Funeral to Finish

  This revolutionary - in every sense of the word - double album made me rethink what "punk" was.  Before I heard this, I thought punk was like, Black Flag or Sex Pistols only - it had to be loud and fast and aggressive.  This didn't sound at all like that!  The drums sound like jazz sometimes, or prog, and the guitars are sometimes not even distorted  and D. Boon isn't screaming at all; in fact, he's barely even singing .  This made me realize that punk is an ethos, a framework, a way of approaching music, if not life itself.  This album is punk as fuck. But wow, it is wild.  George Hurley's drums scatter around, full of verve and ideas.  There are a million different guitar sounds, and that bass pops like it's in a funk song.  D. Boon's voice sounds like exactly what he was - a kid from San Pedro, yelling about the truth.  Then you get something like "Cohesion," a gentle acoustic instrumental that sounds like Segovia from the LA b...

  Randy Newman is probably best-known today for his Toy Story songs, those lovable, heart-warming gravelly-voiced songs that play as Woody is trying to rescue the space guy or whatever.  But back in the day, he wrote the same kind of sounding  songs, but way darker.  He's famous, of course, for "Short People," a long joke about prejudice that many people interpreted as literally a direct slur on short people.  People are dumb. This album has some of the same kind of weirdo shit that walks right by you because it's sung in that New Orleans show tune style that's particular to Newman.  "Political Science," for example, advocates the use of nuclear bombs to destroy the rest of the world, except for Australia: Asia's crowded And Europe's too old Africa's far too hot And Canada's too cold And South America stole our name Let's drop the big one There'll be no one left to blame us We'll save Australia Don't want to hurt no kanga...

  This album is a fucking pipe bomb.  I remember hearing it when it came out in 2013 and then listening to it straight for a month, trying to puzzle out the words and the beats and the sounds and just the overwhelming sound collage Ye throws at you. You have to go back to that time, when Kanye was just knocking on the door of being KANYE, or whatever fame-addled cultural iceberg he is now, to kind of begin to get it.  Poised at the precipice of something enormous and beyond his control, Kanye put out this jarring, abrasive, occasionally beautiful album.  The very first thing you hear, in "On Sight" (coproduced with Daft Punk) is synth, followed by drum machine, then Kanye's angry, aggressive, explicitly dirty vocal.  Halfway through the song there's a sample of a chorus that doesn't fit at all but seems natural anyway.  The second song, "Black Skinhead," which can only be described as industrial rap, is an interesting meta-commentary on Kanye's caree...

  Look, I like Kacey Musgraves.  I first got into her stuff after the release of her first major label album, Same Trailer Different Park , in 2013.  Saw her at the Fillmore on that tour; thought she was great.  I continue to enjoy her music.  I think she's got a great voice and a wry sensibility. That being said, this album does not belong on this list and I'm not sure how it ended up here.  Don't get me wrong; it's a nice album.  There are some good songs (and some duds).  But it's not even the best Kacey Musgraves album, let alone better than Houses of the Holy or, for Chrissakes, Coal Miner's Daughter .  I don't even think Kacey Musgraves thinks that. (I continue to be perplexed at how Coal Miner's Daughter ended up at 440 when it is so far clearly superior to a lot of other albums between here and there, but water under the bridge I guess.) Back in the day when Jann Wenner still had day-to-day control of Rolling Stone, it was pretty mu...

  Don't you feel the magic, the mystery's in the air Lets go down to lover's lane with the love we shared Sadly, Mary, I don't.  This album - or at least all the songs until the very last one, which happens to be the title track - did not work for me at all. Every night and day I dream of another way To tell you something good I don't think that I'm understood Yeah, honestly, Mary, I think you're right.  It's not your fault; I'm not understanding you.  It's a me problem.  I've written a lot about how R&B is just not my jam, and this is a lot of R&B.  What's more, it's not nearly as good as some of the other R&B that's lower on the list.  At least to me. It's all gone The love I thought we shared is gone away Maybe it's better that we didn't stay together Probably so.  Speaking of, the lyrics on this album - other than the rap parts, which we'll get to in a second - are, to put it mildly, unexciting.  Th...

  This noise bomb was dropped on an unsuspecting world in January 1968, and that world universally said "what the fuck" and ignored it.  Now, of course, it is rightly regarded as a seminal, wildly influential record.  I'm not going to repeat the famous trope about people buying Velvet Underground records and starting bands, but everyone from the Buzzcocks to the Strokes started here. For all its reputation as an avant-garde art-rock Factory production, it's sort of surprising how conventional a lot of the songs are, at least in conception and structure.  Take the title track, the first song on the album, which, while it's about shooting speed, clearly has roots in 50's rock like Chuck Berry.  The Velvets, of course, were no Chuck Berry, and they take that rock 'n roll template and add fuzz and dirt and a weirdo extended bass solo at the end.  "I Heard Her Call My Name" has these nice harmony backing vocals but the rest of the song is noise and wa...

  Oh no, it's one of my Lobster Albums.  You know how everyone loves lobster, the go-to decadence food?  Say "fried rice" and people shrug, but say "lobster fried rice" and everyone goes "ohhhhhh that sounds amaaaaaazing, must have."  Lobster is just shorthand for rich, indulgent eating.  Except I don't really care about lobster.  It's not the apex of fine dining to me.  It's a midgrade crustacean, not really that much better than shrimp and probably not as good as crab.  It's just lobster. Which is to say, everyone loves this album but it really doesn't do much for me.  I know, I know, it's incredibly influential and a Super Important post-punk album and maybe the biggest example of "angular," a rock critic word I saved especially for this album , but I don't really like any of the songs.  (This is probably also a Third Rail album so I'm doubly fucked for not liking it.) So let's take a representative son...