Funeral to Finish

  Way before Dolly was DOLLY, an icon of not just country music but American culture writ large, she was a working (extremely hardworking - 15 albums in 4 years around the time of this one) country songwriter and musician and singer, and this album is a perfect snapshot of this era.  Unlike most country artists (and probably most pop artists), she wrote almost all the songs on this album herself, with some offerings from Porter Wagoner, her longtime collaborator and possibly unfulfilled romance. The title song is a classic, a true story about Dolly's impoverished childhood and how her mother sewed her a coat out of rags that she wore to school, only to be teased by other kids.  Lots and lots of country artists have songs about their hardscrabble childhoods, but this is one of the most affecting and maybe even defiant you'll ever hear.  Dolly swears it's true; you can even see a reproduction of the titular coat at the Chasing Rainbows museum at Dollywood in Pigeon Forge, Te

  Potentially another lobster album , although I don't have a clear sense of how many people like this album.  (To refresh, a lobster album is one that people love but that I don't particularly like.)  OK, so I know some about Joni Mitchell, of course know a few songs, but had never heard this album before.  Let me cut right to the chase; I did not like it.  I'm not a huge jazz person, and a lot of this sounds suspiciously jazzy to me.  It's apparently the album where Mitchell broke from her folk/pop roots and started going wild and doing her own thing and whatnot.  More power to you, Joni, but this is not it for me. There is one song on here that I thought was kind of cool, "The Jungle Line," if for no other reason than because it has sampled drums, which may or may not be the first use of sampling in a major-label release.  The drum sound is cool, but again, there's that unleashed melody that just kind of free-floats all over the place and doesn't re

  This album - Janis' second and, tragically, final solo record - opens with a fast drumbeat, soon joined by guitar and then that voice , that otherworldly voice that sounds like no one else before or since.  Really, this entire album is a tribute to Janis Joplin's amazing instrument, which she had complete control over and the ability to modulate between a raspy whisper and a full-throated yawp.  Just an incredible voice. Recorded in LA in 1970, it came out in January 1971, three months after Janis OD'd in a hotel room at the age of 27 .  It's a blues/soul pastiche, really well-recorded and expertly produced by Paul Rothchild.  Janis is backed up by her road band, the Full Tilt Boogie Band, who are clearly tight from a lot of shows together. But let's cut straight to the outlier, an a capella song that's so well-known that my Dad, who was a hardcore country music fan and whose interest in rock extended only as far as Roy Orbison, knew all the words to: "Me

  I've been really lucky during the now-year-plus course of this project, because I've discovered some great stuff I otherwise wouldn't have heard; revisited some old favorites; and learned to appreciate things I didn't particularly like.  This one, I have to say, is a tough one, because I really, really, really, disliked this record. I realize that this album has been lauded as a masterpiece of post-punk and gotten the Cobain seal of approval (for the song "Typical Girls," specifically), and I'm probably going to come off as a music idiot for not liking it, but this just did not resonate with me in any way.  Let me just say I was unsurprised to learn that " [w]hen the group first formed, they couldn't play their instruments for shit ."  A lot of the songs sound like a group of people who have never written, or maybe even heard, a song before.  There's a lot of playground, sing-songy stuff that approaches "singing" but is so ant

  After the disappointing sales of Paul's Boutique (an album that will surely appear later on this list), the Beastie Boys did what any self-respecting rap/rock band would do: bummed around LA for a few years, rented a former ballroom on Glendale Boulevard, threw parties, and listened to lot of records.  After a while, the stuff they were listening to - the Meters, Sly Stone, Lee "Scratch" Perry - started to creep into the songs they were working on, and this album is the result.  It sounds like a mash-up, a pastiche of genres and stylistic experiments, and the Beasties went back to playing instruments and being a band again after the mostly sample-driven Paul's Boutique . The results are mixed.  There's some unquestionably good stuff on here, like the singles "Pass the Mic," "Jimmy James," and probably the best-known song "So What'Cha Want."  I like "Jimmy James" in particular; it's built entirely on samples, as fa

  When you hear the opening riff to "Age of Consent," the first song on this album, do you immediately think you're in an 80's movie?  Are you trading barbs with John Cusack or maybe plotting to bring down Molly Ringwald?  She thinks she's just so great, doesn't she?  No?  Oh, I don't either. You know the story by now.  Joy Division ended when Ian Curtis, the lead singer, killed himself, and then the remaining members formed New Order and became more popular than Joy Division ever was and are absolutely iconic now.  So this was New Order's second album and the company line on this one is that it's a move away from Joy Division's sound and into their own, more poppy, dancey sound.  Listening back to it now for legitimately the first time in 30 years, I can sort of see that but I was also struck by how much some songs sound like Joy Division with a higher-pitched singer, like "Ultraviolence."  Take Bernard Sumner's voice down like 3

  Remember when we talked about Help around a week ago and I talked about how bitter and dark it is about relationships?  Everyone's breaking up and no one trusts each other?  This album (which predated Help by about a year) is from when the relationship was still good.  The songs are mostly about how much the singer is in love and loves her and she loves him and so forth.  (The exceptions, of course, are John Lennon songs.)  So in the very first song (at least on the UK version), the title track, we hear: You know I work all day to get you money to buy you things And it's worth it just to hear you say you're going to give me everything So why on earth should I moan, cos when I get you alone You know I feel OK When I'm home everything seems to be right When I'm home feeling you holding me tight, tight, yeah Aww, that's sweet.  It also occurs to me that this is kind of a transactional relationship!  He gives her money to buy things, and she gives him "ever