Funeral to Finish

  Never has my personal take on an artist shifted so quickly.  You may remember that when we last saw Frank Ocean ( #148, Channel Orange ), I said "it just didn't do much for me."  Either I changed or this album represented a massive leap forward or something, because, reader, this is some incredible music.  It's way, way outside my usual wheelhouse and so it took me some time to warm up to and I feel like I still haven't absorbed it completely.  I'm going to keep returning to it because there is a lot here. Trying to describe what kind of music this is would be like trying to ask a lake what kind of water it is.  But I'll say a few words anyway.  There are elements of dream pop and R&B and electro-pop and gospel and hip hop and soul and I don't, just everything .  This is an album that borrows a lyric from Elliott Smith ("fond farewell to a friend," in "Siegfried") and part of a Beatles melody ("Here, There, and Everywhere...

  This might not have been the very first punk album, but it was the first Punk Album.  I'll explain.  Before the Sex Pistols, there were proto-punk bands like the Stooges and the New York Dolls, but in May of 1976 Malcolm McLaren returned to London and started hanging out at a boutique called Sex and managing a band called the Strand.  He happened upon a young non-vocalist named John Lydon, later rechristened Johnny Rotten, and brought him into the band, which was quickly renamed the Sex Pistols.  They began writing songs together played their first show in November 1975, a gig that ended, predictably, with them fighting with the headlining band. This album, the band's debut, was largely recorded in early 1977, although "Anarchy in the UK" was released in November 1976 and was an immediate success and it's not hard to see why.  Not only is it provocative and, for the time, extremely controversial, it's also just a great fucking song , I am not kidding, one...

  My friend (and occasional commenter) Stephen has his own test for a Top 100 album: every album in that group, he says, "should be someone's favorite album."  He had his doubts about Plastic Ono Band (I don't, I'm absolutely sure there are some weird boomers who have this as their favorite album), but I have absolutely no doubts that this is a lot of people's favorite album.  And no surprise!  It's a great album!  I don't think of myself as a particularly huge Beyoncé fan, but there are a bunch of songs on this album I really liked right away. It's wild to me that the first single was "XO," because, although it fits in with the sonic palette of the album, it could just as easily be a Yeah Yeah Yeah song with a few tweaks.  Like all the other songs on the album, it was the product of a collaborative process, this particular one written with The-Dream (yes, he uses the hyphen in his name), who also helped write "Umbrella" for Ri...

  Oh dear, another Hugely Important Album that didn't do much for me, and I'm saying this as someone who absolutely loves Stand! , the 1969 predecessor to this album.  If anyone was expecting more of the exuberance and joy of Stand! , well, I have some bad news.  This album is... not exactly dark , but it seems inward-looking, more closed off, angrier maybe?  I mean, there was plenty to be angry about.  The Civil Rights Movement was further along by the time this album was being recorded in 1970-71, but the Vietnam War had descended into a quagmire and it was clear the dream of the hippie movement was illusory. Sly himself followed that trajectory, and by the time this was recorded, he was fully in the thrall of cocaine and PCP.  He toyed with this album endlessly, recording parts from his own bed, bouncing tracks back and forth so much that a lot of the album has audible tape hiss.  He makes this explicit in the album's opener, "Luv N' Haight": "Feel ...

  Let's cut right to the chase and talk about "Son of a Preacher Man," which is most likely the only song on this album you already knew.  It is an absolute classic, a gem of a song, just perfection.  Written by John Hurley and Ronnie Wilkins, it was originally intended for Aretha Franklin, but then producer Jerry Wexler heard it and snapped it up for this album.  And a good thing, too, because it's a perfect fit for Springfield's voice, all gentle and innocent while singing about getting deflowered by the preacher's kid. This album is universally praised and I guess loved which is fine but let me break it to you: the rest of this record is kind of a bore.  A lot of the songs sound identical and that's fine, she's doing a sound, but they're just not very....interesting.  "Preacher Man" is so far above the overall album that the rest kind of just lie there limply.  Take "The Windmills of Your Mind," for example, the eighth track,...

  When you read the title and saw the cover, admit it, did the opening riff of "Back in Black" start playing in your head?  Did you get a "DENH ... DEH-NEH-NEH ... DEH-NEH-NEH" right away?  I sure did, and of course, because this is the second best-selling album in the world (right behind Thriller , of course), and the fourth best-selling album in the US.  50 million copies worldwide, 25 million US, and it still stinks like Schlitz and cheap weed and B.O. and still rocks the fuck out.  It's Friday, it's 5 o'clock somewhere, go ahead and put this on. You probably know the now-iconic and tragic tale of AC/DC's first singer, Bon Scott, dying of alcohol poisoning in the back of a parked car in London and the band almost throwing in the towel but instead recruiting Brian Johnson, who had already been in a band called Geordie and before that in the wonderfully-named Gobi Desert Canoe Club.  New singer in tow, the reformulated band decamped to Compass Point...

  Finally out from under Paul McCartney's thumb, John Lennon and muse/band destroyer Yoko Ono repaired to Abbey Road in late 1970 to begin work on a pair of twin solo albums.  Lennon had a bunch of ideas he couldn't use in the Beatles and assembled them into this pastiche of half-finished songs, wild sounds, and vocal experimentation. I defy you to find a written review of this album that doesn't include the phrase "primal scream" or "primal therapy," because this album was created in the wake of Lennon's primal therapy with Arthur Janow, which obviously left a huge impact on Lennon, because this album literally sounds like therapy.  From the first song, "Mother": Mother, you had me but I never had you I wanted you, you didn't want me So I, I just got to tell you Goodbye, goodbye Father, you left me but I never left you I needed you, you didn't need me That'll be $225, please.  The latter days and breakup of the Beatles obviousl...