Funeral to Finish

  When you hear the opening riff to "Age of Consent," the first song on this album, do you immediately think you're in an 80's movie?  Are you trading barbs with John Cusack or maybe plotting to bring down Molly Ringwald?  She thinks she's just so great, doesn't she?  No?  Oh, I don't either. You know the story by now.  Joy Division ended when Ian Curtis, the lead singer, killed himself, and then the remaining members formed New Order and became more popular than Joy Division ever was and are absolutely iconic now.  So this was New Order's second album and the company line on this one is that it's a move away from Joy Division's sound and into their own, more poppy, dancey sound.  Listening back to it now for legitimately the first time in 30 years, I can sort of see that but I was also struck by how much some songs sound like Joy Division with a higher-pitched singer, like "Ultraviolence."  Take Bernard Sumner's voice down like 3...

  Remember when we talked about Help around a week ago and I talked about how bitter and dark it is about relationships?  Everyone's breaking up and no one trusts each other?  This album (which predated Help by about a year) is from when the relationship was still good.  The songs are mostly about how much the singer is in love and loves her and she loves him and so forth.  (The exceptions, of course, are John Lennon songs.)  So in the very first song (at least on the UK version), the title track, we hear: You know I work all day to get you money to buy you things And it's worth it just to hear you say you're going to give me everything So why on earth should I moan, cos when I get you alone You know I feel OK When I'm home everything seems to be right When I'm home feeling you holding me tight, tight, yeah Aww, that's sweet.  It also occurs to me that this is kind of a transactional relationship!  He gives her money to buy things, and she gives...

  [PROGRAMMING NOTE:  Funeral to Finish will be on hiatus until probably Tuesday of next week due to me being out of town and not listening to albums probably.  Have a great weekend and see you next week. ] Beloved by stoners and teenage malcontents everywhere, this album has always lived in the shadow of its predecessor, The Dark Side of the Moon .  But it's all relative; this album sold 20 million copies. Pink Floyd is so successful on their own terms that they can sell 20 million copies of an album that's mostly unplayable on radio and opens with a 13 and a half minute song that doesn't have any vocals until almost nine minutes in.  That song, "Shine On You Crazy Diamond," is widely interpreted as being about one of the band's original members, Syd Barrett, whose sharp mental decline led to his removal from Pink Floyd.  Barrett wandered into Abbey Road studios in London during the recording of this album and the event was apparently so distressing and di...

  Pavement released Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain in 1994 and seemed poised for mainstream success.  Although CRCR was by no means a mainstream commercial album, it produced a minor hit ("Cut Your Hair"), landed the band on MTV, and had people convinced Pavement was on the brink of breaking bigtime, like their contemporaries Smashing Pumpkins or Stone Temple Pilots.   So what did Pavement do to capitalize on this budding success?  They recorded this album, a willfully inaccessible, meandering and genre-free musical exploration that was met upon release with reactions ranging from "what the fuck" to "huh" to "oh god what is this."  NEVERTHELESS as the years have passed its reputation has only improved and now it is widely regarded as one of, or maybe just, Pavement's best albums.  I was a hardcore CRCR stan and, like many others, was taken aback by this album and didn't know what to make of it.  I miust confess that I have barely listened to...

  This video was going around music Twitter last week.  It concerns Ringo Starr and is worth watching: The basic idea is that Ringo gets slagged off a lot for not being a very good drummer, but he was in fact a very good, very inventive drummer.  I don't think I know enough about drums to be able to speak definitely on that, but after seeing this video and then listening to this album - the Beatles' fifth studio album - I definitely noticed the drum parts a lot more and yes, they are much more inventive and creative than I had realized. Seven of the songs on this album (well, the British version of this album) were songs on the soundtrack of the movie of the same name, which I have never seen and did not want to watch just for this project. You probably know most of the songs on this album because, like most Beatles songs, they are just part of the cultural lexicon.  I mean, the title track is so woven into general consciousness that a camp my kid went to when she wa...

  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...