Funeral to Finish

  Oh, god, whatever, it's fine.  You already know this album and probably have heard all the songs.  I guess it's a good album or whatever.  I just don't care.  There's nothing really that interesting about it to me.  If you like it, that's great.  I can see liking it or loving it, just like I can see not liking it or really not giving a fuck, like me.  I just feel like having strong feelings about this album is like really really loving Heineken or Chevy Tahoes.  Like, sure, but why? But since we're all here and there's a picture of Jack White above us, I want to talk about my favorite Jack White thing, his feud with the guy from Black Keys.  OK so Jack White has famously lived in Nashville for a while now and runs a label called Third Man Records and has a record shop down in the touristy part of town and all that.  And he got into some kind of beef with the Black Keys.  I guess he thought they stole the White Stripes sound o...

Man, what a wild album.  This sounds like Paul McCartney went "Let me take EVERY SINGLE MUSICAL IDEA I've had since John and I had our last fight and put them all in a hat and then draw them out and make songs out of whatever I draw."  So we've got "Ram On," a ukulele jingle that's a play on Paul Ramon, the fake name Paul used; we've got the fairly straight-ahead Buddy Holly-esque rocker "Eat at Home," a celebration of staying in that seems REALLY FITTING for 2020 (and also might be one extended dirty joke); and the strangled scream of "Monkberry Moon Delight," surely one of the weirdest things to come out of McCartney's head and mouth. The real centerpiece, of course, is "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey," a mashup of two songs into a deliriously catchy whole.  I'm extremely familiar with this song because the first album I ever bought with my own money was "Wings Over America," a triple live album by McCar...

  Wow this album starts off with a blast.  "Compared to What" is a horn-fueled jazzy swing with some truly dark lyrics: Slaughterhouse is killin' hogs Twisted children killin' frogs Poor dumb rednecks rollin' logs Tired old ladies kissin' dogs Hate the human, love that stinking mutt (I can't stand it) Try to make it real, compared to what? The rest of the record is quite a bit mellower.  After several listens, the description that keeps coming to mind is "sparse."  The songs are open, airy, sometimes too much.  There's a lot of sadness, a lot of empty space. The famous song here is, of course, "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face."  It wasn't a huge hit at first but then took off after it was featured in the Clint Eastwood film "Play Misty for Me."  WARNING; clip contains surprisingly explicit scene of Clint Eastwood having outdoor sex. Yikes.  But see what I mean?  There's almost no actual song there.  It's mo...

  I have to assume that the reason this album is so low is because it's a collection/greatest hits-type album, because HOLY SHIT this is a pretty amazing set of songs you already know every whisper, beat, string arrangement, and vocal in by heart.   Look at this list of songs: "Where Did Our Love Go" "Baby Love" "Ask Any Girl" "Come See About Me" "Stop! In The Name Of Love" "Back In My Arms Again" "Nothing But Heartaches" "I Hear A Symphony" "My World Is Empty Without You" "Love Is Like An Itching In My Heart" "You Can't Hurry Love" "You Keep Me Hangin' On" That's just from sides 2 and 3 of a 6-side collection!  I mean come the fuck on! These are more thsan just songs, they're part of the fabric of American culture.   I put this on when we were in the car on Christmas Eve day and I am happy to report that listening to it is just as easy and pleasur...

  Propitiously, "Pretty Hate Machine" and LiveJournal both came out the same year, 1999, because writing long angsty LJ posts freely using lyrics from PHM is a thing that I am sure happened even if I just imagined it.  When I was kid, we didn't have Industrial Dance music and we had to bum out to The Wall and write in an actual journal and Olu I swear to God if you post a picture of Andy Rooney under this I will block you mark my words. But the experiences of being a youth and feeling alienated and lonely are universal and Trent Reznor's genius was plugging into that feeling and layering the rage and self-pity that all 15 year old feel over his self-invented and frankly genius combination of Industrial and shiny 80's pop.  There is a grinding and uncomfortable undercurrent to songs like "Kinda I Want To" but the catchy chorus to "Head Like a Hole" is sing-along-worthy, especially if you're 15. The thing I got most listening to this again fo...

  I think during this project we sometimes have to agree to disagree, the albums and me, and that's where I am with this Can album.  Now, Can is highly regarded and incredibly influential - in fact, Stephen Malkmus, who led one of my all-time favorite bands, Pavement, which was obviously influenced by Can, said he used to listen to this album every night before he went to sleep (and not to introduce yet another recursive phrase here but that sounds like a recipe for psychosis to me) - but it is really, really not my thing.  I'm not super into long formless jams or weirdness qua weirdness and this album has plenty o' both. There are two semi-normal "songs" on here, and they're the last two songs on the album.  "I'm So Green" has nice funk vibe and "Spoon" - yes, the band got their name from it - has a touch of Swinging '60s, which isn't surprising because it was the theme music for a German cop show. You know who this really remi...

  It's sometimes hard to keep perspective doing this.  I'm sitting in 2020, almost 2021, writing this about these two albums (later repackaged into a single unit by Chess), and I've heard all or most of these songs for most of my life and heard all the derivative acts that they've influenced, like Springsteen and the Stones and essentially any band that uses electric guitars, and you have to keep in mind that Bo Diddley invented it .  You cannot overstate the importance of these two records. Among other innovations in rock music that we are so used to now that they are part of the language of music, Bo Diddley invented the ... wait for it ... Bo Diddley beat.  You can hear it right here, in the song "Bo Diddley." (The man was not shy.  Besides this song, his first album, cleverly titled "Bo Diddley," also contains the songs "Hey! Bo Diddley" and "Diddley Daddy."  You're welcome to sit down with the lyrics for this album, but I...