' no lie Mine's a tale that can't be told My freedom I hold dear How years ago in days of old When magic filled the air 'T was in the darkest depths of Mordor I met a girl so fair But Gollum, and the evil one Crept ...

  Well, it's definintely the most popular U2 album, I guess.  It sold like 18 million copies and is regularly listed as their best album .  It's not, Joshua Tree is, but I'm not a huge U2 fan so YMMV.  I actually don't have a ton to say about this record.  You know all the hits; it's got the ballad where Bono does his "ooooooooooooooooooo-ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh" thing ("One") and the singalong rocker ("Mysterious Ways") and the moody Bono getting deep song ("Acrobat").  I guess the album's hook was the move out of their comfort zone, sound-wise, aided by the production of Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois.  Everybody loved it but now I'm kinda sick of it tbh. I do quite like "Love Is Blindness," the album closer, but I like Jack White's cover even more .  He takes Bono's sad song and turns it into an angry song.  Absolutely one of my favorite singles of 2011. But what I do want to talk about is this incredible r...

  Although the cover is all New York (well, actually it's a fake clothing store in the Lower East Side), the album is all Los Angeles.  In the past 2 days I have read both that it's the " Sgt. Peppers of hip hop" and the " Pet Sounds of hip hop," which gives you some idea about how it's regarded now.  It is surely one of hip hop's most classic albums, a total blast.  It was so much fun listening to this again.  In fact, I can remember this album being a big hit even with my non-hip hop loving friends, that's how deep it goes. What's more important here, the Beastie's inimitable raps or the Dust Brothers' dizzying production, a dense soup of samples that would be 100% impossible to do today since everything would cost so much more to clear?  Let's take track 3, "Johnny Ryall," which contains samples from at least nine songs, including not unusual suspects like Kurtis Blow's "AJ Scratch" and "Kool Is B...

  Regular readers know two things about me: (1) I'm an insufferable nerd; and (2) I don't really care much for R&B.  So imagine my surprise - and yours, perhaps - when I started listening to this album and loved it.  Loved it!  I know, I'm shocked too. Let's take "You Bring Me Joy," built around a sample from "It's Ecstasy When You Lay Down Next to Me" by Barry White. Producers Chucky Thompson and Puff took the drums and bass from White's song and used that; otherwise, it's all Blige.  (White's song has lots and lots of instrumental; it's a rich text to sample from, and, indeed, has been used by everyone from Ja Rule to Pimp C.)  Like most of the songs on here, Blige got a writing credit.  It's a fun bop, an absolute head-nodder.  And it's fun!  It just seems like fun.  Plus the Wiki entry for this song has this wonderful paragraph that may have been composed by a precocious 3rd grader: It's not all fun and games. ...

  No question this is considered one of the most important albums of all time across so many spectra.  It's really the first time a black artist got complete creative control.  It opened up country music to a new audience, and is at least partially responsible for what had been a niche genre breaking into wider popularity.  And its social impact cannot be overstated; as the Civil Rights Movement was growing in importance and racial tensions rising, Charles was breaking down racial barriers that had established firm lines of separation between "white" and "black" music. So I appreciate all that, and still find this album a bit of a bore.   The album is a collection of country and folk songs, all remade into the Ray Charles Sound - that R&B/soul/jazz hybrid with lush strings and choral backup, with Charles' undoubtedly powerful and emotive voice as the centerpiece.  The songs aren't really recognizable as "country," per se, given that Charles...