Funeral to Finish

  Try as I might (which is admittedly not very hard), I have not been able to get my shit together to listen to the next album and so I'm going to put the whole thing on hold until Monday, January 3, 2022.   I also want to listen to some of the stuff on various year-end lists.  Doing this project has largely deprived me of the opportunity to keep up with new music, although I guess almost everything here has been "new music" but you know what I mean. Thanks for reading, and see you in a few days!

  Through no fault of Black Sabbath's and for reasons too mundane to detail here, I only got like four hours of sleep last night, perfect for this drony slab of sludge metal.  (It's kind of an amazing coincidence it comes right after that Metallica album, which is its direct descendant.)  Appropriately enough, this record kicks off with "Sweet Leaf," a plodding ode to marijuana that seems absolutely quaint now that you can buy THC drops in a brushed wood boutique and your general bud off the street is like 20 times more potent than anything Ozzy dreamed of in 1971.   Look, I listened to this with an open mind and all but let me just say that it struck me as more of a vehicle for influence than an actual album I would sit down and enjoy.  I mean, there are entire genres - not just bands - that copped their sound from this album.  That being said, it's kinda boring and Ozzy's lyrics are... well, Ozzy was never known as a great lyricist.   There...

  Regardless of how you feel about this album or Metallica or heavy metal in general, we all have to agree that "Enter Sandman" is an absolutely kick-ass song.  Just a fat slab of pure rock and roll.  So good that cello quartet Apocalyptica can do a deliriously great gothy cover of it. OK so I'm not a huge metalhead or anything but I really enjoyed listening to this.  I mean, sometimes you just need that pure headbanging shit, am I right?  Not only was this Metallica's best-selling album, it's one of the best-selling albums of all time , 16 million plus copies.  16 million heshers can't be wrong! I guess Metallica is pretty famous for being incredibly hard to work with, and the recording of this album was contentious, to say the least.  Producer Bob Rock clashed with the band repeatedly, but the results speak for themselves; it's a great sounding album.  OK, James Hetfield will never be remembered as a great lyricist, but I don't think many people...

  Going from Red Headed Stranger to this is more than a little jarring, like jumping from the hot tub into the pool, if the pool was electrified and French and heavily Autotuned.  (I actually accidentally jumped from RHS to tomorrow's entry, then had to backtrack, but you get the idea.)  Even I, the Old Guy Who Knows Nothing About Electronic Music, know that this was a hugely influential and important album, even if I did not know until yesterday that it was New York garage house or French house or maybe post-disco?  I guess I thought everything that came after disco was post-disco but apparently that's not what that means?  Anyway. First song, first side, is "One More Time," a song I became intimately familiar with since it was on Pitchfork's Best Songs of the 2000s (in fact, it was number 5!), and I made a Spotify playlist of the top 30 songs on the list that I listened to almost nonstop in early 2010.  (Just a quick detour here to say that the list is...

  I accidentally listened to the wrong album yesterday. Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? I can't believe this is the first time this has happened. Unclear what the holiday schedule will be yet.  Thanks for reading!

  I have never counted myself as a huge Willie Nelson fan.  Of course, I appreciate the songwriting - I mean, the guy wrote "Crazy" and "Hello Walls" and another couple dozen incredible songs - but I just don't like his voice.  I was approaching this album with a sense of "let's just get through it and move on." Guess what?  I kinda loved it.   It's telling that at first Columbia didn't want to put it out because they thought it was all demos.  (Willie had negotiated a contract with complete artistic control, however, so they put it out anyway.)  "Sparse" would be doing a lot of work describing this album.  It's quiet and contemplative, but with an unexpected weight and depth that I hadn't anticipated.  It's a country concept album, about a preacher on the run from the law after killing his unfaithful wife and her lover.  Not super out there for country music, but there you have it. One of the biggest surprises for me ...

  "Kraftwerk’s 'Trans Europe Express' is the most important pop album of the last 40 years, though it may not be obvious." OK, calm down a little, Randall Roberts of the Los Angeles Times .  First off, I'm not even sure this is  a pop album.  At least not the kind of "pop" that can stand without a synth- or electro- in front of it.  Now, this is certainly an important album, and was certainly influential, but most important pop album of the last 40 years seems like kind of a stretch.  I mean, Thriller  is just sitting there going "Wha?" To me, the funniest thing about this album (well, one of the funniest things, after the song "The Hall of Mirrors," which I'll get to) is the fact that it was recorded at Kling Klang studios in Dusseldorf.  Is there any better example of an album sounding like the name of the studio where it was made?  This album is all klings and klangs and boops and deet deet deet noises.  There is some pop on he...