Funeral to Finish

  There's a scene in the 2005 Johnny Cash biopic where young Johnny is playing a show and is up right after Jerry Lee Lewis.  In a brief, memorable moment, Jerry Lee comes offstage and snarls "Nobody follows the Killer" to Johnny.  (It's at the end of this clip, which is worth watching.) Fun fact: Jerry Lee was played by Waylon Payne, son of Willie Nelson's former guitarist Jody Payne and singer Sammi Smith.  Waylon is a country artist in his own right, and just released an album this year with the Fiona Apple-esque title Blue Eyes, The Harlot, The Queer, The Pusher & Me .  It's actually really good!  (Check out " Sins of the Father ," for example.) But I digress.  We're here to talk about this album, an anthology, really, that appears to roughly trace Lewis's career chronologically from the Sun sessions and early rockabilly like "Crazy Arms" and "It'll Be Me," up through his much longer country career, and his (no

  I'm not sure there's much doubt that Prince was one of the most gifted and talented songwriters and performers who has ever lived.  I have no doubt that if he had been born in Vienna in the 1700's he would have mopped the floor with Beethoven.  His influence on modern music is huge and wide, and this is really the album that kicked it off.  Not only did he write all the songs, he played (almost) all the instruments and recorded the whole thing, pretty much, by himself.  Just mind-blowing. He made this amazing album by synthesizing funk, R&B, new wave, and pop, and instantly influenced every one of those genres.  The most familiar song on thgis record (to me, anyway), "When You Were Mine," is a perfect example.  It's got that keyboard riff running through it like we would hear so many times later in the 80's, and that incredible funk backbeat, but the star is really Prince's voice, super high-pitched but strong and assured.  It's instantly hum

  Just wow.  I haven't heard this album in what seems like forever and I had forgotten about its raw power, the sheer force of a band playing at their peak.  Widely regarded as the best live album of all time, it literally crackles with electricity.  Upon my (much overdue) relisten, and as an older and wiser Rock Music Fan, a couple of things stood out: Roger Daltrey's voice still sounds raw and a little unpolished.  He doesn't have the high gloss that he'll have later in the Who's career.  I don't mean to suggest that his singing isn't great; it is!  It's just not as polished as it will become.  For this record, that's exactly the right sound. This band is extremely tight.  They've obviously been playing and rehearsing together nonstop, and there's barely a note or a drum hit out of place.  At the same time, there's a wildness and an intensity to it, like it doesn't sound OVERrehearsed, and there's obviously a lot of freedom fo

  Vampire Weekend is maybe the last of the Hipster Bands, back when "hipster" as a term had the power to divide and anger, which seems absolutely quaint now in light of four years of True Life: The Madness of King Donald and Worldwide Pandemic and Oh Hey Here's Another Recession Just In Case You Forgot About the Last One Like 10 Years Ago.  Hard to care about whether American Apparel opens a store in your neighborhood when breathing can kill you. So in their early years they were almost shorthand for white, overeducatred, appropriative, bratty kids except they also managed to make fun, inventive, exciting music.  On this, their third album, they look ahead from the arch observations and class signifiers of college kids on the quad and spring into young adulthood.  I liked this album a lot from the day it came out and we listened to it a lot in our house, so I'm not an unbiased observer here. Vampire Weekend The Early Years was always built on the interplay between fro

  Let's say that I was deeply steeped in 90's hip hop and the DJ culture of the time.  Let's say that I'm Chris Dahlen, who gave the reissue of this album a perfect Pitchfork 10 in 2005 .  Let's say that I know what I'm talking about when it comes to instrumental hip hop at all.  We would have to say any of these things for me to truly GET this album. I have read a not inconsiderable amount about this album, so let me convey what I've learned: "It changed the musical landscape in so many ways . There would be no distinct sound to Radiohead's OK Computer without it, and it ushered a gigantic leap forward in the way sampled production could sound." "Stitched together with samples from every conceivable nook and cranny of musical endeavor, Shadow’s debut invented, established and legitimized instrumental hip-hop music in one fell swoop." "Some under a minute, some over nine, the 13 tracks are designed for headphones--Apollonian eve

  This album - the US version, anyway, which is the one on this list, not the UK version - kicks of with "Paint It, Black," one of the most iconic psych-rock songs in history, and personally one of my favorite Stones songs.  There's been a thread on Twitter recently of "TV shows that only you remember," and although I didn't enter this one, how about "Tour Of Duty," a Vietnam War drama which ran on CBS in the late 80's and featured this song in the opening credits? "Under My Thumb" and "Lady Jane" are also on this record, along with "I Am Waiting," which memorably appears in "Rushmore," one of my favorite movies, so a lot of favorites going on here. The album itself is remarkable, for a couple of reasons.  It's the first Stones album in which the songs were all written by the band, and that means Jagger and Richards, essentially, although the soon-to-be-dead Brian Jones contributed some of the weirdo

  Short version: This album is fantastic. Long version: I've loved "pop music" as long as I can remember, even as I have long struggled to come up with a definition of "pop music" that can contain Big Star and Teenage Fanclub and Jellyfish and this album.  What I can say is that there are different flavors of pop, some that I like (power pop) more than others (whatever it is Mariah Carey does).  This album is surely pop, and it is not the kind of pop I normally gravitate towards, but it is absolutely incredible.   First of all, there are a bunch of songs on here that you - and by "you" I mean "I" - already knew well, like the title track and "Cherish" and "Express Yourself," which are all certified bangers and I don't even think I was embarrassed for liking when they came out and my identity as a Replacements-loving torn-jeans indie-punk rejected anything high-gloss sheeny from LA or that appeared to be from Big Music,