Funeral to Finish

  This album is a fucking pipe bomb.  I remember hearing it when it came out in 2013 and then listening to it straight for a month, trying to puzzle out the words and the beats and the sounds and just the overwhelming sound collage Ye throws at you. You have to go back to that time, when Kanye was just knocking on the door of being KANYE, or whatever fame-addled cultural iceberg he is now, to kind of begin to get it.  Poised at the precipice of something enormous and beyond his control, Kanye put out this jarring, abrasive, occasionally beautiful album.  The very first thing you hear, in "On Sight" (coproduced with Daft Punk) is synth, followed by drum machine, then Kanye's angry, aggressive, explicitly dirty vocal.  Halfway through the song there's a sample of a chorus that doesn't fit at all but seems natural anyway.  The second song, "Black Skinhead," which can only be described as industrial rap, is an interesting meta-commentary on Kanye's caree

  Look, I like Kacey Musgraves.  I first got into her stuff after the release of her first major label album, Same Trailer Different Park , in 2013.  Saw her at the Fillmore on that tour; thought she was great.  I continue to enjoy her music.  I think she's got a great voice and a wry sensibility. That being said, this album does not belong on this list and I'm not sure how it ended up here.  Don't get me wrong; it's a nice album.  There are some good songs (and some duds).  But it's not even the best Kacey Musgraves album, let alone better than Houses of the Holy or, for Chrissakes, Coal Miner's Daughter .  I don't even think Kacey Musgraves thinks that. (I continue to be perplexed at how Coal Miner's Daughter ended up at 440 when it is so far clearly superior to a lot of other albums between here and there, but water under the bridge I guess.) Back in the day when Jann Wenner still had day-to-day control of Rolling Stone, it was pretty much an open s

  Don't you feel the magic, the mystery's in the air Lets go down to lover's lane with the love we shared Sadly, Mary, I don't.  This album - or at least all the songs until the very last one, which happens to be the title track - did not work for me at all. Every night and day I dream of another way To tell you something good I don't think that I'm understood Yeah, honestly, Mary, I think you're right.  It's not your fault; I'm not understanding you.  It's a me problem.  I've written a lot about how R&B is just not my jam, and this is a lot of R&B.  What's more, it's not nearly as good as some of the other R&B that's lower on the list.  At least to me. It's all gone The love I thought we shared is gone away Maybe it's better that we didn't stay together Probably so.  Speaking of, the lyrics on this album - other than the rap parts, which we'll get to in a second - are, to put it mildly, unexciting.  Th

  This noise bomb was dropped on an unsuspecting world in January 1968, and that world universally said "what the fuck" and ignored it.  Now, of course, it is rightly regarded as a seminal, wildly influential record.  I'm not going to repeat the famous trope about people buying Velvet Underground records and starting bands, but everyone from the Buzzcocks to the Strokes started here. For all its reputation as an avant-garde art-rock Factory production, it's sort of surprising how conventional a lot of the songs are, at least in conception and structure.  Take the title track, the first song on the album, which, while it's about shooting speed, clearly has roots in 50's rock like Chuck Berry.  The Velvets, of course, were no Chuck Berry, and they take that rock 'n roll template and add fuzz and dirt and a weirdo extended bass solo at the end.  "I Heard Her Call My Name" has these nice harmony backing vocals but the rest of the song is noise and wa

  Oh no, it's one of my Lobster Albums.  You know how everyone loves lobster, the go-to decadence food?  Say "fried rice" and people shrug, but say "lobster fried rice" and everyone goes "ohhhhhh that sounds amaaaaaazing, must have."  Lobster is just shorthand for rich, indulgent eating.  Except I don't really care about lobster.  It's not the apex of fine dining to me.  It's a midgrade crustacean, not really that much better than shrimp and probably not as good as crab.  It's just lobster. Which is to say, everyone loves this album but it really doesn't do much for me.  I know, I know, it's incredibly influential and a Super Important post-punk album and maybe the biggest example of "angular," a rock critic word I saved especially for this album , but I don't really like any of the songs.  (This is probably also a Third Rail album so I'm doubly fucked for not liking it.) So let's take a representative son

  Long before No Depression magazine or an "Americana" category at the Grammys, there was this album, arguably the first Americana album of them all.  In 1967, Roger McGuinn, who was by then one of only two remaining original members of the Byrds, planned what was essentially a tribute album to American music, with country, jazz, R&B, and other genres showing the development of music in America.  Short on members, he invited doomed angel Gram Parsons to join the band and, happily for the rest of us, Parsons derailed McGuinn's original idea and convinced them to decamp to Nashville to record this album, a groundbreaking work that fused pure country with rock, probably the first well-known country-rock, or Americana, album of all time. But enough about the concept.  Are the songs any good?  Reader, they are.  As with most Byrds albums, it's heavy on covers, but the covers are so well-played and realized that they're now identified as Byrds songs more than the o

  When the first song on your album is called "(Don't Worry) If There's a Hell Below, We're All Going to Go" and starts with Curtis Mayfield yelling "Sisters! N-----s! Whities! Jews! Crackers! Don't worry, If there's a Hell below, we're all gonna go!" you know Mayfield has more on his mind than just having fun.  Nevertheless, this album alternately goes so hard and then so smooth that you can't help but absorb that message, whether or not you want to.  (Watchers of mediocre HBO dramas will recognize this song as the theme from "The Deuce.") So that opening song is a rocking funk jam, but the album then moves into the psychedelic soul it's known for, with "The Other Side of Town."  Later we get "Move on Up," an absolute banger that you almost certainly have heard.  The constants throughout are the social message and Mayfield's beautiful voice.  The vocal is higher in the mix than it is on most records,