Funeral to Finish

  Listening to this album again (an absolute joy, btw, I was almost laughing at how good some of these songs are), I was struck by the number of specific places Lucinda Williams mentions.  Just in the song "Jackson" alone, the final track on the album, she mentions Lafayette, Baton Rouge, Vicksburg, and finally Jackson (obviously Jackson, Mississippi).  That's not even the only song titled after a place - there's also a song called "Greenville," which could be any Greenville because every Southern state (maybe every state, I don't know) has a Greenville (a fact immortalized by R.E.M. in their song "Little America" - "another Greenville/another Magic Mart," but we're getting off-topic), and a song called "Lake Charles," and on and on. As the cover and the title and the overall mood suggests, this is an album rooted in the South and the particular connection of Southerners to the land, connected  to it but also itinerant u...

  Taylor Swift releases so many albums that this was like EIGHT albums ago, and it's from 2012!  She has another one coming out in a month!  Taylor Swift was put on this Earth to make everyone who's even moderately lazy feel like a huge loser.  Or maybe that's just me. Taylor Swift is so motivated that she RE-RECORDED this album and released a new version last year, so she could sell her own version instead of the masters that had been sold to an evil holding company.  (This review will be about the original version, since that's the one on the list).   So as most everybody knows, this is the album where Swift left country behind and starting branching out into more pop and electronica-influenced stuff.  There are still some songs with pedal steel and gently strummed acoustics and the other indicia of country music but this is certainly not a Country Music Album.  There are some good songs ("22," "Starlight," "Stay Stay Stay"), some great s...

  Let's get this out of the way right off the top: this cover art for this album is so hilariously godawful that I think it's part of the reason why I instinctively disliked the record for a long time.  I mean, look at it.  Just horrible.  OK. Remember The Big Chill ?  It was an 80s thing, a movie about people who had gone to college together in the 60s and then had a reunion of sorts when one of the group killed himself.  (The suicide victim was played by Kevin Costner but his scenes were cut from the final version.)  So it came out in 1983, meaning that if it came out today, the characters would have all been in college together around, say, 2007.  Which means that instead of "The Weight" from this album appearing on the soundtrack, it would be something like "Buy U a Drank" by T-Pain or "Girlfriend" by Avril Lavigne. Anyway, this super important album was born out of lengthy songwriting and jam sessions with the members of the Band and Dylan at...

  I guess there's a Led Zeppelin album for every type of stoner and this is not my Led Zeppelin album.  It's mostly a sludgy, plodding trudge through a bunch of recycled blues riffs and listening to Robert Plant start to develop his yowl.  It's a snooze but the kids used to love it. Hey, do you think Zep would have been as big a success if they had kept their original name, "The New Yardbirds"?  It doesn't really sing, does it.  By the time this album was recorded, Jimmy Page was already famous for his work in the Old Yardbirds, and he and manager Peter Grant fronted the 1700+ pounds to pay for the studio time.  The band had already been playing together for a while, so the recording only took something like nine total days. Lyrically, it's not inspiring.  The songs fall into three main categories: (1) you left me, and that makes me sad; (2) I plan to leave you, or I am in the process of leaving you, and that cheers me; and (3) I like to fuck. (1) - "...

  I'm not sure what the first Clash song I heard was, but it was probably something like "Train In Vain" or "Rock the Casbah" or something else from Combat Rock that would have been on mainstream radio in the early 80's.  (This was early in my musical life, when I was still into Pink Floyd and Rush and your standard suburban angsty teen stuff.)  And then I read about the Clash being "punk" and I was like "What?  That isn't punk."  By this point, I had stumbled across the Sex Pistols which not unreasonably defined what punk was for me, and the Clash songs I heard on the radio didn't sound like that. Ladies and gentlemen, the Clash are most definitely punk, and this album, released a few months before Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols , is as good a punk album - or rock album, for that matter -  as was ever made.  Maybe it's not "the greatest rock and roll album ever manufactured anywhere," as Robert...

  Sorry for the service interruption!  Monday I had, like, work stuff to do and yesterday I was picking my wife up at the airport and they lost her bag and we had to file a claim about that and by the time I got home it was well into my Work Hours and you know, I'm just sorry.  (This was tail end of quite a journey for my wife that found her taking off in Ireland and landing in Newark, New Jersey, and then sitting in a plane for almost three hours and then the flight just getting cancelled and then staying in the Courtyard by Marriott in downtown Newark, NJ [not recommended, she says] and then getting on a flight to SFO at 6:30 am and finally getting back here a solid 14 hours later than expected.) Speaking of the greater New York City metropolitan area, a group of kids from Amityville, Long Island, got together in 1988 and started making songs and released this album, one of the best in hip hop or any other genre, in 1989.  De La have been called the "Beatles of hip...

  I have a long-running joke, or maybe not such a joke, with my friends that the Stones' "Monkey Man," which is on Let It Bleed , an album we will most assuredly see at some point, isn't just a great rock song, but objectively the greatest rock and roll song of all time .  I have literally convinced people that this is true!  But you know what?  There is more than one song on this album that could also be the greatest rock song of all time. Recorded mostly in 1970 at the height of the band's powers, this is not just one of the Rolling Stones' best albums; it's one of the best albums of all time, and should probably be much higher on the list.  After the untimely death of Brian Jones (or was it..... muhhhhhduhhhh ), the Stones left behind their dalliances with psychedelia and chamber pop and leaned into Americana roots-rock.  Keith Richards, who always idolized the Mississippi blues, really came into his own on this album.  The very first thing you hear...

  Widely regarded as the greatest rock live album of all time, this album is great if you love seemingly endless guitar noodling and songs that never really go anywhere.  Am I being too harsh?  I'm being too harsh probably.  I bet this album is great if you're fucking rocked on acid or whatever.  As regular readers are no doubt aware, I am not a fan of long jams and do you think this album has long jams?  Let me tell you.  This was a double album with SEVEN SONGS.  Side two and side four both have ONE SONG.  One song!   Just so I don't come off as a complete dick and musical ignoramus, there are things about this album I like.  I like "Statesboro Blues," the album opener, which comes in at a relatively tight 4:19, and is a great blues boogie.  It's a cover of a 1928 Blind Willie McTell song, and features absolutely incendiary guitar interplay between Duane Allman and Dickey Betts.  This the kind of jamming I can get b...

  This album will always be a little cursed, released four days after Kurt Cobain killed himself and dogged to this day by rumors that Kurt helped write or outright wrote some of the material, a charge surely rooted in the sexism that predominates in the music industry.  And it's too bad, because it's a spectacular album with a ton of great musical ideas and a lot to say.   Hole's first album, Pretty on the Inside , was more hard-edged punk-flavored rock, and Courtney Love and the band set out with this record to do something different and show more range.  Man, they did it.  Not that it's all gentle melodies; a song like "Plump" is just as hard and angry as anything in Love's husband's catalog.  But take "Miss World," the first single, which starts with gentle strumming and Love singing I am the girl you know, can't look you in the eye I am the girl you know, so sick I cannot try I am the one you want, can't look you in the eye I am ...

  Another album whose massive influence far outstripped its actual sales.  This weird little gem emerged from the CBGB scene in Lower Manhattan in the 70s, but instead of the wild simplicity of the Ramones, Television was doing something altogether different.  Is it art-punk?  Post-punk?  Prog-punk?  Who knows?  On the cover, the band looks like aliens emerging from their spacecraft with what could be either good or ill intentions, and the music must have seemed just as weird and otherworldly at the time. Unlike the slapdash immediacy of pure punk, the band meticulously rehearsed this album until every note was expertly and precisely placed.  Some of the songs, like the title track and "See No Evil," are based around a delicate little guitar riff that is more of a motif than a dominant feature.  The guitar playing throughout is not just expertly done but also so unique that it simultaneously defined the sound of the band and influenced a thou...

  I went to Peru.  Peru is wild, man!  We were in Lima for a few days and then we went to this area near Ica called Huacachina with these massive sand dunes where we took a semiterrifying dune buggy ride up and down the slopes and then I watched my family try to sandboard and shit.  Then back to Lima.  Man, they have some good-ass food in Peru but also if you think it's bad for pedestrians here you would get laughed at in Lima, where the drivers may not be trying intentionally to kill you but they sure drive like they are. Then I got Covid.  Not really a surprise, I guess, travelling internationally and all, and it really hasn't been a big deal, just more annoying than anything else. Which brings us to Fiona Apple's sophomore album, the full title of which is  When the Pawn Hits the Conflicts He Thinks Like a King What He Knows Throws the Blows When He Goes to the Fight and He'll Win the Whole Thing 'Fore He Enters the Ring There's No Body to Batter W...