Funeral to Finish

  Never has my personal take on an artist shifted so quickly.  You may remember that when we last saw Frank Ocean ( #148, Channel Orange ), I said "it just didn't do much for me."  Either I changed or this album represented a massive leap forward or something, because, reader, this is some incredible music.  It's way, way outside my usual wheelhouse and so it took me some time to warm up to and I feel like I still haven't absorbed it completely.  I'm going to keep returning to it because there is a lot here. Trying to describe what kind of music this is would be like trying to ask a lake what kind of water it is.  But I'll say a few words anyway.  There are elements of dream pop and R&B and electro-pop and gospel and hip hop and soul and I don't, just everything .  This is an album that borrows a lyric from Elliott Smith ("fond farewell to a friend," in "Siegfried") and part of a Beatles melody ("Here, There, and Everywhere

  This might not have been the very first punk album, but it was the first Punk Album.  I'll explain.  Before the Sex Pistols, there were proto-punk bands like the Stooges and the New York Dolls, but in May of 1976 Malcolm McLaren returned to London and started hanging out at a boutique called Sex and managing a band called the Strand.  He happened upon a young non-vocalist named John Lydon, later rechristened Johnny Rotten, and brought him into the band, which was quickly renamed the Sex Pistols.  They began writing songs together played their first show in November 1975, a gig that ended, predictably, with them fighting with the headlining band. This album, the band's debut, was largely recorded in early 1977, although "Anarchy in the UK" was released in November 1976 and was an immediate success and it's not hard to see why.  Not only is it provocative and, for the time, extremely controversial, it's also just a great fucking song , I am not kidding, one of

  My friend (and occasional commenter) Stephen has his own test for a Top 100 album: every album in that group, he says, "should be someone's favorite album."  He had his doubts about Plastic Ono Band (I don't, I'm absolutely sure there are some weird boomers who have this as their favorite album), but I have absolutely no doubts that this is a lot of people's favorite album.  And no surprise!  It's a great album!  I don't think of myself as a particularly huge Beyoncé fan, but there are a bunch of songs on this album I really liked right away. It's wild to me that the first single was "XO," because, although it fits in with the sonic palette of the album, it could just as easily be a Yeah Yeah Yeah song with a few tweaks.  Like all the other songs on the album, it was the product of a collaborative process, this particular one written with The-Dream (yes, he uses the hyphen in his name), who also helped write "Umbrella" for Ri

  Oh dear, another Hugely Important Album that didn't do much for me, and I'm saying this as someone who absolutely loves Stand! , the 1969 predecessor to this album.  If anyone was expecting more of the exuberance and joy of Stand! , well, I have some bad news.  This album is... not exactly dark , but it seems inward-looking, more closed off, angrier maybe?  I mean, there was plenty to be angry about.  The Civil Rights Movement was further along by the time this album was being recorded in 1970-71, but the Vietnam War had descended into a quagmire and it was clear the dream of the hippie movement was illusory. Sly himself followed that trajectory, and by the time this was recorded, he was fully in the thrall of cocaine and PCP.  He toyed with this album endlessly, recording parts from his own bed, bouncing tracks back and forth so much that a lot of the album has audible tape hiss.  He makes this explicit in the album's opener, "Luv N' Haight": "Feel so

  Let's cut right to the chase and talk about "Son of a Preacher Man," which is most likely the only song on this album you already knew.  It is an absolute classic, a gem of a song, just perfection.  Written by John Hurley and Ronnie Wilkins, it was originally intended for Aretha Franklin, but then producer Jerry Wexler heard it and snapped it up for this album.  And a good thing, too, because it's a perfect fit for Springfield's voice, all gentle and innocent while singing about getting deflowered by the preacher's kid. This album is universally praised and I guess loved which is fine but let me break it to you: the rest of this record is kind of a bore.  A lot of the songs sound identical and that's fine, she's doing a sound, but they're just not very....interesting.  "Preacher Man" is so far above the overall album that the rest kind of just lie there limply.  Take "The Windmills of Your Mind," for example, the eighth track,

  When you read the title and saw the cover, admit it, did the opening riff of "Back in Black" start playing in your head?  Did you get a "DENH ... DEH-NEH-NEH ... DEH-NEH-NEH" right away?  I sure did, and of course, because this is the second best-selling album in the world (right behind Thriller , of course), and the fourth best-selling album in the US.  50 million copies worldwide, 25 million US, and it still stinks like Schlitz and cheap weed and B.O. and still rocks the fuck out.  It's Friday, it's 5 o'clock somewhere, go ahead and put this on. You probably know the now-iconic and tragic tale of AC/DC's first singer, Bon Scott, dying of alcohol poisoning in the back of a parked car in London and the band almost throwing in the towel but instead recruiting Brian Johnson, who had already been in a band called Geordie and before that in the wonderfully-named Gobi Desert Canoe Club.  New singer in tow, the reformulated band decamped to Compass Point

  Finally out from under Paul McCartney's thumb, John Lennon and muse/band destroyer Yoko Ono repaired to Abbey Road in late 1970 to begin work on a pair of twin solo albums.  Lennon had a bunch of ideas he couldn't use in the Beatles and assembled them into this pastiche of half-finished songs, wild sounds, and vocal experimentation. I defy you to find a written review of this album that doesn't include the phrase "primal scream" or "primal therapy," because this album was created in the wake of Lennon's primal therapy with Arthur Janow, which obviously left a huge impact on Lennon, because this album literally sounds like therapy.  From the first song, "Mother": Mother, you had me but I never had you I wanted you, you didn't want me So I, I just got to tell you Goodbye, goodbye Father, you left me but I never left you I needed you, you didn't need me That'll be $225, please.  The latter days and breakup of the Beatles obviousl

  Man, I've had a journey with the Doors.  In high school, the Doors were still cool.  There was a tattered paperback copy of No One Here Gets Out Alive , one of the best rock biographies ever, that was passed around.  I devoured it, and I thought at that point, when I was 14 or 15, that Jim Morrison was maybe one of the coolest guys ever.  I mean, he drank all the booze and did all the drugs and had sex with all the girls and just generally did whatever he wanted.  How much more appealing could you get to a 15-year-old boy?  He told authority to fuck off and never really faced any consequences because he was rich and in a band.  The dream!  Plus, the Doors were just re-entering public consciousness due to the inclusion of "The End," more on which later, in the movie Apocalypse Now , and the 1980 release of their Greatest Hits album. Then by the time I was in my 20's the Doors were no longer cool but just one of those classic rock bands I never really thought about m

  Let me be very upfront about this: I am not a Jazz Guy, have never been a Jazz Guy, have never willingly attended a jazz performance, and have only owned one jazz album, this one, for reasons I'm still not clear on, because I think I put it on once at a dinner party.  [ Edit : it was actually  Kind of Blue , a different Miles Davis album, I now recall I had, and I liked it quite a bit more than this one.]  That being said, what happened when I listened to this album?  Nothing.  I disliked it intensely. Maybe, as Rolling Stone wrote when this album was released , "[t]his music is so rich in its form and substance that it permits and even encourages soaring flights of imagination by anyone who listens."  I did not get any soaring flights of imagination, but I'm on an SSRI so maybe that's why.  I would say my predominant emotion listening to this album was boredom, followed by slight annoyance and exasperation that it wasn't over. People like all kinds of weir

  All David Bowie ever did was cocaine and make great albums and this one is one of his best.  Commenter Stephen had his doubts that Baduizm was the 89th best album of all time - I'm agnostic on the subject, but think he made some good points about the lack of cultural currency - but to my mind there is no doubt that this album could be the 88th best album of all time, maybe even higher.  There are at least two absolute all-time classic songs on this album, "Changes," which you probably can at least fake an attempt at singing, it's so engrained, and "Life on Mars?" (I'm not asking, the song ends in a question mark.) Let's talk about "Mars" for a second.  If you don't know this song, listen to it right now.  Or even if you do. I mean, come on, an absolutely beautiful song.  The piano is played by Rick Wakeman, who you might remember from such bands as Yes, on the same piano that was used in "Hey Jude" and "Bohemian Rhapso

  I know I have some pretty big holes in my musical knowledge, but it's rare that I encounter an album on here - especially since we passed, say, number 200, and have never heard a single song.  Welp, sorry, Erykah, somehow you have stayed completely off my radar until yesterday. So it's sort of an interesting experiment!  What would someone who is truly, completely coming to an album fresh and unheard think?  The verdict is I like it!    My very first impression was "wow, she is either really trying to sound like Billie Holiday or just really sounds like Billie Holiday."  Once I did some reading I found out I was not the first person to think that.  (In fact, she " drew so many early comparisons to Billie Holiday that Badu’s publicist began asking interviewers to avoid the subject .") The album is clearly what became known as neo-soul, and it reminded me immediately of D'Angelo and other foundational artists in the genre.  (D'Angelo's Brown Suga

  Man, it must suck to be in Crazy Horse.  One day, you're just gigging behind Neil Young, touring the world, drinking Martini & Rossi Asti Spumante and smoking the world's best weed and the next it's pink slips all around and you're just an out of work musician while your boss retreats to his Topanga Canyon property where he's built a studio in the basement and starts recording one of his best albums without you .  (Don't worry, you'll be back.  And fired again.  And back.  You're basically the Billy Martin and the Yankees of roots rock.) Well, one Crazy Horse member played on this record, drummer Ralph Molina, along with CSNY bassist Greg Reeves and guitar prodigy Nils Lofgren, who Neil shunted off to play piano, an instrument he had no real experience with.  But Neil Young being Neil Young, the alchemical result was this dreamy, brilliant collection of songs, powered largely by Young's guitar and voice.  On the title track, the second song, Y

  I'm going to tread lightly here, because this album is (rightfully) regarded as an all-time classic, as you can see because it's here at 91, but it suffers a little bit following Jimi yesterday.  Not because it's not a good album!  It's a good album!  But it has a kind of sameness and uniformity of sound that makes it come across as a little plodding after the wild creativity of Axis: Bold as Love .  Hendrix is a hard act to follow!  Even Bruce would tell you that. Now, let's get to how good this album is, because when you think of "pure, uncut rock and roll music," this is what you're thinking of.  "Badlands," the album opener, is like if you compressed all of early Springsteen into one song - it's got that guitar, Clarence Clemons' aching sax lines, Max Weinberg's drums, which are perfectly suited to the music, not too much, not too little (I love the little three-snare-hit fills at the end of each phrase in the middle), and o

  This absolute masterpiece of psychedelic rock has probably seen more acid trips than Owsley Stanley and still sounds like nothing else out there.  Over a tight 39 minutes, you get the full sweep of what Hendrix could so, from the loose, gangly jam of "If Six Was Nine" to the compact jewelbox "Little Wing," a song with a guitar part so evocative and beautiful it haunts me to this day.  And I don't even own this album! This was recorded in Olympic Studios, in London, before the Jimi Hendrix Experience even played their first US gig (which, as it turns out, was the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, when Jimi set his guitar on fire , a now-legendary moment).  Some of Hendrix's best-known songs are on here, like "Castles Made of Sand," "Spanish Castle Magic" and other songs that do not have the word castle in the title.  My favorite is and will always be "Little Wing," but the centerpiece is really "If Six Was Nine," a five-

  "Pass the Dutchie" was a 1982 song from British-Jamaican group Musical Youth and if you were anywhere near a TV in 1982 that had MTV on it this song is drilled into your brain forever.  It's enjoying something of a renaissance these days; it was featured on Netflix's Stranger Things , and it's popular on TikTok, one of the many age-inappropriate activities I engage in.  But back in 1997, Missy Elliott copped it for one of the songs on this album, "Pass da Blunt," which, as its name implies, also concerns smoking marijuana, along with other concerns, such as Missy Elliott's superior musical abilities and the desires of others to have same.  It's also about Timbaland's prowess as a producer, and that's not actually a boast because it's true; the beats on this album are really, really great. Missy was already an accomplished songwriter for other before dropping this, her first album, in case you're wondering "how could a first

  You almost certainly can't handle this smoke.  This is a caterwauling barrage of sound that's actually borderline unpleasant to listen to, until you finally just give up and let it fucking shake you around.  And that's just the last song, "L.A. Blues," a shuddering freakout instrumental - well, mostly instrumental, Iggy Pop does moan some shit like he's dying; the whole track sounds like dying. This album came out in 1970, and people really didn't know what the fuck to make of it.  It's certainly related to psych-rock, but there are elements of jazz and swamp rock and god knows what else.  It's more of a feeling than an exact sound, but it's hard even to put your finger on what the feeling is. I know I'm kind of floundering around here but it's not an easy album to describe, because the Stooges aren't really into conventional things like song structure or melody or the stuff that you associate with rock music.  They're out her

  What if you were a fairly big music fan in, like, 1972, and you were like "Led Zeppelin?  Oh, sure, I know the name, but I don't really know any of their songs.  I do love that one meme where he's like 'Yeah' and then like 'No?'  What's a meme?  Oh shit, never mind, you're not ready."  So that's kind of what I'm like with Drake, one of the biggest artists of the 21st century who I know almost nothing about and couldn't really name a single song by.   [Oh crap I basically used this whole intro the last time I talked about Drake , down to the meme thing.  Felt cute, might delete later, I guess.] But this project is all about learning new stuff and guess what?  I really like it!  Maybe I like Drake!  This album has very much what I've come to think of as the Drake Sound, that slinky kind of barely-there backing track with Drake speak-rapping.  For me, the Kanye influence on this is humongous, not just from going "Uh" b

  What's the most cliched, hacky sentiment ascribed to "hipsters," whatever that means, when talking about music?  It isn't "oh, you like ________, name five of their songs," which is just assholes, not hipsters.  It's "This is okay, but I like their old stuff better."  Well, guess what I'm about to say? R.E.M. was, without a doubt, the most important band to me in roughly my late high school/early college years.  I think I was a sophomore in high school when I first saw them, in a small-ish place, and wow I'm really dating myself here.  I was just thinking about this yesterday and I think their second album, Reckoning , might be one of my most-played albums, since I listened to every day for well over a year.  But my attention wandered and I became enamored of new bands.  I bought Green , which came out in 1988, and was not a fan.  (Green was the one with "Stand," on it, if that gives you any idea).  I didn't buy Out of T

  I was never a big metal guy, and my only connection to Metallica was always pointing out Kirk Hammett's house at the peak of Divisadero when I was showing people around San Francisco.  If you've ever driven up that super steep hill, you've passed it: Whew, I bet some wild shit went down in there.  (He sold it a few years back and now apparently lives in Sonoma and Hawaii.)  Anyway, given my real-estate-only interest in Metallica, I was very pleasantly surprised to find myself enjoying this album.  I mean, I'm not gonna put it on every day or anything but I liked it!   The songs were largely written in a garage in El Cerrito but the album was recorded in Copenhagen and it has a Nordic blackness you associate with the Danes.  The sound is, as you might expect, extremely guitar-forward, that absolutely crunching sound that you can feel in your chest.  But by this point Metallica had left behind the thrash scene they emerged from and although the guitars are relentless, t