Funeral to Finish

  I'm going to have to ask my fellow Gen X white males to close their clunky Windows laptops and go outside, it's beautiful day.  Come back tomorrow.  It'll be better that way. Are they gone?  OK, yeesh.  This album was famously released online with a pay-what-you-want model and, like most of the people who downloaded it, I would pay roughly zero dollars.  There are a few songs that seem like they have an idea - or at least a guitar ides - like "Bodysnatchers," but then there are some songs that sound like the band never bothered to finish them, like "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi."  The vocals on a lot of the songs sound like Thom Yorke is just fucking around and looking for a melody.   And it's so cold!  It's freezing.  It sounds so sparse and open and empty.  Radiohead gets knocked a lot for being depressing and this doesn't help.  It sounds like looking out of a frosty window at a bleak snowscape.  Radiohead also gets knoc...

  To hear an artist at the absolute peak of their talents is a magical thing, and Aretha Franklin just did it over and over and over again.  This was her, incredibly, nineteenth  album, recorded when she was just 29 years old.  When I was 29 I was still trying to figure out how to do laundry and Aretha had already had like 4 full recording careers. The title track, a Nina Simone cover (or, I guess, a complete owning of the Simone song by Franklin) is a perfect example.  Franklin toys with the melody, swatting it around a bit, just plaing with it, before exploding later as the song builds up.  The dynamics of her voice are, of course, otherworldy, but there's also the amount of emotion she can covey in that powerful instrument.  I honestly thought I would put this on and be like "oh yeah, Aretha Franklin, she's great," but I really had no idea.   And it's not just a showcase for her to go wild vocally (like some artists I could name, *cough*Ma...

  I did not like this album at all. 111 albums into this project, I have come across a lot of stuff that is not in my wheelhouse and that I would never have listened to under normal conditions.  So far, it's been the case that I can at least find something to appreciate, even if it's not my thing.  Like I would never have listened to Britney Spears' Blackout  in a million years but even though it's totally not my thing, I kind of enjoyed it! Not with this one.  Mea culpas first: I don't really care for this style of R&B, the slickly-produced, Autotuned, drum machined, "why can't we get back together" lyriced, vocal acrobatic featuring stuff.  I guess I get it, but I really, really don't like it.  So that made this one a tough listen.  The whole album is like that.  It's bad.  There isn't really a hooky chorus or melody line that you'd catch yourself humming.  It just goes on and on with the same stuff and the stuff is not good. ...

  I know this album was formative for many of my indie rock coming-of-age-in-the-80's peers but I was always more of a Doolittle  person.  Nevertheless, upon relisten, this album is still hard as fuck and interesting as ever.  The first thing that hits you is the HUGE, booming drum sounds that underlie, or maybe overlie, every song.  Does it sound like they were recorded in a huge industrial bathroom in a factory?  They were.  There are the screeching buzzsaw guitars and Black Francis' yelping wail, which sounds like it was recorded from the bottom of a well, or maybe a prison cell.  You all know "Gigantic" and "Where Is My Mind?" but the real sound of this album is exemplified by "Oh My Golly!" There's a lot going on here.  When they recorded this, the band really didn't know much about music, and freed of the constraints of expectations, they could just go fucking wild and do whatever popped into their heads.  Steve Albini, Legendary P...

  Kelis' debut album, one of those records that I had heretofore never heard a single track from, and another pleasant surprise!  I guess I wasn't really sure what to expect, but this is really a fascinating pastiche of R&B, hip-hop, jazz, and DJ beats.  Produced by the Neptunes - Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo - who would go on to an incredible career that's still going on, so you know it's going to sound good. I guess the money song on this album was "Caught Out There," a breakup anthem for all time, with Kelis screaming "I HATE YOU SO MUCH RIGHT NOW" over a smooth beat.  It's hard to describe, but it works.  "Good Stuff" was also a big hit, and it's easy to see why; it's got a great head-nodding beat and a jazzy, easy vocal.  Guest vocal by Pusha T, good as always.  My favorite, though, is "Ghetto Children," which is, as its name implies, a call of support for kids left behind by society and an indictment of th...

  This isn't just a collection of songs featuring an insanely talented singer and an incredibly influential guitarist, it's a tour through the history of rock.  You start off with the familiar girl-group sounds of something like "I'm Jealous" and "I Idolize You" and go through a set of covers of some of the most important songs ever ("Come Together" and "Honky Tonk Women") and end up with some of Tina's own compositions, which shows she's just as capable of Ike, who terrorized and dominated her for years until karma finally came around.  Tina ended up a superstar with a career renaissance and Ike died mostly a broken man. There are all kinds of fascinating things about this album, but the trhroughline is Tina's incredible voice, that go from a soft croon to a shriek of power and anguish, sometimes within seconds.  Just drop into "I'm Jealous" to see what I'm talking about. I mentioned the covers, and the ...

  Since I started doing this, we've hit a couple of landmarks: first album I actually owned , first album that was a Very Important Album in my life , and now the first album that contains a song my almost-8-year-old daughter likes, namely "Shake It Off." It may seem hard to believe now, but Taylor Swift started as a country music star, and it was this album where she finally and totally severed her ties with country in favor of the shimmery, glossy pop this record exemplifies.  Obviously, Max Martin was the co-producer because when you want shimmery pop, you want Max Martin !  And besides "Shake It Off," there are a bunch of super catchy songs on this album, like "Blank Space" and "Bad Blood." A lot of people like "Welcome to New York," the album opener, which is obviously about Taylor's own move from Nashville to NYC and very obvious reinvention of herself.  The song itself contains all the tropes about moving to the big city ...