Funeral to Finish

  Here we have another third rail artist, Stevie Wonder, and in this case, unlike some other third rail artists I could name , it's richly deserved.  I don't think it's hyperbole or overstatement to say that Stevie Wonder is one of the most prodigiously talented, gifted, and enjoyable American artists to ever perform.  No serious music fan would argue with that. That said, this album - released in 1972, his FOURTEENTH album - is more of a prelude than a destination.  By that, I mean that in this album, which is widely considered the first album of his golden phase, the rest of which we will certainly be seeing later, you can hear the musical ideas that will later become fully realized in later albums.  Take a song like "Girl Blue," with its lilting, descending melody of a kind that will show later in much better-recognized songs.  And the harmonica work in "Sweet Little Girl" will undoubtedly remind you of little songs like "Isn't She Lovely....

  This is a wild album that I really can't believe came out in 1973.  The top-selling album in 1973 was The World Is a Ghetto  by War.  Second was Summer Breeze  by Seals and Crofts.  Neither of those albums even faintly resemble this.  In fact, you have to go down to number 11, Dark Side of the Moon , to find anything even remotely as weird as this.   This was the last time Brian Eno and Bryan Ferry could work together, and you can feel their tensions pulling against each other.  There's a driving, almost funky song like "Editions of You" that should have found a home on pop radio and then there's something like "The Bogus Man," with Ferry's vocals over a steady beat with all kinds of swirling instrumentation beneath, going off in strange directions, very Eno-like. We would be remiss if we didn't mention "In Every Dream Home a Heartache," a famous love song to a blow-up doll, which anticipated the film "Lars and the Real Girl...

  When I was a kid - ok, maybe older than "kid," maybe "adolescent," like I'm thinking 12 or 13? - I used to draw these little comics for other kids at school.  I was kind of an awkward kid and wasn't really into playing sports or stuff like that but these comics were a big hit and my first taste of media fame.  I wish I could say they were intelligent or thought-provoking but they were really just gross-out shit.  Like I would come up with the grossest stuff a 12-year-old boy could think of and draw it up and make a story out of it, and it would be like 5 or 6 pages and man, my target demo - other 12 or 13-year-old boys - really liked it.  Stuff like arms getting chopped off and force-fed to their former owners and animals ripping people apart and I don't know, it was just me trying to gross out the other kids, which they fucking loved.  If my school had a Billboard, my Gross Comics would have gone diamond.  They were passed around and I was doing lik...

  There have been albums on here that I know inside and out, and that I love deeply, and both.  But this is the first album where I knew every song (except one, more on that soon) and I've never owned the album.  That's how many straight-up hits and super well-known songs are on here.  I mean, these are the first three songs: Good Times Roll My Best Friend's Girl Just What I Needed You can probably sing some or all of all three of those songs in your head right now.  And this isn't a greatest hits album!  Amazing.  I was talking to a friend about this album yesterday and he said it probably doesn't get the appreciation it deserves but it should absolutely be in the "nearly perfect album" collection. So, the music.  As you already know, it's synth-pop or maybe electronic rock or whatever, I don't know, it's their sound and they invented it.  I know that a lot of what you hear today like MGMT and Miike Snow and Hot Chip and god so many more wer...

  Imagine going to see the Sex Pistols in Hastings on your 19th birthday and immediately putting an ad in Melody Maker looking for "young punx who want to stick it together" and forming a band and then one year later putting out one of the finest punk albums ever made.  This actually happened to Poly Styrene, the young woman who fronted this band and whose voice I am still trying to process.  Friends, there are very few records as powerful and immediate and raw as this one. I think I heard this album once or twice before, probably in high school at my friend who had graduated a year before me's apartment, a slightly seedy and run-down affair that was of course a magnet for the 40-drinking, Camel unfiltered-smoking, ripped jeans wearing crowd that I associated with at the time.  Ah, the fond memories of leaving high school, grabbing a Big Gulp of 7-Up, hitting up the liquor store that was known to sell to the underage, getting a half-pint of Seagrams 7, emptying out h...

  Recorded in one 12-hour session with virtually no overdubs, this album sounds like it was recorded in one 12-hour session with virtually no overdubs.  I'M KIDDING, sort of.  It could use some polish, but it is a fascinating document of the birth of heavy metal.  To my mind, it sounds like guitarist Tommy Iommi was just trying to play blues and accidentally created something else.  Maybe because he lost his fingerips in a sheet metal accident and had to adapt and that led him to create his sui generis sound?  Even the musical background story is metal as fuck. So yes.  Here we witness the birth pangs of heavy metal.  It sounds a lot like blues-psych with extra distortion and some fucked up chords thrown in and dime store Satanism lyrics, which I guess is what heavy metal is.  Speaking of lyrics, let's discuss John Michael Osbourne for a sec.  Ozzy's singing on this album is, to put it charitably, raw.  To be more frank, he, at this...

  You know how kids say things are a MOOD?  Well, this album is a whole motherfucking MOOD and the mood is "backing band at a voodoo ritual in the basement of a New Orleans flophouse."  It is really something, a weird-ass blend of Afro-Caribbean beats, New Orleans funk, some kind of swamp rock, and I don't even fucking know what else.  I wasn't sure what to make of it at first but then I just went with it and was glad I did.  There are songs that are just sort of extended musical ideas, like "Danse Kalinda Da Boom," and songs that more closely resemble what we think of as "songs," like "Mama Roux" and "Jump Sturdy."   Although it was recorded in Los Angeles, where Dr. John (nee Mac Rebennack) was living at the time, this album is so firmly rooted in one place - that place, of course, being New Orleans - that it should have its own post office,  Even by the standards of 1968, though, it was so weird and out there that it was neve...