Funeral to Finish

  You cannot kill disco, you can only make it stronger and angrier.  On this album, EDM superstars Daft Punk turned their icy gaze to one of the most unfairly maligned genres in music.  The result is a fantastic sounding album, but I don't know if the songs entirely work for me.   The first thing you notice is that the music sounds live - like I was listening and I thought "this can't be a drum machine, it sounds too real" - and turns out DP brought in studio musicians to record a lot of it.  There's a lot of vocoder, of course, although blessedly 70's songwriting icon Paul Williams gets to sing "Touch," which he co-wrote, in his own voice.  Guess who else shows up?  Our Strokes buddy Julian Casablancas, singing unrecognizably altered vocals on "Instant Crush."  It occurs to me that the Strokes could rockify that song and it would be better than a lot of the Strokes' later catalogue. Of course you are aware of "Get Lucky," wh

  Before we get into the guts of this record, please allow me a Burrito Justice-style historical diversion.  The acoustic portions of this album at the beginning ("My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)," "Thrasher," and "Ride My Llama") were recorded in San Francisco at a long-gone theater called the Boarding House, that was located at 960 Bush Street. After a fire, the theater was torn down in 1980 and replaced by the featureless condos you've passed a million times on your way downtown (Bush to the Bay, Pine to the Pacific, y'know). Enough historical diversion.  Neil Young again!  We are getting about one Neil Young record a week now.  I knew Neil Young was important but really I did not anticipate him being the most featured artist in the bottom 205 records at all. I had this album on cassette in the late 80's/early 90's and I wore that thing out .  This was definitely one of my most listened to albums during that time.  As I've mentione

  An absolute monster of an album that contained a few hit singles, one of which was turned into maybe the best music video of all time, easily the best music video up to that time.  Of course, I'm talking about "Mercy Street."  No I'm not, you doofus, I'm talking about "Sledgehammer." Pretty fucking catchy for the guy who got kicked out of Genesis for being too weird, huh?  OK, it wasn't exactly like that, to be fair.  He left, citing a desire to spend more time with family blah blah blah but then he started to go off into some avant-garde musical/film experiments.  He also put out a string of semi-successful solo albums, but nothing like this one. So let me say this is not really my shit and it took me a few listens but there is a lot of interesting stuff going on here.  You all know "Sledgehammer" and "Big Time," two obviously soul-influenced songs, both of which are immediately catchy and bouncy and it's no surprise they b

  The mid-80's Ford Mustang of albums, this redoubtable classic is beloved by middle-aged white guys, the people who stock jukeboxes, and anyone who has a Tasmanian devil tattoo.  Every account of the making of this album includes the irresistible nugget that MCA initially rejected it because they didn't hear a single.  Brother, this album is all motherfucking singles.  If you don't know every word to "Free Fallin'" or "I Won't Back Down" then you were probably in suspended animation since the 90's. These are undoubtedly great songs.  But let me swoop in here with kind of a downer: they're not particularly interesting songs.  They're all verse-chorus-bridge/solo etc., and they all sound like they were written on an acoustic, which they were.  This is not to say there aren't some great moments!  When he hits that E minor in the prechorus of "Yer So Bad," and sings "But nottttttt meeeeeee baaaaaaaaby" it is a ge

  When you think of "the blues" today, you might picture a tired genre, a bunch of old guys slogging their way through a set of tiresome and predictable songs.  Or maybe not!  But either way, this album is a fantastic demonstration of why it wasn't always like that.  Maybe this is the blues, but this is not that kind of blues. The first song is called "Every Day I Have the Blues" but it sounds more like "Every Day I Have the Jazz" to me.  It's a fast, almost frantic jam, with syncopated drums and blasts of horns, a real ride.  The next one, "Sweet Little Angel," is more the kind of thing you think of as "blues," but it's so full of life and verve there's no chance of getting bored. I'm used to late-era B.B. King, the affable showman with his famous guitar, "Lucille," but I had never appreciated the man's voice before this record.  B.B. King could fucking SING.  Check out the incredible vocals on "W

  Would you be surprised if I told you this is the best selling album by a female artist of all time?  I was mildly surprised!  It's also the best-selling "country" album of all time, but I'm going to go all music snob here and say it's more country-adjacent than actual country.  In fact, one of the things that's surprised me about this list is how little country there is on it.  This is, of course, a result of who Rolling Stone solicited votes from.  I think they did an admirable job of expanding beyond the usual white male rock crowd and a miserable job of asking the country music world.  Who knows, maybe the best 50 country albums of all time are coming up, but I doubt it. Back to Shania.  She wrote these songs with famous producer/then husband Robert "Mutt" Lange and turned over production entirely to him, which is why this sounds like a high-gloss BMW 7-series instead of an old Ford pickup.  To say it is carefully crafted and slickly produced is

  Another one of those acts with more influence than fans, the New York Dolls paved the way for so much glam rock and hair metal and punk.  Kiss owes their entire existence to the Dolls.   I liked, not loved, this album.  It's weird, I don't think I've ever heard it all the way through, but I definitely knew the song "Trash," which is a pretty great song.  What was strange was I know I knew the song from somewhere but I couldn't place where at what point in my life I knew it and it felt strange and disconnected, like another person had once known the song.  Memory is a trip. This would be a good time to point out that the Dolls were snubbed this year for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame which, I'm sure, they're probably proud of.  I've had ongoing debates with people for years about the HOF and whether it means anything and we've never come up with a good answer.  I tend to think getting inducted into a rock hall of fame is probably the uncoolest