VW's Top 1000 Albums

[Paaaaul]

Does my opinion matter that much? They're perfectly fitting descriptions and they are my recommendations. If you feel cheated, I'll try arranging some verbs, adjectives and nouns in the right order myself next time.

The whole idea of this thread is to share your love of music with other people.
Just naming an album and pasting some text next to it says nothing about the pleasure you derive from the music you've listed.

The great thing about the 1000 Singles thread wasn't that people had listed songs, but what they had written about them. If it had been just a list of 1000 singles, it would have been dull as hell and no-one would have suggested this idea again.

If anybody here wanted to read a review from Pitchfork or wherever-the-fuck-you-nicked-the-reviews-from, they could go there and read them, easily, and if you want to see how dull lists of records are - go here http://www.rocklist.net/ and try to read a page without your mind wandering after 10 seconds.

I haven't had the time to write a decent review yet, so I haven't bothered, because I know it's all about the writing and not the listing.

[Emma Raducanu]

The great thing about the 1000 Singles thread wasn't that people had listed songs, but what they had written about them.

That is true. I'll put more effort in next time. That's a warning to everybody.

[LC]

Aye, don't be a dick.

[CaledonianGonzo]

987.  The Band – The Band



Released:  September 22, 1969
Genre:  Rock/Folk-rock
Label:  Capitol
Producer:  John Simon

It is a truth commonly acknowledged that even classic albums can have duff or even slightly sub-par tracks.  For every Tomorrow Never Knows, there is a Love You To; for every Idiot Wind there is a Lily, Rosemary & The Jack of Hearts.  There are blights on many supposed masterpieces, be it Four Sticks or Fitter, Happier.

However, try as I might, I just can't find one on The Band's eponymous second album.  Approached from just about any angle, its flaws, if they exist, remain elusive.  In their crafting of this classic, The Band appeared to forget that sometimes mistakes might be expected of them.
 
A paradox, then.  For to err is human, and this is nothing if not one of the most warm and human records of the 1960s.

You can tell they mean it from the photo, mounted formally on the dull brown background of the sleeve, the members of the band standing uncomfortably frigid before the camera's gaze, come to shuffle and stare like refugees from an Appalachia that Cormac McCarthy would one day depict in Gothic novels.  One might be forgiven for thinking the album contained in such a sleeve might be a tad on the dour side, its contents austere, even forbidding and claustrophobic.

Au Contraire, Blackadder.  Not a bit of it.  In fact, at times it verges on jaunty, opener 'Across The Great Divide' possessor of a spry, spring in its step, 'Up On Cripple Creek' creaking along with a rickety paleskin funk.  There is comedy here, of a warm and inclusive flavour.  There is a cheeky glint in the eye of 'Rag Mamma Rag's ribald narrator as he invites the titular 'Mama' to come and relax in his sleeping bag.  It's appropriate that Spike Jones worms his way onto the juke-box in Cripple Creek, though what he'd have made of 'Jemima Surrender' is anyone's guess.

There are moments of introspection too, but they are songs of nostalgia rather than disgust with life, and the music is never morbid.  Rather, it is redolent with a heartfelt, elegiac longing, an occasionally bittersweet wistfulness that pervades tracks like 'Rocking Chair'.  These songs of friendship feel as old as the hills in which they were crafted, as if they might have been first sung round campfires in times antecedent to these.  They are of the land they were born in, of a vast and welcoming and uninhibited Northern America. 

But to elaborate on that context in further analogy, to labour the geographical metaphor past breaking point, would be to deny this album its lightness of touch, its deft and subtle catchiness.  It is smooth on the palate and easy to digest.  This is at once bright and commercial and ancient and mystical, and it is in these paradoxes that its greatness lies.

Was their sound unique, these sometimes-spooky weaving organs and Catskill harmonies?  In 1969, one could see the influence of their years as the Hawks, of their time spent in Bob Dylan's basement.  There influences from amongst the familiar range of Newport folksters and Guthrie acolytes.  But to my ears it also sounds like there's also something more here, something chemically combined within the groove.  Something faintly askew and hippyfied.  Something that is resolutely The Band.  Their own brand of timeworn, sepia-tinted Americana.  And it imbues these songs of slavery and the civil war, of the dust-bowl and depression.  Theirs is a world populated by characters that in their detail and their circumstance could have sprung alive from the pen of William Faulkner.
 
Discovering this album as a 13 or 14 year old (while listening to Radio 1's Saturday afternoon Classic Albums series - yes, they,  even played tracks like 'Jawbone' and 'Whispering Pines' during daytime on the 'Nation's Favourite') I felt like I was being clued in to a hidden secret, a clandestine pleasure.  It's not a cool album, particularly, or one you can name drop to benefit by its hipness.  If ever I feel that this is being forgotten about, I tend to fling it in the direction of people I think might appreciate its nuanced pleasures.  A lot of the great music currently being crafted Stateside - seemingly the entire current rosters of labels like Sub Pop and Bella Union - owes The Band an incalculable debt.  On current flavour-of-the-month album Veckatimest, Grizzly Bear are merely reiterating its themes.  Its influence, simply, is so pervasive that you'd be forgiven for never having even noticed it at all.

Whispering Pines
King Harvest (Has Surely Come)

[Retinend]

987.  The Band – The Band



Released:  September 22, 1969
Genre:  Rock/Folk-rock
Label:  Capitol
Producer:  John Simon

One of my favourite albums. I thought of doing it myself, but that's a great review.

[LC]

Good write up there, I'm going to illegally download it now.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

Could we just submit our choices to CaledonianGonzo and have him write them up for us?

[The Boston Crab]

Gonch was the first person I thought of when thinking about the Singles thread. He's another reason I think we don't need to worry about a 5-album-per-poster limit.

[CaledonianGonzo]

Cheers folks.  Appreciated.

I'll hopefully have one of a certain 1972 double album album up later on today.  It is, in just about every sense, a love letter and lacks even the faintest moment of objectivity.  It's quite ridiculous, but it's going up in the early stages of this thread in case some on else bags it before me. 

After that, I can only become less hyped up, and start laying it on a bit less thick.

[boxofslice]

987.  The Band – The Band

Great stuff CG. Lovely write up of an album that I've held close to my heart for many a year.

[Why I Hate Tables]

986. Your Funeral.....My Trial - Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds



Year Of Release : 1986
Genre : Punk Blues, Murder Ballads
Producers : Flood and Tony Cohen
Label: Mute Records

There are many sides to Nick Cave. There's the bestial drugged up rage of
The Birthday Party; there's the Southern Gothic obsessed raving fanatical preacher side; the lust crazed devil waiting outside your door; the sad poet; the lovelorn balladeer; the half mad librarian chronicling his murder ballads; and many more. The album I've picked (as there's not a Nick Cave album I don't love) is one which to me combines them all, some of them within the same song. Your Funeral My Trial came out the same year as an album of cover versions of songs that had influenced Cave. The Bad Seeds were in arguably their best lineup, with Mick Harvey from The Birthday Party on various instruments; Barry Adamson from Magazine on various instruments; Thomas Wylder from Die Haut on drums; and Blixa Bargeld from Einsturzende Neubauten, a formidable creative entity in himself, contributing insane guitar.

The album opens with one of the trademark Cave brooding "Do I love her or want to hang her skin on my door?" ballads, the title track, with a strange nocturnal lounge arrangement with the kind of twisted beauty you'd expect. The lyrics stand right up there with any of Cave's influences, building to the incredible peak of:
Here I am, little lamb
Let all the bells of whoredom ring
All the crooked bitches that she was
Mongers of pain
I saw the moon
Become a fang
Your funeral, my trial

This track sets the tone for the album perfectly (I'm referring to the CD/LP edition, as it was originally packaged as two EPs with a different order but the same songs). The album is split between brooding ballads and slightly more uptempo tracks which lurch along forebodingly such as She Fell Away (where the story of another dead girl is set to paranoid surf rock punctuated with the clangs of Thomas Wylder hitting a fire extinguisher). Biblical imagery is thrown all over the place along with a lot of sex, murder and insanity. This happens most memorably in Hard On For Love, a perfect depiction of incredibly intense sex marred with "I've seen that girl before, she looks like she walked straight out of the book of Leviticus", and "Coming at her like Lazarus from above" which isn't really the best demonstration of how good his lyrics are

The Carny, on the other hand, is a great demonstration of his writing and the work of the band (or more accurately Mick Harvey who plays pretty much everything on this track). To a backdrop of hostile circus music, Cave tells the story of a travelling circus led by a mysterious, ghostly Boss Bellini, the titular Carny (played by Blixa Bargeld). This may well be the precursor to his novel The Ass Saw The Angel, and featured in Wim Wenders Wings Of Desire, a film I have never seen. The best way I can describe this song is a mangled Something Wicked This Way Comes soundtracked by Tom Waits and condensed into 8 minutes. I have never heard anything quite like this, or for that matter most of the album, other than in Cave's back catalogue (and even then rarely).

This album is the work of a man who is disenchanted by love and the drugs that he's addicted to. In this world, love is a terrible thing: nearly always accompanied by murder; it's an addiction as debilitating as the heroin coursing through Cave's veins at the time; and sex is always either sordid or violent. I could pick lyrics from virtually anything off the album to illustrate this, but it really is probably best to listen to it and work it out. This album is a great thing to play after a broken heart, better even than The Boatman's Call. As The Boatman's Call is full of a quiet resignation and a yearning for the past, whereas Your Funeral My Trial is full of "I hope the fucker dies, doing this to me. They're gonna fuckin' die, I just know it. Scum. What was I doing?!". Which is sometime what you really need for a while, isn't it?

Picking tracks to represent this album is difficult, and I hope I've not messed up there. To my ears every part of his career is represented here (apart from the film soundtracks) and you can hear The Boatman's Call and Dig Lazarus Dig in here too. In the form of Sad Waters there's even a love song with no violence present, something he wouldn't achieve again for a few years. After this album the Bad Seeds would go on to lose Barry Adamson, soundtrack Ghosts Of The Civil Dead, and Cave would sink further into a heroin addiction that would last until 2002 while still not affecting his creativity. A lesson for all other smackhead musicians there.

When I first heard this album, I was blown away by the sinister brilliance lurking in every corner. It made me take writing a lot more seriously, and find other like minded people who'd take music as ridiculously serious as I do. I'm skipping the whole heroin part, though, obviously.

No one seems to cite this album as an influence. The influences on this album are there, and obvious. There's the influence of Tom Waits, Einsturzende Neubauten, various blues singers (the title is lifted from a Sonny Boy Williamson song of a similar theme) and the Velvet Underground. There's lyrics lifted from Tom Jones songs and a Tim Rose cover (see also Einsturzende Neubauten's cover of the often covered Morning Dew, which sounds like something off this album albeit with more Germanic vocals).The influences you'd expect on an early Nick Cave album, really. However, somewhere along the way it stopped sounding like any of these and became a completely different beast. With fangs and claws. Blunt ones.

Your Funeral, My Trial
http://sharebee.com/35be8c14

The Carny
http://sharebee.com/828e3af7

[CaledonianGonzo]

Great write up, WIHT.  I haven't really devoted much time to Cave's early work, finding what I've heard a bit self-consciously melodramatic.  Time to fix that, methinks.  Cheers.

Pre-submit edit:  Yeah - great title track.

Now then.

[CaledonianGonzo]

985.  Exile On Main St. – The Rolling Stones



Released:  May 12, 1972
Genre:  Most of 'em
Label:  Rolling Stones/Atlantic
Producer:  Jimmy Miller

Batten down the hatches – I'm doing Exile On Main St.

It's a seductive image.  On the run from the Inland Revenue and their long-time bete noirs, the British justice system, the Stones and their coterie of hangers-on hole up in the South France and spend the summer of 1971 making their new album.  Anita's practicing black magic in the bedroom, there are filmstars dropping by for breakfast, demi-monde doyen Dr John is tinkling the ivories and $1000 Gram Parsons is strumming his guitar in the garden.  Meanwhile, various doctor feelgoods are willing to write out any prescription for a chance to hang with the Stones, the local boho girls are scaling the walls and outside in the bright and dazzling Cote d'Azur there are car chases and speedboat scares waiting to happen.  This is some serious juju.  Then someone finds out that the place was used by the Gestapo during the War - which goes at least some way towards explaining the swastikas stamped on the Nellcote fittings and fixtures.  There are children running around screaming, women uprooted from Harlem with afros 3 feet wide and Nicky Hopkins challenging Bobby Keys to tennis on the lawn.  The ventilators aren't working, the temperature's rising, the dealers are giving it away for free and parked outside in the drive is Smoke on the Water's "Rolling Truck Stones Thing", a state of the art mobile recording unit with wires trailing down into the basement where a group of torn, frayed and frazzled musicians – augmented by some of the world's greatest session players – are cooking up a storm.



Over the years it's become an archetype, but let's lay some myths to rest.  While some of Exile On Main St was recorded in Keith Richard's mansion in Villefranche-sur-Mer, current analysis claims that only about 30% of the album was put on tape there, the rest having been laid down in the spring of 1971 at Stargroves, and the remainder coming together later that year and early next in Sunset Sound, LA.  'Ventilator Blues' has the basement DNA.  So too, perhaps, do 'Happy' and 'All Down the Line'.  People with better ears than me can differentiate between the sweaty, subterranean drum sound and the crisper rhythm tracks laid down in Hollywood.  As for the rest?  Some have mixed blood, cross-spawned bastards of dubious parentage, while the truth about the others may never really be known – the band themselves are happy to perpetuate the last gang in town legend and, in fitting manner, are prone to mythologise their moment in the (literal and figurative) sun.

So, maybe it is indeed true that the gestation of Exile On Main Street isn't so unique after all, that the creation of one of the great fulcrum double albums of the form is a whole lot more prosaic than the rock'n'roll romantics would sometimes like to think.  Perhaps so, but what remains truly astounding is that by some flawed and unstable alchemy, by some once-in-a-lifetime-and-never-to-be-repeated principle of coagulation and sublimation, the Stones managed to forge an accidental masterpiece out of a number of outtakes, rejects and abandoned songs.



It seems that at the time of it's recording, few of the songs on Exile were brand new - most, indeed, having been first rehearsed or at least written at some point during the sustained burst of creativity in 1968-69 that truly propelled the Stones into the stratosphere, where they overtook The Beatles as the best band on the planet, became gods and demons both, deified and castigated as appropriate to your beliefs.  'Shine a Light' was written after (and about) the death of Brian Jones.  'Loving Cup' was almost as old as the mountains mentioned in the opening verse.  'Tumbling Dice' had long been known as 'Call Girl Blues', likewise 'Sweet Virginia' as 'Bent Green Needles'.  Various fumbled demos can be found in the outtakes for Beggar's Banquet and Let It Bleed and its antecedents are everywhere in their catalogue – in 'Salt of the Earth's' faltering hymnal blues, in the long, slow evolution from transcendent opening to rapturous, defiant coda that constitutes 'You Can't Always Get What You Want'.

And yet, it comes from nowhere, comes fully formed and complete like something delivered from higher climes than these, something suddenly integral that world had not known until then was missing. 

For me, and the other disciples of this greatest of testaments, that's where the reality is better even the legend that surrounds it.  Are you ready for some serious hyperbole?  For some seriously mixed metaphors?  For praise bordering on the laughably shrill?

Exile On Main Street is rock'n'roll's equivalent of the Ten Commandments.  It is the Complete Works of Shakespeare rendered in dirty guitar and read with a hungover drawl.  It is the Temple of Solomon reconfigured as a record shop and it is the sensation felt by Saul on the Road to Damascus if he was instead walking down Route 66.  It's the discovery of DNA and the publication of On the Origin of Species, the songs the devil kept hidden from Robert Johnson.  The alpha and omega of Western traditional music up to that point and beyond.  It's cosmic Americana the likes of which no American band ever came close to recording, a vision of the intrinsic possibility of music-as-inspirational-form that no other popular musicians (save perhaps Dylan in his days of thin wild mercury) ever beheld.

It's a concept album where the story is music itself, the synthesis, summation and logical conclusion of nearly every strain of popular song in existence up to that point.  Here is rock'n'roll, sure, but also country, pop, soul, folk, protest music, slave mantras, gospel, the James Brown funk and the cool jazz swing.  There is boogie and there is barndance.  You could cha-cha-cha or do the Charleston like a flapper girl to 'Hipshake'.  There are songs of the road and the Riviera, of the glitterati and the gulch.  This is diverse, true, inspired eclecticism that yet all feels cut from the same cloth.  It's a more interconnected, anastomosing White Album (which may be to defeat the point of The White Album, but Exile syncs in a way that 'The Beatles', despite its manifold virtues, never does).

Some think they can trace a pattern in Exile's grooves, that there's a simple blueprint that runs Rock Side, Country Side, Blues Side...umm....another Rock Side', but I don't buy it, can't find the formula.  It all feels too fluid for that, too protean.  Such is its ductility, it's malleable nature, that it becomes the album you believe it to be, that it is as much a record of its listeners creating as one recorded by a band.  Much is made of Exile's hazy, barely tangible quality.  Sometimes it seems just out of focus, flickering here and there at the edges where you are obliged to use your imagination to fill in the detail.  It's an amorphous, ever-shifting experience and it continues to confound any opinions I ever form about it.  I've compared on here before to a 'tapestry woven from the finest threads' and I think that's as good a description as any, but it still doesn't quite convey the rickety, ramshackle, barely-cohering beauty of it when taken holistically - in some senses, it's a tapestry that's all the more exquisite because you can't always make out what the picture is representing, where sometimes your memories of how you suppose it supplant that which is actually manifest before your inquiry.  It's rock'n'roll as Impressionism, as paint splayed across canvas struggling to depict form while the artist wills it otherwise.  It is the sunset that Turner allows to bleed across his horizon as the Fighting Temeraire is being brought into London to be broken down for scrap.

I warned you that there would be excessive praise.  It's entirely possible that there is worse to come.



Observe, if you would, how 'All down the Line' mutates in the 4 minutes that pass between its opening open Gs and the hollered, horn-heavy communal conclusion - by the end it's a completely different song to the one you started listening to - and yet, it is the same song and perhaps the only change has been one of perception, in the way the elements of the song have rearranged themselves around its propulsive and coruscating central core.

Likewise Let It Loose, for many initiates (including myself), the finest few minutes in the Stones' canon.  A song of so rare and precious a stamp that it must be apportioned with care, that bids its devotees ration their exposure to it lest they become complacent about its beauty.  Perhaps the band are of the same opinion, having never attempted to play it live, maybe for fear that they'll not capture even the faintest iota of what makes it remarkable, that Jagger won't be able to approximate his finest recorded vocal performance.  Swimming in from nowhere, it's a feast for the senses, beautiful Leslie-swirled guitars that could well be organs, brass bleeding into yearning backing vocals, a rarefied paean to acts simultaneously sacred and profane, a hymn to earthly pleasure where no instrument is as it ought and yet is entirely of itself.  In some ways, it's not so much a song as a suggested possibility, an implication.

But to single out any one track here is a next to fruitless endeavour.  There are highlights, of course, but, as with the best of the records we'll see in the upcoming months, Exile insists, nay, demands to be taken on entire, to be consumed whole like an ortolan songbird, bones and all.  For it is in the viscera, in the red and nameless matter that surrounds the vital organs, that the truth of things might lie.  It's as likely that Exile's vital essence lies in its unsung corners, in the dusty backwaters of 'Don't Wanna Talk About Jesus, Just Wanna See His Face' as it does in its most familiar moments, the sprawling filth of Rocks Off or the gunslinging groove of Tumbling Dice.  If, as the ancients believed, you can divine the future from the entrails of animals, to garner hints and gleans of moments as yet unexperienced from the stuff and substance of life, perhaps also it may be possible to do the same with Exile On Main Street, to learn more of the past, present and future from a record that is at once timeless and yet thrillingly alive.

All Down the Line
Let It Loose
A wee extra - some related photos, etc - mostly by Dominique Tarlé

[SavageHedgehog]

Beautiful man. It's so nice to hear (well read) the Stones get the praise they deserve. I feel it's become too common to cut them down these days.

[LC]

Amazing write up of my favourite album. Hope you do the rest of my faves justice. Bravo.

This paragraph in particular;

It all feels too fluid for that, too protean.  Such is its ductility, it's malleable nature, that it becomes the album you believe it to be, that it is as much a record of its listeners creating as one recorded by a band.  Much is made of Exile's hazy, barely tangible quality.  Sometimes it seems just out of focus, flickering here and there at the edges where you are obliged to use your imagination to fill in the detail.  It's an amorphous, ever-shifting experience and it continues to confound any opinions I ever form about it.  I've compared on here before to a 'tapestry woven from the finest threads' and I think that's as good a description as any, but it still doesn't quite convey the rickety, ramshackle, barely-cohering beauty of it when taken holistically - in some senses, it's a tapestry that's all the more exquisite because you can't always make out what the picture is representing, where sometimes your memories of how you suppose it supplant that which is actually manifest before your inquiry.

I love that emboldened part. The notion that the album almost falls apart, so ramshakle, broken and resurrected at once. Fantastic. I hold similar views about Tonight's the Night.

[Retinend]

#984

The Beach Boys - Holland



Released:   Janurary 1973
Genre:    Pop, Rock
Label:   Brother/ Reprise
Producer:   The Beach Boys


(I had a hard time choosing this album over SURF'S UP for my choice of a favourite Beach Boys album. Tracks like 'TIL I DIE, FEEL FLOWS and, of course, SURF'S UP have such power and melancholic lyrical majesty that I feel tempted to chose it just to discuss these tracks at length... but it is HOLLAND which I find superior in the sum of its parts.)

The album opens with the Brian song, SAIL ON SAILOR, providing a driving, mid-tempo kick-start to the album. I think, however, that it's newcomer, Blondie Chaplin's vocals which really sell this song; a husky and earnest delivery of the lyrical character's hardship. The song's simple rock arrangement and minimal harmonies would be striking to a Beach Boys fan familiar only with PET SOUNDS. This phonic departure is sustained throughout the album, lending a more mature and sombre mood to the album as a whole, with earnest ballads like THE TRADER, LEAVING THIS TOWN and ONLY WITH YOU, holding an understated profundity, separate from the heartbreaking longing of SURF'S UP's 'TIL I DIE and WILD HONEY's LET THE WIND BLOW.

The standout track on this album is without a doubt the sublime, sardonic imperialist fable, THE TRADER, written by Carl Wilson – not one of the most prolific writers, but a Beach Boy whose songwriting skills are not praised nearly enough. The song's lyrics, telling the story of the 'Velvet Robes's conquest of an indigenous population, might not approach Steely-Dan-esque levels of oblique wit, but nevertheless contains some expert sarcasm: "trader... cleared humanity from his way/ he civilised all he saw/ making changes every single day say".

The song, opening with this toe-tapping narrative, flourishes and turns into something truly wonderful at the 2:20 mark, with the instrumentation melting away until only a silk-smooth bassline, quiet shaken percussion and heavenly harmonies remain. Carl's vocals transform from sharp and acidic, in the first half, to hushed and incredibly intimate. This second half of the track is without a doubt one of the most moving and perfectly executed pieces of music I have ever heard. At the lyric "beyond tomorrow...", I almost well up. It is not something explainable, but the simple combination and sequence of notes is affecting on a very real, emotional level. The lyrics of the song, from this point also adopt a poetry and mysticism to equal the beauty of the music.

LEAVING THIS TOWN is a similarly sublime ballad; honest, heartfelt and with another fantastic lead from Chaplin, which, while not to any extreme, gives a soulful, relatively rough performance - in contrast with the other members' note-perfect vocals.

The 'California Saga', a suite of three consecutive songs, is another standout feature of the album, which I believe should be listened to undivided. The nostalgic melancholy of BIG SUR echoes Neil Young's HARVEST, released the year before, and features a beautiful vocal performance by Mike Love (as does the rest of the suite). THE BEAKS OF EAGLES, half a sombre spoken poem by Robinson Jeffers, half a brisk, optimistic pop tune, which segues straight into the silly, zippy CALIFORNIA, which, although I admit is slightly cheesy, provides a cheery reminder of more optimistic times for the band.

The album is bookended with the second of the two Brian songs: FUNKY PRETTY, a song about a superstitious girlfriend. Whilst I have nothing against the song, it is probably the weakest on the album (not a great insult), and is made all the more incongruous by its stark contrast to the rest of the otherwise coherent album.

HOLLAND deserves recognition as one of the Beach Boy's very best albums. Epic, emotional, inspiring and uplifting, HOLLAND represents the Beach Boys at their most understated and mature. The playful, naïve elements of previous classics, WILD HONEY, SUNFLOWER and the superb SURF'S UP, are nowhere to be found on this album, and the sound of the record, whilst unmistakably theirs, bares little relation to anything else in their repertoire. With Brian no longer able to handle duties of chief songwriter, the writing talents of the other band members were able to shine. HOLLAND proves that the Beach Boys were more than just Dennis and Brian.

[trotsky assortment]

(The Band)  One of my favourite albums. I thought of doing it myself, but that's a great review.

Agreed.  A perfect album; a timeless masterpiece and one I never get tired of hearing.  One of its biggest strengths is that it always had an air of old-fashionedness about it.  It'll never get old.

[Vitalstatistix]

#983

The Microphones - The Glow Pt. 2




Released:   2001
Label:   K Records
Producer:   Phil Elvrum


Since the mid-90s, the enigmatic, frustrating and fascinating figure of Phil Elvrum had been quietly working with Olympia, Washington's K Records on strange sound collages on tape - dissonance and hums, quiet, dreamlike acoustic arrangements, fuzzy analog recording experiments, this was genuine, unfashionable and at times bewildering lo-fi. What caught people's attention early on, however, what set him apart, was Elvrum's instinctive ear for a natural warmth in the recording, a humanism and an emotional honesty which punctuated these unfocused and meandering lofi movements.

It was little surprise then, that this shy, elusive figure would gain confidence through his art and improve his natural talent for a melody. 1999's Don't Wake Me Up and, to a larger extent, 2000's It was Hot, We Stayed in the Water cemented the typical and distinct features of Elvrum's mature Microphones output. Layers of fuzz, warmth, odd, distant noises swim with short, infectious acoustic pop songs. Elvrum's vocal talents were also improving in confidence and technique drastically. His voice had a sweet, boyish quality which set him apart from more posturing, self-conscious or acerbic contemporaries. The albums also cemented his popularity with a small but growing fanbase, helped by an enthusiastic critical response, whose nerve had been touched by Elvrum's intimate and honest compositions.



Whilst Elvrum, then, was noted as an interesting, if insular, musical figure at the turn of the millenium, his next album as The Microphones would turn out to be a giant leap forward artistically, both a summation and distillation of his unusual style up until this point, with a broadening of scope instrumentally, conceptually and emotionally.

The Glow Pt. 2 is an enormous, woozy and dense collection of songs and soundscapes. It is an album to fall into, to get lost in, to lose yourself completely with. Its fuzz is warmer than ever before, its compositions more complex and its pop flourishes more accomplished. Its an audacious record, one which throws out the 'lo-fi' rulebook, embracing large orchestral accompaniments, giant distorted drums, barroom piano, distant horns, vocal harmonising, collaborations and proper pop songs, no less.

Once you succumb to its charms, you'll find its a practically flawless album, but its opening sequence is particularly stunning. Opener "I Want Wind to Blow" has a slow building rhythm, with dual acoustic guitars, distant drums and Elvrum's distinct voice, frail, intimate, engaging. It just builds and builds, ending with crashing, noisy drums and a strident piano melody which leads effortlessly into the title track, a song which for me represents the peak of Elvrum's career to this very day. Exploding forward with fuzzed out guitars and warm drums the track slips through into an off-kilter acoustic pop number, bringing in discomforting psych elements then hitting a middle section with simple Radiohead-esque organ and a vocal performance so raw, honest and jaw-droppingly intense you'll listen to it all again as soon as its over.

"I faced death, I went in with my arms swinging
but I heard my own breath
I had to face that I'm still living
I'm still flesh
I hold on to life with feelings"

The rest of the album mines a similar path, songs often segueing into one another using ominous horn noises and crackles. The production here is immense, every detail important, every sound gorgeous. It's almost the anti-lofi lofi album, a record which is to be truly savoured on headphones. The next three songs display a knack for a simple, infectious melody which other songwriters would kill for, but Elvrum never gets sentimental, always keeps the listener on their toes. You never quite know when a pleasant pop melody will fall suddenly into an abyss of carefully crafted noise, or vice versa.

A number of short instrumental passages then punctuate a wonderful sequence of short psych pop experiments; everything is brimming with haunting noises and lonely melodies. The whole record is admirably fluid, flawlessy continous. The vibe never lets up, on into the second half, even when Elvrum truly indulges his pop sentiments ("You'll Be in the Air",  "I Felt Your Shape") or loses himself in fuzzy noise ("I Want To Be Cold", "Samurai Sword"). "Map" is another top-drawer highlight, featuring female vocals and a sublimely affecting and noisy climax.



Since this album, Elvrum has appeared, to me, someone either unable or unwilling to produce anything as impressive. He changed the name to Mount Eerie, changed back to Microphones, then back to Mount Eerie again. He's recorded some Microphones-lite lofi, a heavy rock-influenced EP (Black Wooden Ceiling Opening) and a lovely collaboration with Jule Doiron (Lost Wisdom), but nothing which touches the ambition, scope and raw emotion of The Glow Pt. 2.


"The Glow Pt. 2" - http://sharebee.com/7ddebecd
"Map" - http://sharebee.com/9920d077

[Ballad of Ballard Berkley]

# 982

Tom Waits - Small Change



Released: September 1976

Genre: Jazz, Tin Pan Alley pop

Label: Asylum

Producer: Bones Howe

I toyed with nominating Waits' Rain Dogs, Frank's Wild Years, or Mule Variations, but I eventually plumped for this as his strongest album - or at least his strongest album from his lachrymose beat bum/boho 1970s prime.

Having failed to quite capture the authentic, pre-rock'n'roll sound he'd envisioned on his first three albums, Waits as we think of him in the 1970s finally arrived fully-formed on this low-key, late night masterpiece.

Using sympathetic musicians from a jazz background, including famed drummer Shelly Manne (according to Barney Hoskyns book, Waits was astonished that producer Bones Howe - who also had a jazz background - had procured the services of Manne), Waits created the perfect musical and lyrical manifestation of everything he was trying to achieve during his early period.

The album has a uniform sound - Waits' piano, stand-up bass, jazzy drums, smoky trumpet and saxaphone, and beautifully arranged, keening strings - but thanks to Waits' gift for writing distinctive melodies, the songs never blend into one. There simply isn't a bad song on the album, the weakest being the closing cut, I Can't Wait To Get Off Work, but even then it's still a very pretty tune.

Famously, this is the album on which Waits began using that distinctive, impossibly gravelly Louis Armstrong-inspired voice. Again, according to Hoskyns book, Waits had fucked his voice during a long and arduous tour, although I suspect that the change in vocal style was also a deliberate attempt to lend his songs more character. 

That incredible voice introduces itself via Tom Traubert's Blues - perhaps Waits most famous song - and it's achingly sad opening refrain:

Wasted and wounded     
It ain't what the moon did
I got what I paid for now

His voice positively aches with sadness, the weeping embodiment of "wasted and wounded". It's one of the most heart-wrenchingly melancholy ballads ever written, a groaning litany of hopelessness and loss. There's something timeless and almost holy about it, Waits' use of Waltzing Matilda for the chorus lending it the feel of some ancient folk standard. I could go on and on about this incredible song, but Bones Howe was right when he opined that the start of the final stanza is one of the most genuinely poetic pieces of writing in the whole rock canon (not that Small Change is a rock record exactly, but pedantry be damned):

And it's a battered old suitcase
To a hotel someplace
And a wound that will never heal

Doesn't that just pait such a vivid, heartbroken image? Waits' lyrics (and there are loads of them on SC) are superb throughout - funny, tender, filmic and imagistic - the writer having bundled all of his influences - Kerouac, Bukowski, Burroughs and Raymond Chandler - into a perfect whole that, thanks to Waits own wonderful imagination and character, never sound plagiarisitic.

So, these songs: Step Right Up is a frantic, hilarious jazz romp - smoking stand-up bass and raucous sax - over which Waits plays the disingenous snake-oil salesman, rapping out a ludicrous list of consumer come-ons:

It gives you an erection, wins the election... change your shorts, change your life, change into a nine-year-old Hindu boy, get rid of your wife...

At this point in his career, Waits live was half musician, half stand up/slumped down comedian, so there's loads of great one-liners on light-hearted (but hardly novelty) songs such as The Piano Has Been Drinking and Pasties and a G-String, the latter a bumping, grinding rhythmic burlesque stripper rap that hints at the more avant-garde work Waits would produce in the latter part of his career. Jitterbug Boy is another funny, wistful tune, a series of drunken boasts which - although amusing - perfectly captures the innate loneliness of the tall tale-spinning barfly who won't stop bending your ear.

I Wish I Was in New Orleans again sounds like a pre-rock'n'roll standard. It's easy to imagine Tony Bennett or Sinatra making a good fist of this wonderful melody. The other great ballad on Small Change is the hugely atmospheric Invitation to the Blues, with lyrics that read like the screenplay from a Douglas Sirk movie.

Another masterpiece of atmosphere and writing is the spoken word piece, Small Change. Backed only by a sultry, neon blue saxophone, this is Waits in full-on Chandler mode, acting out a fantastically detailed and sympathetic account of a young hoodlum murdered by his own gun (And the cops are telling jokes about some whorehouse in Seattle...) 

All in all, this is one of the most stylistically cohesive musical statements of Waits' career, and one of the strongest albums of the 1970s generally. Yes, it has long been argued that Waits at this time was playing a character, that his flophouse, beat-bum schtick was just a pose, and to all intents and purposes it was. But that doesn't mean that his songs lacked sincerity. On the contrary, Waits' paeans to the luckless souls and down and outs in American society ooze with empathy and compassion, and never sound patronising or ersatz.

There really are only a small handful of bona fide geniuses in the pop/rock sphere, and Tom Waits is definitely one of them. Small Change proves that beyond all reasonable doubt.

http://open.spotify.com/track/2ECPfn5VcQ6huXSWMQJKTz

http://open.spotify.com/track/6Tqhcac63CGKWeyfCmp9Jb

http://open.spotify.com/track/4x06ILYG06hp8VWFUW0Cp8

EDIT: I'm such a huge fan of this album, I forgot to mention two of its songs. They are: Bad Liver and a Broken Heart which is essentially the musical encapsulation of Waits' whole persona during this period. You could argue that it teeters precariously close to self-parody (I ain't got a drinking problem, 'cept when I can't get a drink), but I think that's partly intentional. It begins with a snatch of As Time Goes By from Casablanca, before drifting off into a poignant, bittersweet closing time lament. You can picture the sympathetic barman stacking chairs and saying: "I hate to see you this way Mr Waits". The other song is The One That Got Away, another walking bass semi-spoken number. It's hardly essential, but it's got a great slinky, Pink Panther groove, and Waits' lyrics are typically evocative and witty (He's got a snakeskin sports shirt and he looks like Vincent Price/With a little piece of chicken in his carbonara slice). So that's Small Change in full everyone. Thanks.

[Why I Hate Tables]

Great writeup of a masterpiece.

[Vitalstatistix]

Thanks!

[Retinend]

Thanks!

No, he meant me.

[CaledonianGonzo]

Tracks like 'TIL I DIE

Mibbe my favourite Beach Boys track.  What think you of the Alternate Mix on the Endless Harmony soundtrack?  Trumps the original in my book, and I'm forever bleating on about it.  Like here, fr'instance.

newcomer, Blondie Chaplin

Well, well, well.

[Retinend]

Mibbe my favourite Beach Boys track.  What think you of the Alternate Mix on the Endless Harmony soundtrack?

It's shit.

[CaledonianGonzo]

It's shit.

Succinct.  I put it to you:

No it's not.

[Retinend]

is

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

981.

Sleep - Dopesmoker



Released: 2003

Genre: Stoner rock/metal

Label: Tee Pee

Produced by: Sleep and Billy Anderson

What began with Black Sabbath's Sweet Leaf found it's apotheosis in this, Sleep's monolithic Dopesmoker. Consisting of only two songs, it's perhaps stretching the definition of the word album a little but, considering the title track runs for over an hour, I don't think there's any danger of it being mistaken for a single.

As perhaps the most extreme example of the stoner rock sub-genre, it's unlikely to make converts of the unbelievers and this was a sentiment clearly shared by London Records, who refused to release the album in it's intended form. The band came back with a slightly altered version called Jerusalem. Shaved down to around fifty minutes and split into six segments, it still wasn't enough for London and, not wanting to compromise their magnum opus any further, the band decided to go their separate ways. While Jerusalem was eventually released in 1999, Dopesmoker didn't see the light of day until 2003, ten years after their previous album, Holy Mountain.

The second track, Sonic Titan, is a live recording running at a comparitively scant ten minutes and presumably just included as an incentive to those who already owned Jerusalem. It's a good tune in it's own right, but there can be no doubt that the main draw here (no pun intended) is the title track.

Despite Cisneros and Hakius later proving that they could go it alone as Om, I think it's fair to say that Dopesmoker is dominated by Matt Pike's guitar. As much as it's obviously a hymn to weed (and it certainly is that, what with Cisneros bellowing lyrics like, "Drop out of life, with bong in hand") it's also a monument to the power of the riff and the solo. If you can listen to this without playing air guitar at some point, your arms are wasted on you. The riffs come like a glacier; slow, unstoppable and grinding all within their path. With it's constant repetition and tale of the "Weedian" people, it risks being ridiculous or simply boring but, such is the band's commitment to their vision that, even without the aid of drugs, it instead becomes something transcendental.

Ironically, given the band's insistence on it being listened to as a single piece, the nature of the song means that it's too unwieldly to upload in it's entirety (and somewhat immoral, considering it's almost the whole record), so you'll have to make do with one of the segments culled from Jerusalem instead. For many that may well be as much as they'll ever need or want to hear, but for the faithful this is as essential an album as will ever be made.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8InCkFX9d8

[The Boston Crab]

I'm a-thievin' up in a frenzy. Great stuff.

I've literally never listened to a Rolling Stones album. Never. Now I have to.

As for The Microphones, an Indian chap at college sent that to me on MSN and although I enjoyed it straight away, it didn't fit into my 'French House Or Die' ethos at the time so I binned it. I've been meaning to give it another go for about six years. Now I will.

I can't see myself ever getting into Nick Cave but you tempted me, Tables. You tempted me.

[buttgammon]

980. Wire - Chairs Missing



Released: 1978
Genre: Post-punk/Experimental rock
Label: Harvest
Producer: Mike Thorne

Imagine a song written by a late seventies band who were straying from punk. A lovely, dreamy pop song. A song about a serpentine leaf miner. Once you've found out what the hell a serpentine leaf miner is exactly (apparently, it's the larva of a small fly which burrows into cabbage leaves), listen to it. Outdoor Miner is unusual and obtuse but also blessed with sunny harmonies and pure sunlight beaming out of every chord. The perfect pop song exists and it lives as an island of paradise within the sometimes stormy, always fascinating sea of Chairs Missing, Wire's second album and the bridge between the spiky, stripped-down punk of Pink Flag and the daring, vast canvas of 154. I think this is their best work, although each album out of their first trilogy is definitely worth listening to.

The menacing opener, Practice Makes Perfect means business. Guitar tears through the songs as the vocals descend into increasingly intense screaming, though not the kind of angry snarl which would be found in punk music. The scream is like this album: a different animal altogether, one which retained some of the superficial features of the creature it had evolved out of but which was a fundamentally different thing. The track ends with a strange sound which could be a heavily distorted guitar, a synthesiser or a cross between the two. Maybe even something altogether different.

This leads onto the next track, French Film Blurred. As with Outdoor Miner, this song has a downright weird subject matter, inspired by an incident when the band settled down to watch a French film on the TV only to find that the subtitles were obscured by interference and, unable to understand the language, they were forced to devise their own dialogue. Not obvious song material but it lead to one of the greatest and most oblique lyrics I have ever heard:

"It's not quite the way to say your goodbyes
It's not quite the way to behave
Secured you a concrete grave beneath a motorway"

Funny, opaque and surreal, these lyrics seem to sum up a lot about Wire. They make sense and yet somehow, they don't. They could be a kind of commentary on, I don't know, how roads and pollution are killing the countryside but that doesn't seem too likely. The next song happens to be something which I can only describe as the sound of feeling seasick during a particularly stormy crossing of the English Channel in a small boat and yet it's seemingly about a suicide note. Perhaps they're trying to say that anything can be about anything (without actually directly saying anything, of course).

Marooned is a densely atmospheric song about feeling completely stranded and helpless, which is about as claustrophobic as anything I have heard. It is seemingly about an Arctic explorer who becomes stuck on an iceberg which gradually begins to melt as it drifts into warm waters, waiting for the inevitable. But he "pours more petrol on" and his "thoughts get clearer." Is he trying to quicken his demise as a means of exiting the situation, knowing his fate is already sealed? This is a  dark, but totally absorbing and fascinating song. As always with Wire, the lyrics are challenging and hard to comprehend and the music is brilliant.

The longest song on the album, Mercy, falls just over halfway through proceedings and it forms the backbone of the album as its Homeric epic. Clocking in at just under six minutes, it's hardly hours in length but for a band who valued brevity so much in their early work, working on a song this long was a diversion for Wire and one which put some fans of the first album off, but it's one of my favourite Wire songs. The churning guitar opening provides tension which finds no resolve or release until the geyser-like climax, although several glimpses of crashing cymbals keep hinting at this. And against this tense and dramatic backdrop, there is an outlet for some of their most obtuse lyrics, taking the form of what appears to be a prose poem which touches on the area of the shipping forecast, transvestisism and mental institutions.

"Crooks lay in a weighted state waiting for the dead assassin while the rust pure powder puffs, a shimmering opaque red. Papers spread no one driving we hurled direct ahead, the windows dark green tinted the hearse a taxi instead. Snow storms forecast imminently in areas Dogger, Viking, Moray, Forth, and Orkney. Keeping cover in denuded scrub, the school destroyed raised the club, panic spreading with threat of fire. Crowding beneath a layer of foam, refugees intertwined, alone. Within the institution walls in pastel blue, clinical white slashed red lipsticked walls, mercy nurse tonight. Seem like dark grey stockinged in the raking torchlight with 4 AM stubble, a midnight transvestite."

I don't think I can form much of a response apart from bemusement and amazement, especially when this is followed by 'Outdoor Miner' one of their great pop moments. This one is far shorter than Mercy but rounds the sharp edges, dusts off the sixties harmonies and sparkles like the sea which surrounded the stricken sailor in Marooned. It's all over too quickly on the album. It was extended and released as a single, which should have been a massive hit but EMI failed to promote it. A song about an obscure insect probably isn't going to take off anyway, even one this good.

I Am the Fly continues the arthropod theme, but it is far more constricting than the previous track. This one sounds very, very sticky, full of thick, sludgy noises. As with lots of things on this album, I can't tell what instrument created the opening to this album but it is such a fantastic noise that I don't really care. It fits well, leading on to a song which crawls around like an insect, slowly stepping around, perhaps leaving a sticky residue. The sticky residue of glam rock is also audible somewhere in the song, with the handclaps which emerge midway through. If insects could make music, I bet it would sound a little bit like this.

Chairs Missing is often indecipherable, always unusual and sometimes just downright baffling but through their creativeness and ability to confound and challenge audiences, Wire created a masterpiece which remains as strange, brilliant and forward thinking as it was over thirty years ago.

[The Region Legion]

WHERE ARE THE FREEEEE TRRAAAACKS