Funeral to Finish

  I can see how great this album is but it just didn't do much for me, how's that for a boring take?  Frank Ocean's debut studio album, this has been hailed as " a masterful, dynamic and evocative collection of conversations between his inner-self and the listener " and was the best-reviewed album of 2012 .  I wanted to like this album so, so much, but it left me cold. It is cold, for one thing; the production is often chilly and stark, and the themes tend towards the dark.  Ocean (he legally changed his name in 2015) was originally from New Orleans, but moved to LA in 2006.  Rich kids obviously made a big impression on him!  From "Sweet Life:" You've had a landscaper and a house keeper since you were born The starshine always kept you warm So why see the world, when you got the beach? Don't know why see the world, when you got the beach The sweet life In fact, there's a whole song about this!  One of the best songs on the album, "Super...

  Totally true small world story about John Prine: in the late 60's he was a mailman in Chicago and one of the people on his route back when you knew your mailman and talked to them was my wife's uncle and they used to hang out and chat.  Wild, huh?   John Prine went on to become not only one of the world's greatest songwriters but also a mentor and father figure and general lifter upper to a whole generation of younger songwriters like Jason Isbell and Sturgill Simpson.  He was one of the first people I recognized who died of Covid (along with Fountains of Wayne's Adam Schlesinger, another monster songwriting talent of a different era).  Prine wasn't just the aw-shucks singer-songwriter type, he was an absolute legend, but maybe only in the songwriting community.  (Speaking of aw shucks, he said the cover photo for this album was the first time he'd ever sat on a hay bale - the man was from Chicago!) You can hear it all on this album, his first....

  "Stark" doesn't begin to describe this bleak and beautiful album, which starts off with a song about Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, who killed 11 people over an eight-day spree in Nebraska and Wyoming in late 1957 and early 1958.  The song, told from Starkweather's perspective, ends with him strapped into the electric chair, wishing Fugate could be with him as he died.  (Starkweather was, as the song relates, executed in 1959; Fugate, who was 14 years old at the time of the crimes, was later paroled and is still alive.)  And it pretty much goes downhill from there. Springsteen recorded this as demos, using a four-track, in his house, mostly in one day in 1982.  And it sounds like it; most of the songs feature nothing more than guitar, some harmonica, and Springsteen's voice.  It's as simple and unforgiving as the cover image, suited to the subject matter, mostly about lowlifes and people in trouble and facing a crossroads.  In "Johnny 99,...

  My experience with this album being limited, I turned to my wife (well, not literally, I texted her) to see what she thought about it and she replied "It's amazing!  Iconic!  How many of those songs do you know from osmosis?  And a true reinvention and setting out on his own terms in a time when there was huge label pressure not to.  It was HUGE!  That video with all the supermodels?  Gay icon!" Sadly, the video with the supermodels turned out to be " Freedom! '90 ," which isn't on this album but I watched it anyway just to be safe.  But there were plenty of videos for this album too, like the title track! I think what impresses me most about this song - indeed, about most of this album - is that George Michael wrote and arranged all the songs pretty much by himself, which would be unheard of for a major pop star today.  Take a song like "Levitating" by Dua Lipa , a perfectly catchy pop song that came out in 2020 and required three writers ...

  Just an absolute blast of an album.  This mashup of new wave and punk and sheer attitude was released in 1979 and debuted at number 1 on the UK albums chart, due largely to the Pretenders' cover of the Kinks' "Stop Your Sobbing," which had already been released and gone to number 1 in the UK.   This quintessentially British band was fronted by American Chrissy Hynde, and has there ever been a frontwoman with more swagger (except possibly Debbie Harry)?  She wrote almost all the songs and delivers them with so much confidence and attitude that you would swear she'd been doing it for years.  A song like "Precious," the album opener, is so fully formed and well-thought-out as a song that it's hard to believe it's on a band's debut.  It also sets the table perfectly for the rest of the album, landing somewhere between punk, new wave, and pop, an absolutely magnetic blend that Hynde more or less invented.  It also has the provocative lyrics that...

  Oh dear, I'm afraid we have another Sonic Youth situation on our hands by which I mean I'm absolutely sure this is a great album but I just do not like it that much.  I have been trying to like both sushi and PJ Harvey since the 90s and have finally just resigned myself to the fact that it's never going to happen for either one. Believe it or not, this is the second record we've had that was produced by Steve Albini at Pachyderm Studios in Cannon Falls, Minnesota (the other one being In Utero ).  Albini was, and is, famous for a few things, one of them being wide shifts in sound dynamics - or, if I wasn't a pretentious twat, going quiet LOUD quiet - and his resolute opposition to compressing records to sound louder, both of which are on display here.  The album starts with a quiet strumming, and then you can kind of tell there's a song building, and then there's some very quiet vocals, and then around 2:10 it comes BLASTING at you and then gets quiet again...

  Aretha Franklin is a towering figure in American music, one of the greatest singers who has ever lived and whose influence can be felt far and wide to this day.  She's at the top of her game on this album, wielding  her incredible voice like a sword, totally in command of every note.  So why did I have decidedly mixed feelings about it? This album was recorded in January 1972 at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles, under the watchful eye of Aretha's father, Rev. C.L. Franklin.  By this point, Aretha was already a world-famous talent; she had already released "Chain of Fools" and "Think" and won a couple of Grammys, so this was more of a homecoming than a coming out.  She, of course, had grown up in the church and had begun her legendary career by singing gospel music. The importance of Christianity in African-American culture cannot, of course, be overstated.  The Bible's stories of enslaved people getting their freedom must ...