Funeral to Finish

  As we start to get down to the last 100+ I start to get nervous about who we haven't seen.  Like, there's gonna be a Smiths album on here, right?  RIGHT?   And one of those bands was the Cure.  So here we are. I can't say I love this album.  I think of the Cure, really, as having two related but distinct sounds - the shimmery, bouncy pop of "Friday I'm in Love" or "In Between Days," and the atmospheric Goth that makes up most or even all of this album.  You can guess which Cure I like more.  I mean, the first Cure album I bought, and the only one I listened to a ton, was Standing on a Beach , the collection of singles that favors the Pop Cure. But if you want to be deep in your feelings, boy, this album will take you there and embrace you and maybe whisper in your ear "it's ok, no one understands us, go ahead and give yourself a tattoo between your thumb and finger."  I mean, it starts with an orchestral and majestic intro in "Pl

  I love this big, sprawling, inventive mess of an album, even though I came to it late.  Always more of a producer than a rapper, Kanye here teams up with Jon Brion, probably best known for his work with Extremely White artists like Aimee Mann and Fiona Apple and for film scores, and the collab turned out to be inspired; we really can't know who contributed what, exactly, but there's a certain playfulness and experimentation here that I like to think Brion helped with.  This may not be Ye's best album (that one, I'm sure, is coming up), but it's certainly one of the most fun. Take "Touch the Sky," based loosely around a sample from "Move On Up" by Curtis Mayfield but thickly layered with other sounds and Kanye's dense rhymes, with a guest turn by then-nascent Lupe Fiasco.  I really love "Drive Slow," ostensibly an homage to cruising in your buddy's car as a teen but with the somber background message of don't try to grow up

  Uggggghhhhhhh for real? OK, fuck it.  Let's do it.  Hey, are you a thrice-divorced retired orthodontist with a condo in Newport Beach and a midlife crisis Harley you ride once a year?  Did you have some pretty wild times at USC in the 70's?  Is your fave place to take a hygienist with crispy hair on the first date a bar called Sharky's?  Then this might be your favorite album.  This absolute slab of midtempo schlock is so easy going down that it makes Coors Light look like a 14% quadruple IPA.  It's the absolute apotheosis of wildly overproduced completely soulless white man's easy listening, a testament to what Southern Californians with plenty of musical ability and no ideas at all can do. Let's stick a pin in the title track and come back to it, because first we must land on track two, "New Kid in Town," a track so soft and unbothersome an Olson twin could kick its ass.  Don Henley said "It’s about the fleeting, fickle nature of love and roma

  Lots of musicians get called "genius," but Sly Stone is an actual musical genius.  As this album amply demonstrates, he fused funk, blues, rock, and psychedelia in hippie-era San Francisco and left an indelible mark on all of those genres.  This album, clocking in at an economical 41-plus minutes (13 of which are a single song, "Sex Machine," more on which later), contains Sly's best ideas in a package that is an absolute joy to listen to. Let's start with track one, the title song, an absolute blast of funk-rock goodness that then moves to a gospel-funk breakdown in the last 40 or so seconds.  I don't even want to type out the name of the second song but it's an exhortation to white people not to call the singer by a racial slur that has become even more incendiary over time.  The overtle racial subject matter is even more fascinating because Sly and the Family Stone were a famously multi-racial, mixed gender band, with a white drummer and a woma

  Beloved of acoustic-strumming bros at waterfront-adjacent bars and jukeboxes worldwide, this album, Morrison's third as a solo artist, contains probably (well, besides "Brown-Eyed Girl") the best-known songs of his career.  I mean, you know "Moondance," of course, and "Caravan," and maybe "And It Stoned Me" and "Everyone."  After the less-than-inspiring sales of Astral Weeks , Morrison's record label pretty much said "You better come up with some hits," and damn if he didn't. What struck me on this relisten was just how unique and personal a style he had, especially for 1970, the year of Abbey Road, Led Zeppelin II , and Cosmo's Factory .  It's this weird blend of folk, rock, jazz, soul, and blues that I'm not sure anyone has done the same way before or since.  "Everyone," for example, starts with a harpsichord and is driven along not by guitar but mostly by flute.  It sounds like a merry b

  I'm not even sure this is in my top 3 Elvis Costello albums (now that I think about it, it's not, they're Imperial Bedroom, Armed Forces , and Punch the Clock ), but yeah, like all EC records from his Golden Era of 1977-1987, it's absolutely packed with gems.  How about these: "(I Don't Want to Go to) Chelsea" and "The Beat" and "No Action" and "Radio Radio" and those are just the best-known songs.  This guy would just wake up and songs would fall out of his ass. And this was only his second album!  Notably, it was his first with the backing band that would become known as the Attractions, including a keyboard player fresh out of the Royal College of Music named Steve Nieve, whose mark on Costello's sound was immediate.  So many of these songs have strong keyboard parts - just take the aforementioned "The Beat," where the keyboard not only punctuates the verses with little accents, but in fact drives the main m

  Nope. Is this album in my personal Top 500? No.