Funeral to Finish

  Brian Eno again!  I'm not much of a prog guy, and you may remember that I did not like the last Eno project on this list very much .  This one is better than that one in the sense that it has coherent songs, some of which even have verses and choruses! The opening track, "Needles in the Camel's Eye," starts out promisingly enough, a noisy squall of guitar and god knows what else over a driving four-on-the-floor drum beat, a catchy melody.  Some of the songs, like "Cindy Tells Me," have a bit of a 50's vibe.  That song in particular is moving along just fine before Eno just has to do something crazy like insert a sound like an angry swarm of bees about halfway through.  Later, there's "On Some Faraway Beach," an actually lovely song that builds and builds.  You know what?  A lot of it vaguely reminds me of late-stage Beatles, like some of the fragments on Abbey Road . After my last Eno-cussion, this was a mostly pleasurable experience.  I

  What could be more perfect for a gray (here in SF, anyway) Monday morning than Joy Division's Closer , an album so depressing it was released after the singer's suicide with a cover featuring three figures mourning a fourth? By now, you know the story: Ian Curtis, the lead singer of the band, with the odd, solemn voice, hung himself on May 18, 1980, on the eve of the band's first North American tour.  This, of course, transformed the band from what they likely would have been - a good post-punk band - into a legend.  Not that this album doesn't deserve every accolade it gets!  It's a haunting, moving, genuinely unnerving piece of work.  The instrumentation is sparse, driven by drums, with Curtis' voice floating above it and commanding the scene.  My history of listening to Joy Division started with "this voice is just too weird" and evolved to "I cannot imagine these songs sung by someone else."   By this point in his life, Curtis was strug

  Wire is like the Velvet Underground of the UK - loved by record store clerks, a big influence on a lot of people who started bands, and never really cracked the mainstream.  This, their debut album, never charted on its initial release, but is now widely considered a punk, or post-punk, I guess, masterpiece. Even if you don't like a song, don't worry, there's another one about to happen; the longest song on here is "Strange," at 3:59, but most of them are under 2 minutes.  In contrast to yesterday's audio marijuana, this is not a soothing album at all.  It's all pretty fast tempo-wise and that weird affected British punk vocal style and punchy distorted guitars.  I'm saving up the word "angular" for Gang of Four, but this is at least "pre-angular." There are so many covers of songs on this album!  R.E,M. covered the aforementioned "Strange" on Document , for example.  Well, "covered" isn't exactly the right

  I am neither a Neil Young super fan nor a Neil Young detractor.  I am a Neil Young semi-fan.  I had a battered vinyl copy of Harvest ; "Pocahontas" was one of the first songs I ever learned on guitar and warbled during my first attempts at playing and singing.  I've been to a few Bridge School benefits, and was there for the Neil/Pearl Jam collab at GG Park .  Which is to say, I had heard of this album, but never heard it.  Apparently it was out of print for a long time and became a bootleg classic that was passed around and gained a certain underground cachet, which should neither enhance nor diminish this fact: This is a beautiful album. Sometimes I get an album on the list and I listen to it once, maybe go back to a couple of tracks that stood out, and then write it up.  I've been listening to this over and over for days, and I think I like it more every time.  Recorded in the wake of  Harvest , which was a giant success, as well as the overdose death friend and

  There are not many people who could stand to be, you know. Beyonce's little sister, but this album is so beautifully crafted and exquisite that Solange went one better and made an album as good as or better than any of her sister's.  It stands fully on its own, a beautifully realized statement about what it means to be a Black woman in America today.  It doesn't hurt that Solange started writing songs as a teenager, was in Destiny's Child, and released her first album at 16 years old.   The first song I heard off of this album when it first came out, "Cranes in the Sky," is a good synecdoche of the album, with its sparse but intentional production and perfectly restrained instrumentation and, above all, Solange's gorgeous voice floating over the whole thing.  A song about trying to bury your emotions in drinking or partying or whatever, I always pictured cranes - the bird - flying through the sky as a metaphor for unrealized feelings, but I recently lear

  PJ Harvey, who is such a big deal that she got an MBE for "services to music," has put out nine albums.  Any time an artist puts out nine albums, they're not all going to be gems and, I'm sad to say, this is not one of her gems.  (I already checked and a definite gem is later on the list.)  I guess it's her New York City album.  Everyone's gotta make an album about how much they love New York City, and here you go.  Spoiler: it's not exactly packed with incisive truths about the city that no one's thought of before. The whores hustle and the hustlers whore  Too many people out of love  The whores hustle and the hustlers whore  This city's ripped right to the core Tough town, man.  You don't say?  Plus she lets Thom Yorke sing a song and when you're not expecting Thom Yorke and he pops up it's disconcerting. Of course, this is just my personal thing.  I know a lot of people absolutely adore this album and hey, that's great!  I feel

  Poor Aaliyah.  Signed to a record deal at 12 years old and introduced to R. Kelly, who is pretty much the last person on Earth you want to introduce a 12-year-old to.  Sure enough, he married her at 15 (maybe - accounts vary on this, but there certainly was something going on) and produced her first album, the extremely creepily titled  Age Ain't Nothing but a Number .  For this album, however, she worked with Missy Elliott, who is probably underrated as a songwriter, and Timbaland.  Then she made a couple more albums, was in some movies, then got in a plane crash and died.   Today Aaliyah is regarded as a groundbreaking R&B artist.  I always wonder the extent to which dying helps out your artistic cred; would she still be regarded as a hugely important R&B figure if she hadn't died?  Would the Doors have been so highly regarded if Jim Morrison had lived?  No to the second one, but there's no way to run an A/B test. Anyway, this album was of course a huge smash su