No great surprises in revisiting this one that I bought at release, it is all of this particular sound that they did better than the many also-rans (who also seem to be on this list 🤷) but I’ve never totally gotten on with Turner’s vocals and it feels like they waste a lot of time on simple garage rock stuff for the footie stands before occasionally showing the band are talented in little spurts and then going back to the grindstone. Viva la indie or w/e.
Starts fantastic for the first three tracks, fantastic fusion of funk and Latin music and psychedelic rock and a bunch of other stuff, genuine treat for the ears and with some good snappiness in the energy and pace despite the track lengths. But then, the energy starts to waver in the back half and the song lengths start to feel a bit more present, and I don’t know, just loses me a bit in there. I can get down with a long blues-y tune or a long political ballad at the right time, but the songs don’t necessarily develop enough through the course of that length to keep me tuned in (whereas City, Country, City keeps that jamming turn-taking you need). Would happily come back for more War though.
Funny place to start with Radiohead, no doubt, especially with the first track being familiar to me from the Twilight credits. That said, and putting past the ever-complicated question of if I like Thom Yorke’s voice or it just fits as an additional instrument in the music, I can see more of what the fuss is about here and I can easily imagine the world where I had ended up catching this as a teenager and becoming the annoying sort of Radiohead superfan that put me off listening to the band for so long. Fascinating soundscape-y tunes with a nice drone and this understated sense of play while also trying to sound depressing as fuck which sort of balances out the energy once you get past the higher push of the first two tracks - like being lulled into a safe space that still feels like it could catch you out on a point at any time. If I knew what any of the words were, I’m sure they’d be fine too, but just taking the vocals as part of the soundscape still works plenty well too.
Obviously the child of Sly and Jimi but also a build-up of a decade of finding that particular Clinton P-Funk sound and bringing it to its big anarchic, jammy, grooved-to-hell-and-back form, in turn clearly inspiring so much more down the line (lot of stuff which sounds like the backbone of later rnb and rap naturally). Long tracks that stay entertaining, so many funny vocal sections (I’m more than childish enough to enjoy the things that come through in Promentalshitbackwashpsychosis Enema Squad) and an all round richness of instrumentation as it bounces from genre to genre (Who Says A Funk Band Can’t Rock obviously a main album high of this, but the bonus tracks, especially the live version of Maggot Brain, are wild on guitar). I’m sure if you don’t like funk it’s more to wash over you, but then again - who doesn’t like funk?
As I hoped, listening to a singular EWF album makes a great difference in the feeling of how smooth their music can be. Here, there’s great flow between softer ballads (fantastic vocal showcases especially on Reasons) and harder funkier tracks (Happy Feelin’ absolutely has the sauce on that baseline, Africano also goes hard) in the right way to keep you attuned to the movement, which I was missing on their Greatest Hits - it’s one thing to make great tunes, it’s another to make a great album. It’s definitely still all on the more soulful disco side of funk compared to some of the other stuff I’ve been listening to recently from War and Funkadelic, but no one does it quite as well as EWF y’know.
Ah, the album that changed pop music (semi-joking). I think it’s notable that it sits at this sound intersection of Taylor shifting to pop fully, with the experienced Max Martin and the fresh Jack Antonoff, which allows it to take in a whole bunch of other contemporary pop sounds (you would be hard pressed to not hear at least Robyn and Lana Del Rey merged in here, at minimum) and compress them into a new strain of hooky but writerly synth-pop sound that feels so distinctly Taylor in its own right (and is so big that many artists still owe something to being in its wake). But the key thing is that on this album at least, that strain works pretty much song after song, beat for beat and self-reflection bar for bar. The singles obviously stand as highlights (five singles certainly helps it highlight a lot) but also most of these could have been singles still for how bankably good they are. It’s not making it into my pop pantheon because I think it lacks that extra unique Thing and the lyrical sentiments and the written character of Taylor Swift don’t click for me like that, but revisiting has been a nice reminder that, yes, there was a good reason why I paid to listen to this and didn’t complain about it.
Funkadelic asked “can a funk band make rock music” in their genre-busting, but Blood Sweat and Tears asked “can a jazz band make rock, blues, soul, proto-funk, proto-prog, big band pop etc. etc.” - needless to say, somehow in all of that fusion of all these ingredients I like, there’s a sort of cohesion in here, or at least enough of one for me to fall in love with it, and it keeps an accessibility despite the experiment of it all. If you’re listening out, it’s easy to sort of pull at different songs to go “oh And When I Die sounds a bit like the Vegas Elvis arrangements, You’ve Made Me So Very Happy starts sounding kinda Otis Redding, Blues Part 2 does literally have Sunshine of Your Love for a minute” but hey, that’s fusion for you, if I didn’t like that I wouldn’t like Steely Dan either. No wonder I happily listened to it twice this afternoon.
I was initially thinking the old school boom bap sound was going to throw me off this album because the tracks were running together too much and I was really lacking something standout and different, but thankfully, the middle third or so starts to break it up with What’s Golden and Thin Line probably being what hit more for me there. The big trouble though, aside from a lot of it sounding similar to me outside of the peaks, is the album is just too long and feels spread thin for it - shortening it up, putting more into the tracks, get some more variance, it’d be bumped up. All in all though, it’s fairly good rap, it’s just not my cut as a child of the 00s sounds tbh.
Immigres and Pitche Mi fantastic works, Taaw and Badou “merely” really good. Truly the only great problems with this album are it goes by too quickly and I don’t speak Wolof, neither of which are really Youssou N’Dour’s fault. I love this dense percussion-driven and guitar and sax supported soul-y sound so I should definitely look into more N’Dour and mbalax generally probably? Also no wonder everyone with an ear to African artists wanted to get this guy on their pop albums.
Part of the art of album creation is understanding how to crest the waves of ups and downs and building sounds and expectations to play with or against, and so on. It’s part of why, if you can avoid it, you tend not to put your two best songs first on an 11 track album where the other nine songs don’t sound like that and are instead quite boring and not dynamic and sound sort of similar in this particular 00s indie way that completely washes over me. I’m curious to hear their better and more famous other album but this one didn’t inspire me with confidence.
Landing on a Damon Albarn-led supergroup you’ve never heard about is one of those nice expectation-resetting things, where you’re not necessarily thinking you’ll hear anything great because supergroups aren’t always a lock but the talent at least gives you a drive to want to dig in. And lo and behold, here we are at the weird dismal circus having a good old time. It’s on a few knives’ edges of being downbeat but interesting, clean but worn down, working out all the members presences, but for the most part it sits pretty well across them all. I also can’t lie and say it didn’t click more for my tastes once I realised how it had a similar musical tone to post-Songs for the Deaf QOTSA in a fair few places, which is an easy sell if I’ve ever had one. Pleasant surprises abound, honestly.
Love a lot of the clear influences that go into this and what Michael Kiwanuka wants to do with his music in following them, just don’t really fuck with the end product that much? It all sort of slips off the mind at a certain point and reminds me more of other contemporary would-be throwback soul artists like Leon Bridges than actually getting into the level it aspires to get to with psychedelic guitars, Stevie Wonder grandeur of sound and Marvin Gaye soulfulness and social conscious. I think it also ends up losing some relisten space because it’s so mellowed and intimate and personal, whether that’s fair or not. Perfect radio 6 bait though, no wonder it beat albums I like much more to the Mercury Prize.
It’s not bad, and I do in fact really fuck with Mr Skin as a track, but the issue is that I listen to this and I’m largely like… wow, it must have been so cool to be a 19 year old in California in 1970 and seeing all these other artists and taking them as influence without particularly embracing them deeply and getting a really good producer to make varied and really crisp imitations for you. The band’s not bad, the songs are largely fine-to-good, but a lot of them leave me wanting to go and listen to the blues rock bands or the psychedelic rock bands or the singer-songwriters doing this stuff better. Hell, they even got me thinking “well, I could go listen to Led Zeppelin for this” and I don’t even fuck that much with Led Zeppelin. I get (some of) the “why” of it being an album you should hear, but yeah, it’s skilled water off a ducks back to me, I can’t grab that thing that makes me care really.
One of the ways in which this project is nice is it can force you to listen to albums you’ve otherwise set aside or put off for one reason or another - like if you’d known someone really annoying who liked Pulp or you’d heard the big song sung boldly and happily by upper-middle class people you didn’t care for. So imagine my surprise when I find out this album is all about being young, over-educated but without opportunities because you come from a shithole in the Midlands (and make no mistake, Sheffield, you’re not the north) and full of cum, and thus this was actually meant for me all along and, in line with the energy of the album, kept from me by the bourgeois types that want to hold onto art and trick you into thinking it’s for them even though they can never truly get it. Cocker’s got a fantastic swagger backed up by a great knack as a songwriter, the band are tapped into a cool version of the Britpop sound that feels like it’s still also in connection with new wave from the synths and so on which keeps it all similarly smart but easy, and it’s all got good energy. I think there’s a part of me that wishes it was bigger and bolder in a holistic sense, but that’s just to wish it was more of a favourite to go with my love of the words and spirit of it.
Speakerboxxx is a fantastic rump-shaker funked-out blast of looking back and looking around for a great sound and Big Boi kills it as a lead on that, and Love Below is a fascinating almost-explosion of ideas from Andre 3000 across a wide breadth of tone and genre and all the rest of it which feels like it’s had tangible inspiration on all sorts of people. The thing is I just don’t know if it’s a strength that they’re together on “one” album - honestly, 40 tracks (I’m not gonna try to count without interludes) would be a lot anyway, 134 and a half minutes would be a lot anyway, but more crucially, an hour of Speakerboxxx jumping straight off the 100m diving board from Last Call and Bowtie into an hour of The Love Below just feels too much. I wouldn’t want either really compressed is the fucked up thing, there’s very little fat you could trim and you surely wouldn’t want to - I think you’d just have to Fuel/Refuel it as a separate pair who are spiritually a double, which would give you more room to breathe on The Love Below especially. And then also maybe I’d be able to purely focus on A Life In The Day without also dying for the pee break at the end.
Great showcase of James Brown’s energy and control as a performer with a squealing crowd in tow, I just wish I was more into the early soul period of his career more to enjoy it. Also, this reminded me of Otis Redding’s Monterrey Pop performance, in that you can see how these soul performers at the top of their game can jam more performance into 20-30 minutes than most could in a full modern gig, and so you end up just wishing there was more of it to soak in. Absolute shame this is the only James Brown on the list though, considering he’s a grandfather of funk and this is so early in his career to not hit at his popularly understood sound, even if this is an important album and a great showcase.
Happy to find out Sam Cooke live puts in the grit and energy I always find a bit lacking in hearing some of his songs recorded - the songs here sound so much punchier and impassioned, and there’s this great energy build between Cooke and this club audience throughout which really works for me. I think putting it across from the James Brown live release of the same time day-after-day helps it as well, because the looseness and the passion comes across really well for me rather than the perfect stage show, especially with this particular soul sound (which now I can begin to hear the influence on reggae particularly). The sound production could probably be better in an ideal world, but it’s a live album from 1963, I’ll take what I can get on that.
Undoubtedly, there’s some part of my love for this which comes round to nostalgia for George Michael and for the general sound this album pushed into pop, I’m sure, but also, you have to give it proper credit and admit that it’s just fantastic pop, carrying an undeniable Prince influence lyrically and sonically while forming its own thing out of the studio (vs Prince’s full band setup at the time). The first four tracks are a killer front side, all sliced well to make singles even when you’re naming a song I Want Your Sex, but the back half also doesn’t disappoint when it’s pushing the sounds a bit further and really giving the subwoofer a taste on one track while doubling back to a Broadway-esque sound by the end. Songwriting is probably arguably a bit of a weak spot, but sometimes a singer sounds great and that’s enough, you’ll let him work out his horndog jealousy on the tape. Ultimately, it’s all got that boldness and range you expect out of a “something to prove” debut, but the art in that is landing the plane somehow, which this absolutely does for me.
Fantastic pop songwriting lifted to another level with expansive and lush new wave influences so you can easily make a 40 minute pop album with just 8 songs and they’re all great and you can pull several singles despite length and they each feel timeless etc. etc. It’s one of those pinnacles of what you could do with the glossy and rich 80s production and two guys (well one guy) with a good voice and ideas. Loved it for a long time, gonna continue to love it, gonna be now returning to accidentally singing it and quoting it a bunch again now.
Very pleasantly surprised with this one, because I saw the genre descriptions and thought “oh no, this is not gonna be my vibe at all” and then lo and behold, it caught my ears like if Kurt Cobain was into country and folk instead of Pixies and alt-rock. Really great texture to voice and instrumentation, there’s a good drive and motion to songs which vary nicely beat to beat (Death to Everyone unsurprisingly my favourite with the distorted band sound), moody lyrics that I don’t hate and come across alright. I guess I’m becoming open to good singer-songwriter stuff and indie folk, they got to me.
Don’t love it as much as Heaven or Las Vegas because that album has more of a sunny inflection and this one feels much more gloomy and grey (more of a typical Scottish day than a Nevada one), but you know the vibes - the soundscapes are incredible, songs vary but blur together beautifully as a piece, it all makes the point it’s wanting to. It’s pop but like a dream, it is what it is, done well.
After we got Spirit before any Doors, I’d been patiently waiting to get a better show of this sound and scene and thank god it’s here. It’s a good thing I’ve spent a while inoculating myself from a lot of Jim Morrison’s poet quirks, so I can mostly just vibe with the Doors’ sound, and what a sound it is here. Heavy in on that LA counterculture blues that they probably did the best, really guitar forward on a lot of these but backed up well across the board. Roadhouse Blues is a killer opener, Peace Frog one of their best tracks. Gets a bit more psychedelic in places, particularly the back half which is also a bit shaggier for me, but they’re still doing it well ultimately - it is the Doors and all that.
Honestly maybe the most damning thing is that I like all three singles when I hear them on their own, like on the radio or in a playlist or something, but I feel worse about them in the general melange of the album. It’s all just in this sort of soft grey post-Britpop melange, quite boring and without much to really hold onto, lyrically or musically or anything elselly. The motherland really let me down with this one being such a hit.
Some of the highest highs of that old psychedelic and blues-y rock of the era for me, especially that closing run, but really all over the album. Some lulls sure, but I think you can reasonably forgive only making good songs in between great ones and experimenting and using all the shagginess you can get from self-funding and producing a double album in the late 60s. Hendrix is a fantastic singer and guitarist (and soundscape maker), Mitchell and Redding do more than enough to keep up rounding out the band (I’ve long thought their talents are slept on because it’s the Hendrix band), and I guess thanks Bobby D for writing Watchtower so someone else could shred it.
