Funeral to Finish

  Widely regarded as the greatest rock live album of all time, this album is great if you love seemingly endless guitar noodling and songs that never really go anywhere.  Am I being too harsh?  I'm being too harsh probably.  I bet this album is great if you're fucking rocked on acid or whatever.  As regular readers are no doubt aware, I am not a fan of long jams and do you think this album has long jams?  Let me tell you.  This was a double album with SEVEN SONGS.  Side two and side four both have ONE SONG.  One song!   Just so I don't come off as a complete dick and musical ignoramus, there are things about this album I like.  I like "Statesboro Blues," the album opener, which comes in at a relatively tight 4:19, and is a great blues boogie.  It's a cover of a 1928 Blind Willie McTell song, and features absolutely incendiary guitar interplay between Duane Allman and Dickey Betts.  This the kind of jamming I can get behind; it has a point, a structure, and you

  This album will always be a little cursed, released four days after Kurt Cobain killed himself and dogged to this day by rumors that Kurt helped write or outright wrote some of the material, a charge surely rooted in the sexism that predominates in the music industry.  And it's too bad, because it's a spectacular album with a ton of great musical ideas and a lot to say.   Hole's first album, Pretty on the Inside , was more hard-edged punk-flavored rock, and Courtney Love and the band set out with this record to do something different and show more range.  Man, they did it.  Not that it's all gentle melodies; a song like "Plump" is just as hard and angry as anything in Love's husband's catalog.  But take "Miss World," the first single, which starts with gentle strumming and Love singing I am the girl you know, can't look you in the eye I am the girl you know, so sick I cannot try I am the one you want, can't look you in the eye I am

  Another album whose massive influence far outstripped its actual sales.  This weird little gem emerged from the CBGB scene in Lower Manhattan in the 70s, but instead of the wild simplicity of the Ramones, Television was doing something altogether different.  Is it art-punk?  Post-punk?  Prog-punk?  Who knows?  On the cover, the band looks like aliens emerging from their spacecraft with what could be either good or ill intentions, and the music must have seemed just as weird and otherworldly at the time. Unlike the slapdash immediacy of pure punk, the band meticulously rehearsed this album until every note was expertly and precisely placed.  Some of the songs, like the title track and "See No Evil," are based around a delicate little guitar riff that is more of a motif than a dominant feature.  The guitar playing throughout is not just expertly done but also so unique that it simultaneously defined the sound of the band and influenced a thousand bands that would come later. 

  I went to Peru.  Peru is wild, man!  We were in Lima for a few days and then we went to this area near Ica called Huacachina with these massive sand dunes where we took a semiterrifying dune buggy ride up and down the slopes and then I watched my family try to sandboard and shit.  Then back to Lima.  Man, they have some good-ass food in Peru but also if you think it's bad for pedestrians here you would get laughed at in Lima, where the drivers may not be trying intentionally to kill you but they sure drive like they are. Then I got Covid.  Not really a surprise, I guess, travelling internationally and all, and it really hasn't been a big deal, just more annoying than anything else. Which brings us to Fiona Apple's sophomore album, the full title of which is  When the Pawn Hits the Conflicts He Thinks Like a King What He Knows Throws the Blows When He Goes to the Fight and He'll Win the Whole Thing 'Fore He Enters the Ring There's No Body to Batter When Your M

  Before we get started on today's album, I have to let you know that this blog will be on hiatus next week and part of the week after that.  There's no easy way to say this, so I'm just going to come right out and say it: I'm going to Peru. I've never been a huge traveler.  My mother was obsessed with travel and was always off to Thailand or France or Guatemala.  Growing up with a chaotic and unpredictable mother I think left me wanting a sense of order and stability in my life, so I was never the backpack-through-Europe type.  My wife is from Ireland so I've gone to Europe a number of times since I've met her and I've greatly enjoyed those trips, but it never would have occurred to me to go to Peru, which seems like a fine country but is just one I never really think about, except that one of my relatives who is a university Spanish professor has been in Lima since January doing some kind of research or something, I'm not 100% sure, with his whole

  I feel like such an idiot for disliking most of Joni Mitchell's stuff as much as I do, but this, her most commercial and probably most accessible album, I even enjoyed in parts.  Look, Joni Mitchell is widely beloved and revered and she doesn't need me or anybody else to like her and I have some glaring musical blind spots and this is just one of them.  Wow I sound defensive but it's just so weird to totally not get something that so many people love so completely.   There is one song on here I liked unconditionally: "Raised on Robbery," a 50s-tinged boogie about a prostitute trying to pick up a guy at the Empire Hotel in Regina, Saskatchewan (Mitchell, you know, being Canadian and all): He was sitting in the lounge of the Empire Hotel He was drinking for diversion He was thinking for himself A little money riding on the Maple Leafs Along comes a lady in lacy sleeves She says let me sit down You know, drinkin' alone's a shame (It's a shame it's a

  First of all, just feast your eyes on that cover.  It's so 80s it looks like leg warmers married a Rubik's Cube.  The squiggly lines, bright colors, it's got it all.  The cover for the single version of the title track goes even harder: It's like the Berlin Wall is falling all over again.  Anyway, graphic design is not even close to the most interesting thing about this album, a tight 41 minutes of electro-dance-pop mixed with R&B and funk and disco and God knows what else.  The cultural reach of this album is hard to overestimate; I knew like half the songs, and to my knowledge I have never listened to this album before. Thjis album, which came out in 1986, was Jackson's third, following two mostly forgettable and routine pop efforts overseen by her legendarily domineering father, Joe.  With this album, she stepped away from his overbearing presence and worked with superstar producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis.  It seems to have worked; it sold like 10 millio