Over what will likely be the next few years I’m going to be ranking and reviewing the top 5 albums - plus a fair few extras - according to users on rateyourmusic.com (think IMDB for music) from every year from 1960 to the present. If you want to know more, I wrote an introduction to the ‘challenge’ here. You can also read all the other entries I’ve written so far by heading to the lovely index page here.

We’re officially into the second half of the 70s, but before we start talking about music, let’s look at a few of the year’s main events. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia and the city of Saigon (now Ho-Chi Minh) was surrendered and all Americans evacuated, ending the Vietnam war. Margaret Thatcher became the first female leader of the Conservative party in the UK and the Pollo and Soyuz spacecrafts took off for a US-Soviet link-up in Space.

Here’s what rateyourmusic.com’s users rate as the year’s top 5 albums:

#1 Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here
#2 Bob Dylan - Blood on the Tracks
#3 Brian Eno - Another Green World
#4 Led Zeppelin - Physical Graffiti
#5 Bruce Springsteen - Born to Run

Bob Dylan’s back! As are Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Brian Eno, and we’ve got Bruce making his first appearance. Of course, we can’t just review 5 albums, so I’ll grab a few from further down the list too and give them a shot at the prestigious ‘best album of 1975’ award.

#6 Queen - A Night at the Opera
#7 Patti Smith - Horses
#8 Fela Kuti & Africa 70 - Expensive Shit
#9 Neil Young - Tonight’s the Night
#10 NEU! - NEU! ’75
#22 Joni Mitchell - The Hissing of Summer Lawns

Ok, 11 albums to get through, let’s go. Here’s my ranking and thoughts on the above.

The fourth album the British rock band was reportedly the most expensive album ever recorded at the time. The album includes the hit single Bohemian Rhapsody, which catapulted the band to fame worldwide. While reviews of the album at the time were mixed, it’s now regularly revered as Queen’s best album.

I have to confess at this point to not being the biggest fan of Queen - I’ve always found Mercury’s vocals a little too ‘High School Musical’ (don’t kill me) - but I ended up enjoying this one more than expected. Brian May’s riffing and soloing is on top form, and is evident immediately on Death On Two Legs where his riffs and solos sound humongous, and every penny thrown at the production of the album seems to have been worth it. Mercury’s vocals are as flamboyant and dramatic as you’d expect throughout.

The album is undeniably fun, the humour of tracks like I Love My Car had a pretty wide smile on my face. The drama Mercury’s vocals add to the line “I’m in love with my car” is just great. You’re My Best Friend is so positive it’s almost saccharin and of course the penultimate track, Bohemian Rhapsody is a masterpiece that’s become a victim of its own success. Overplayed, and such a part of our daily lives that it has become almost normal, when it is anything but. Mercury’s incomparable vocals, May’s riff masterclass, the changes that somehow work and make it sound like a collection of great songs while still being very much one song all combine to make one of the most famous songs in the world.

A Nigh at the Opera combines a whole heap of influences, and infuses them into Queen’s famous larger than life sound. It’s an album that evidences their significant talent, individuality and variety. Their sound still isn’t massively for me, but that’s on me.

Song Picks: I’m in Love With My Car, Bohemian Rhapsody

7/10

Neu! 75 is the third album by Neu, the krautrockers from Dusseldorf consisting of ex-Kraftwerk members Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger. Michael and Klaus took a couple of years off and found on returning to work together the direction they each wanted to take the band was now very different. Rother wanted to stick with the ambient sound of the old Neu!, while Dinger was keen to get more aggressive and in your face. They eventually compromised giving each other a side each, leading to an album that is very much a tale of two halves. Neu! 75 was also the last album before they disbanded, reuniting half-heartedly in the 80s.

Things start very relaxed with Isi as the drums tap along to a synthy instrumental verse-chorus-verse-chorus structure, and a sound that reminds me very much of The Boy With the Arab Strap by Belle & Sebastian. It’s a piece that cries out for some vocals to me, or something to add a little bit of interest to what sounds a little too much like a backing-track, even if it is a pleasant one. Things get more interesting on Seeland where a repeated guitar part builds as ominous synths and cymbals fade in and out in the distance. The track has that wonderful mystery to it that krautrock does so well, Rother’s guitar work echoing across the sparse arrangement like space waves. Next up, Leb Wohl (‘Live Well’ literally translated), is birthed out of the sounds of waves lapping onto the beach, as Rother’s guitar work is almost Latin in nature. Once the synth comes in it’s the kind of relaxing atmosphere that you’ll struggle to stay awake through, a magical, gently emotional piece of music reminiscent of a lot of ambient electronic music today - which is rather impressive considering this is from 1975. The simple piano part is just enough to pluck at the heart strings and make you reflect, the ticking clock a reminder that time passes even in dreams, and Rother’s airy mumbles a further reminder that vocals can be perfect even if you’re not sure what’s being said.

And then, it’s time for Klaus’ pieces, where we have his brother Thomas and Hans Lampe playing drums. You’re woken from your slumber immediately by a peppy riff and drums that are by no means heavy, but sound like an earthquake compared to the calm you’ve just experienced. Dinger’s vocals sound like those of a rambling drunk crossed with Damo Suzuki of Can. It’s the urgent call to arms of the present, the sirens calling you out from your slumber onto the front-line. E-Musik, the album’s longest track coming in at close to ten minutes is a rattling, overtone laden punk romp where the cymbals smash through the otherwise comfortable mix as if they’re made of glass, and the drums phase from side to side like a restless space ship before everything fades out into an ambient horror-scape which wouldn’t have been out of place on the album’s first side. The album finishes with After Eight, a bruising song with a guitar riff that soars like a garbled Chuck Berry above another plodding drumbeat. It’s a gritty, strangely infectious piece driven by vocals so throaty they sound like the cries of orcs.

Neu! 75 is undoubtedly inventive and creates an atmosphere very much its own. The most remarkable thing however, is how it wouldn’t sound out of place if it came out today.

Song Picks: Leb Wohl, After Eight

8.5/10

Expensive Shit is the twelfth album from the Nigerian pioneer of afrobeat. The tite refers to an incident - referred to in the album’s title track - where the police planted a joint on Fela Kuti before arresting him. He managed to eat it before they got him and thus the police waited for him to have his ‘expensive shit’. The album consists of two tracks, totalling 24 minutes.

The album is full of Fela’s energetic anger at the military government in Nigeria - something that seems particularly poignant with the SARS situation in Nigeria right now - who had continuously raided the compound where he lived trying to arrest him due to his ever more vocal opposition to the country’s rulers. The album opens with the title track, an affrobeat jam full of rolling conga drums, a trance-like offbeat guitar part and horn stabs that all combine to create something so lively and danceable, it’s hard to imagine it not bringing everyone to their feet to resist their oppression. When Kuti starts his political tirade half-way through the 13 minute song it’s easy to see why he was such an influential figure, delivering his lines with the brashness and confidence of someone not to be dissuaded. It’s a lively call to arms.

The album’s second and final track, Water No Get Enemy isn’t as fast as the title track, but arguably has more groove to it. Fela’s saxophone playing is magical, and lifted yet further by the vocals that accompany its energetic melody. As with the title track, many of the lyrics are in Yoruba, a language originating in south-west Nigeria, but it’s clear from the English parts that the song has a very powerful message. Likening the people of Nigeria to water, an essential part of the country, and one that the government will only drown themselves if they fight. The backing vocals give the song a powerful communal feel and the whole thing is one of the finest pieces of protest music I’ve ever heard. Completely Nigerian, and yet completely universal.

Expensive Shit is a 24 minute wonder of infectious discontent.

Song Picks: Water No Get Enemy

8.5/10

Tonight's the Night — 8. Tonight’s the Night

Neil Young

Neil Young’s sixth album was actually recorded before his fifth, On the Beach, and has a noticeably starker tone. The record was written shortly after the deaths of Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten and Young’s close friend Bruce Berry from drug overdoses, and largely deals with Young’s significant grief at the time. The first vinyl releases included the following message from him, "I'm sorry. You don't know these people. This means nothing to you."

The opening title track name-checks Bruce Berry and refers, presumably, about the night of his death, its chorus is haunting, direct, and drills right through you. Young’s vocals are dry and he’s tired and worn. The whole things sounds like it was recorded in a large cardboard box, there’s no reverb, no studio sheen, the atmosphere has been sucked out, and all that’s left is the broken-hearted skeleton of Young. Borrowed Tune - named so because it uses the melody from Lady Jane by the Rolling Stones - provides a little respite from this thanks to its pretty piano part, but Young is still frail, his voice balancing on the thinnest of tightropes, about to crack under its own delicate weight. It’s an affecting, brutally honest song. A couple of songs later on Mellow My Mind, his voice finally cracks, in one of the most in the moment, affecting and emotionally crushing vocal performances you’re likely to hear.

Young recovers himself on the second side and returns with more of a resigned mumble, something particularly evident on the sweeping Albuquerque, a song about restlessly driving around looking for a place he can relax, knowing full well the only way he can even remotely relax is by staying on the move. New Mama is the only song on the album offering any hope, as he sings quietly of the birth of his child, “Each morning when I wake up to rise / I'm living in a dreamland,” its acapella ending is perhaps the most affecting part of the album, providing a glimmer of hope in a hole deeper than the ocean. The penultimate track Tired Eyes features another heartbreaking melody and broken performance, or as Young himself puts it, “A bleary view of a drug murder in a Los Angeles canyon. Out of pitch but still in tune,” before we end with Tonight’s the Night (Pt. 2), an electric guitar version of the opening track. Young’s vocal is noticeably louder than the rest of the album here, he seems to have regained some strength, or is it simply that last surge of energy you get before you collapse? Likely the latter.

Tonigt’’s the Night is one of the starkest album I’ve ever heard. It’s an honest and immediate distillation of grief, recorded over a couple of weeks, at a time when Young was feeling at his weakest. The spontaneous nature of the songs and performances ensures that every inch of pain inside him is expressed. Not for the faint-hearted, this is an album that threatens to crumble in your hands, as broken as the man who made it.

Song Picks: Tonight’s the Night, Borrowed Tune, Albuquerque, Mellow My Mind

8.5/10

Patti Smith’s debut album was recorded at Electric Lady Studios, a studio commissioned by Jim Hendrix 10 months before his death. It’s an album notable for its experimental nature, something that set it apart from other punk albums of the time. Though not particularly successful commercially, the album was critically acclaimed immediately and is regularly cited as one of the best albums of all time, and a whole host of artists talk of it being a big influence on them.

The album opens with Gloria: In Excelcis Deo - a re-imagining of Gloria by Van Morrison’s band Them - a song you’ve no doubt heard before with its famous belting G-L-O-R-I-A chorus. There’s a Velvet Underground feeling to the freedom of the instrumentation, although perhaps slightly less dissonant and shrill. It goes perfectly with Smith’s performance, which is bursting with a restless energy. A perfect expression of freedom in song form.

Redondo Beach is a surprisingly catchy track about a drowned woman washing up on Redondo beach, the bouncy bass and drums as well as Smith’s melodies defying the darkness of the lyrics. Birdland is a great example of Smith’s storytelling skill, with fabulous images such as “It was as if someone had spread butter on all the fine points of the stars” and is based on Peter Reich’s Book of Dreams. Smith mixes intricate spoken word parts with powerfully cascading vocal sections where she seems to be extricating some kind of demon from within her, her vibrato mixed with shouts and frantic plosives. As with most of the songs on the album, it has a remarkable lack of structure, and seems to go where it goes purely on Smith’s whim. I think it sums her up as a performer and lyricist pretty perfectly in its 9 minute duration.

Free Money is perhaps the album’s most toughing song, a song written for her Mum, and inspired by ‘growing up poor,’ and how her Mum always wanted to win the lottery to be able to treat her kids. Its chorus echoes with a longing for the freedom that money buys. The equally poignant Kimberly is another tale of Smith’s youth, this one specifically about her youngest sibling, or as she puts it, “My mother gave birth to a fourth child whom we all pitched in to raise, a sickly though sunny little girl named Kimberly.” Again the song is characterised by some minimalist instrumentation that never takes your attention off Smith’s enigmatic and captivating vocal performance, while providing enough to make elements of the song surprisingly catchy, particularly the “some will make it go crack” section. The final three tracks have a mythological tone, and are as mysterious as they are engaging. Break it Up is a particular highlight for me, featuring one of the album’s biggest choruses, backed by some large piano chords and punchy backing vocals, with Smith really pushing her vocal range to create a melody that seems to explode out from the rest of the album like a restless firework. Land follows this up with a piece that has so much bop to it, it’s hard not to be taken away in its swirl of energy and groove. Smith’s vocals ensure it never sounds in any way conventional, and it all combines to create one of the finest, most memorable songs this challenge has introduced me to.

I’ve used the word ‘free’ a million times already, but I think it’s the word that best describes Horses. An album free of musical expectations and templates, free of worry about pretension, free of convention, and full of life.

Song Picks: Gloria: In Excelcis Deo, Break it Up, Land

9/10

AnotherGreenWorld — 6. Another Green World

Brian Eno

Eno’s third album features appearances from Robert Fripp on guitar, Phil Collins on drums and John Cale on the viola, though Eno plays most of the album’s instruments and generates most of the album’s sounds. It’s generally seen as the album where Eno transitioned from the rockier sound - an example of which we had on his debut in 1974 - to the more ambient sound that he’s famous for. He used tactics from his Oblique Strategies cards - a set of cards that provides instructions to aid creativity, you pick one and run with it - to compose many of the songs, and it’s regularly regarded as one of the best albums of the 70s.

I’ve talked about Eno’s fondness for impossible to decipher lyrics before and his belief that, “Since everyone just ignores the words anyway, it makes no difference if they are meaningless” is very much on display here, Eno even makes a point of announcing this with the opening song Sky Saw’s first verse:

All the clouds turn to words
All the words float in sequence
No one knows what they mean
Everyone just ignores them

An industrial, machine-like churn, is topped by a screeching violin, as the album’s menacing opener comes to a close. As with most Eno records, it’s as much about sounds as music, the funky Over Fire Island features a whole host of inventive sounds scattered around its funky bass-riff centre and Eno’s sound manipulation skills are evident throughout the album in spades. I’d go as far as saying he’s a sound-designer as well as a musician and producer.

The album’s highlight Big Ship follows the haunting In Dark Trees, as if after the unnerving walk through a dark forest, we find a glowing ship to take us to the promised land. It’s a song that moved me to tears when I first heard it in the (great) film Me, Earl and the Dying Girl, where it plays during a pivotal scene that I’ll never be able to separate it from. I remember looking it up immediately and being utterly flabbergasted that it was from 1975. It sounds like it could have come out in 2020, which considering the electronic sounding nature of it, is remarkable. Eno plays the guitar, the synth and programs the electronic drums to create a piece of music that soars as highly as anything written up to this point. That glowing ship takes us to the the sky, away from all our troubles. It’s the kind of song that could go on for much longer than its 3 minute running length and still not outstay its welcome. One of my very favourite pieces of music.

Although Another Green World has its more dissonant, perhaps slightly uncomfortable moments, I’d say it’s a warm album overall. I’ll Come Running, the short title track, Sombre Reptiles, and most of the tracks that follow have a glow to them often provided by Robert Fripp’s lengthy guitar notes, as well as Eno’s programmed percussion. The gently hopping Golden Hours has a nostalgic nursery-rhyme feel to it, it’s a hug from a family member, telling you all will be ok. Becalmed is a gorgeous synth-bed, carrying you to a place of reflection, I could go on. There’s gem after gem. It’s safe to say that Another Green World is a joy, an inventive joy, and unlike anything I’ve heard so far in this challenge.

Song Picks: Big Ships, Golden Hours, Becalmed

9/10

Led Zeppelin are seemingly incapable of making an album that doesn’t end up on these lists and here they are again with their sixth album, and first double-album. Eight tracks were recorded at a country house in Hampshire where the band could have a fairly loose recording schedule and the remaining six songs were previously unreleased tracks from albums going all the way back to Led Zeppelin III. This included Houses of the Holy, which was of course the name of their last album, as it was originally planned to be the title track.

Physical Graffiti is often said to be Led Zeppelin’s The White Album, and I agree in that it contains the most songs, and perhaps their least amount of hits, meaning a listen feels like discovering a whole host of new material in a similar way to The White Album and indeed the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. However, I’d say this is more comparable to Abbey Road, as it feels like a culmination of their sound, a summary of everything that came before it, and in many ways the peak of everything they’d been working on. You could argue it’s not particularly cohesive thematically, and it isn’t, but it is cohesive in it’s brilliance.

Custard Pie features a typically pounding beat from Bonham, and a riff that, though repeated for the entirety of the song, somehow never gets tiring. It feels like the most ‘mature’ of their songs full of sexual innuendos, if that is indeed possible. The Rover features one of my favourite Jimmy Page riffs and a wonderful, dramatic chord-sequence in the chorus, creating one of Zep’s tightest sounding songs. My Time of Dying - the song played last by Chris Cornell in the set on the night of his suicide - is Led Zeppelin’s longest song, and features Page’s fabulous slide guitar, as it crashes over mountain ranges, giving the song an immense power. Bonham’s claim of “that’s got to be the one hasn’t it?” makes it clear this wasn’t the first take, and indeed the album is filled with a sense of perfectionism, while never loosing that lightning in a bottle sound of a more instant recording, perhaps due to the low-pressure environment on the farm. It’s an example of the band at their blues-rock best, four performers who know each other like the back of their hands, working together to create the most wondrous and filthy mass of noise.

I could waffle on about cataclysmic riffs, cascading solos and pounding drums, but I feel I’ve already done plenty of that in my previous five Led Zeppelin reviews. Needless to say, all that applies here, and in spades, but there’s an added sense of importance to all the songs on Physical Graffiti too. Where all previous albums had around eight tracks, we’ve got 15 here, and the quality hasn’t dipped at all - in fact this is perhaps the band at their most consistent yet. So basically, this is like a double-portion of a great meal, and while Kashmir’s brilliant marching riff is well known (and indeed Bonham’s phased fills towards the end of the song sound like the band becoming too good for planet Earth), there’s plenty here to discover for those who’ve only heard the famous Led Zeppelin songs. Essentially it’s Zep at their best, has more to get your teeth into than any of their other albums, and sounds fresher. What’s not to like? I don’t think we’ll be seeing Led Zeppelin again on these lists as their later material is generally less well regarded, but Physical Graffiti seems like the perfect goodbye from one of the most consistent bands of all time. Never have they sounded so essential.

Song Picks: Custard Pie, In My Time of Dying, Kashmir, In the Light

9.5/10

BorntoRun — 4. Born to Run

Bruce Springsteen

The boss arrives with his third album, and first entry onto these lists. Very much his breakthrough album, it reached number three on the Billboard 200. Not only was the album very commercially successful, but it’s regularly considered by critics to be one of the best albums of all time. The album took over 14 months to record, as Bruce spent more time fine-tuning and re-recording parts than he ever had, and was also working with a substantially higher budget than his previous two albums. The iconic cover sees Springsteen holding his Telecaster while leaning on saxophonist and close friend Clarence Clemons, who died in 2011, and was a member of Springsteen’s E-Street band up until his death. See below for the rather lovely, un-cropped version of the cover.

The album opens with Thunder Road, a song that embodies the last-ditch effort that the album was - his first two albums hadn’t been successful and so this was very much seen as his last chance. Bruce sings of escaping, hitting the road, and the promised land, all topics he covers endlessly in his songs. He does so energetically, with an infectious boyish enthusiasm backed perfectly by the E-Street band, and particularly Clemons’ saxophone playing, which launches the already great song into the stratosphere of masterpieces. As Springsteen ends with the famous lines, “It's a town full of losers/And I'm pulling out of here to win,” before Clarence’s stratospheric sax solo enters accompanied by a piano part so full of life its hard not to explode with joy, you realise that Bruce was not here to mess about, he knew this albums was destined for success.

Tenth Avenue Freeze Out is a more straightforward number, with an infectious bounce making it one of Springsteen’s live favourites. Clemons’ saxophone is on form again - when is it not? - as Bruce builds a surreal picture of the formation of his band. Night features a powerful Springsteen vocal complete with impressive vibrato passages as he tells of the rock ‘n’ roll dream and escape before the first side ends with another ‘wow’ moment, Backstreets. The song tells of the adventures of him and his childhood friend Terry. As with many childhood friendships though it don’t last into adulthood, as perfectly encapsulated at the end of the third verse:

Well after all this time
To find we're just like all the rest
Stranded in the park
And forced to confess

It’s another song of relentlessly energetic vocals - Bruce belting it out with a level of energy that makes it hard to imagine he has much left after the performance - crying with the power of freedom and the American dream, which always promises more than it delivers.

Side two opens with the title track, and perhaps Springsteen’s most famous song. A song that explodes out the gates in a way similar to Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone. You’re catapulted into a frenetic song of love and escape, Springsteen’s relentless vigour bursting out the speakers as he sings each line in a way that is so present, it’s hard to compare it to anyone but Bob himself, even if it sounds completely different. Clemons’ famous sax solo bridges to the song’s calmer section as the album’s wall of sound seemingly catches Springsteen when he collapses from exhaustion, before he explodes again into what is quite probably one of the most powerful final minutes to a song ever. As all the instruments burst into a firework display crescendo of an ending, it’s hard not to stare at the sky and laugh at the sheer brilliance of it all. She’s the One provides us with a chorus-less four and a half minute climb to a blissful love, featuring yet another memorable ending. The album ends with a couple of slower songs, the ode to a failed criminal Meeting Across the River and the 10 minute masterpiece, Jungleland, featuring probably the album’s best sax solo by Clemons - which is saying something - soaring along like the spirit of adolescence that the album so perfectly encapsulates.

Born to Run is an album about coming of age and the restless bouncing around from one thing to another, trying to find some meaning to all this. It reminds me of hitch-hiking through the night, of arriving in places and immediately becoming restless again, of an insatiable need to move, to see everything, to feel everything, to live so fast that I just might encounter what I was looking for. If indeed, I was looking for anything.

Song Picks: Thunder Road, Backstreets, Born to Run, Jungleland

9.5/10

WishYouWereHere — 3. Wish You Were Here

Pink Floyd

As veterans of these lists by now, Pink Floyd return with their ninth album, recorded at the famous Abbey Road Studios in London, and regarded by keyboardist Richard Wright and guitarist David Gilmour as their best album. It initially received mixed reviews, but has since been hailed a masterpiece, and one of the greatest albums of all time. It reached number 1 in the UK on release, and has sold over 13 million copies since.

The album opens with Shine on You Crazy Diamond Pt 1-5, the final parts of which close out the album. It begins as an instrumental, Mason’s gentle and basic drumming as crisp and clear as the titular diamond, and Gilmour’s guitar work some of the most gorgeous I’ve ever heard, a master of doing a lot with a little. The song bubbles over in the finale as the vocals come in, when it becomes clear that the song is a tribute to Syd Barrett, who had left the band seven years earlier as I’ve described in a previous post, “Remember when you were young/You shone like the Sun.” The lyrical themes are generally of a life lived too fast, and Dick Parry’s saxophone adds another layer of emotion, without ever approaching cheesiness.

Welcome to the Machine is generally interpreted as a scathing critique of the music industry, the lines “What did you dream? It's alright, we told you what to dream” summing thins up pretty nicely. Gilmour’s vocals are quite monotone, and rather desperate, like a man who’s been worn down by said machine. The piercing synth spells doom, and wouldn’t be out of place in 2001: A Space Odyssey as it completely obliterates the acoustic guitar backing, like the arrival of a machine-dominated future, crushing that of a more folky past. This music industry vibe continues on Have a Guitar, a song about a music industry exec creating a monster out of a new prodigy, “And did we tell you the name of the game, boy?/We call it riding the gravy train” Roy Harper howls in a guest appearance - Waters and Gilmour couldn’t get their own vocals to work so asked Harper who was recording next door - as that synth looms in the background. Gilmour’s trying to fight it off with lick after lick, before it eventually seemingly gets sucked into a black hole, announcing the arrival of the album’s title track, one of the band’s many masterpieces.

Wish You Were Here is the album’s shortest, and most instrumentally basic song, largely propelled only by Gilmour’s acoustic guitar and vocal it opens with a timeless acoustic guitar solo and those immortal words, “So you think you can tell/Heaven from Hell?” sung in a melody like the most universal of lullabies. I’m unsure if a song led by acoustic guitars has ever sounded so huge, such a force of nature. Waters’ lyrics and Gilmour’s gentle guitar licks combine as if they’d both drained down from the same mountain. The final chorus is one of the most affecting ever written, expressing an alienation that I’m sure we can all relate to from time to time;

How I wish, how I wish you were here
We're just two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl year after year
Running over the same old ground, what have we found?
The same old fears, wish you were here

The ocean winds bring us the last track, Shine on You Crazy Diamond Pts. 6-9, a 12 minute reprise of the opening track that is more menacing as the lyrics focus more on how Syd has gone somewhere - perhaps to the dark side of the moon - and how Roger Waters will be joining him there. Gilmour’s guitar work dominates the track, as he throws out more dissonant, edgy lines, than the ones in the album’s opening. The vocals appear around halfway and stick around for barely a minute before we’re launched into a 6 minute instrumental outro to the album that is some of the band’s most stunning musical world-building with synths, pedal steels and guitars working in perfect unison to create a sad, and yet infinitely pretty universe.

Wish You Were Here is the sad deconstruction of the rock ‘n’ roll dream and how it destroyed one of their best friends. It’s hard to imagine a more beautiful musical representation of this, and that, along with its undeniable beauty, is what makes it a masterpiece.

Song Picks: Shine on You Crazy Diamond (all parts), Wish You Were Here

9.5/10

2. The Hissing of Summer Lawns

Joni Mitchell

Mitchell’s seventh studio album sees her moving from the poppier, folkier trappings of Court and Spark into less traditional song structures and jazzier, more experimental arrangements. Interestingly, the song The Jungle Line, is credited as being the first commercial song to use sampling, something that was to become more popular in the 80s, and is commonplace in many genres today, particularly hip-hop.

The album opens with the pop-rock In France they Kiss on Main Street, a breezy, melodic, coming-of-age song that wouldn’t have been out of place on Court and Spark, but by the second track The Jungle Line we’re into the darker, more experimental tone of the rest of the album. The African drum sample pounds along with a grainy distortion as Mitchell sings in dark tones over the top. It’d be easy to focus on the interesting instrumentation and atmosphere, but the lyrics themselves are the beginning of perhaps Mitchell’s strongest lyrical album. The second verse is a case in point:

In a low-cut blouse she brings the beer
Rousseau paints a jungle flower behind her ear
Those cannibals-of shuck and jive
They'll eat a working girl like her alive
With his hard-edged eye and his steady hand
He paints the cellar full of ferns and orchid vines
And he hangs a moon above a five-piece band
He hangs it up above the jungle line

Something’s happening here, and we’re not sure what it is, are we? It’s a mysterious album, a winding maze of sound and words. Lyrical flair permeates through the female independence song Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow and the frankly gorgeous Shades of Scarlett Conquering, which features a vocal performance both haunting and beautiful.

The title track is very much the album’s centrepiece , telling the story of a woman who is seen as her husband’s possession, with the repeated image of sprinklers hissing at their unhappiness with the materialistic culture running through the houses’ gardens they water. Again, Mitchell’s lyrics are evocative, mysterious, and brilliant. The song finishes with the following verse sung over the ever-present brooding bass:

A diamond dog
Carrying a cup and a cane
Looking through a double glass
Looking at too much pride and too much shame
There's a black fly buzzing
There's a heat wave burning in her master's voice
Hissing summer lawns

The Hissing of Summer Lawns is an album about appearances, about failing marriages hidden behind walls of wealth, about artists ‘selling out’ when they’re actually just being themselves, but mainly about women’s attempts to find their own way, when forever they’ve been taught to appear happy with supporting men to go theirs. Hissing of Summer Lawns is a lyrical masterpiece set in a moody, intricate instrumental setting, it’s unlike anything before or since. For my money, it’s Joni Mitchell’s best album.

Song Picks: Shades of Scarlett Conquering, The Jungle Line, Hissing of Summer Lawns

9.5/10

BloodOntheTracks — 1. Blood on the Tracks

Bob Dylan

It’s been a while since our undisputed king of the 60s has made an appearance on one of these lists. He’s made plenty of albums since his last appearance with John Wesley Harding, but it’s Blood on the Tracks that is one of his few later releases spoken about in the same breath as the products of his golden years in the 60s. His fifteenth album sees him behind an acoustic guitar, this time often tuned to a jangly open E, generally performing as part of a fairly standard 4 or 5-piece band.

The album is largely seen to be about the breakdown of his marriage to Sara Lownds, and their son Jakob Dylan has described it as “my parents talking.” It was described as “the truest, most honest account of a love affair from tip to stern ever put down on magnetic tape,” by Benjamin Hedin. Dylan has denied numerous times that the songs are autobiographical however, claiming instead they were inspired by the short stories of Anton Checkov, but then Dylan says a lot of things.

The album was apparently recorded in a similarly spontaneous way to his 60s efforts with verses being cut and the location of choruses changed on the fly. 5 of the album’s 10 tracks were even re-recorded last-minute after Bob’s brother David claimed the sound on the original test pressing was too stark. That original test pressing was released for world record store day in 2019, but we’ll of course be talking about the proper 1975 release.

Tangled Up In Blue opens the album with its jangly open tuned guitar part, and features one of Dylan’s most brilliant lyrics - where he ends each verse with the song’s title - as he tells the story of a relationship, starting in the present, then going to the past for 5 verses before returning to now, ending with the immortal lines “We always did feel the same / We just saw it from a different point of view / Tangled up in blue." It’s a masterpiece, a poetic marvel, sung with a worn version of the Dylan vocals we’re so accustomed to, where every word enters your brain like a gentle bullet of beauty.

A Simple Twist of Fate is another song that uses a repetition of its title after each verse to punch home its message, with no need for a chorus. Its another exploration of a failing relationship, emphasising how little control we have over the universe, and shrouding the whole thing in the beautiful metaphorical imagery that Dylan does so well. It’s a gentler song to the opener, but no less powerful or haunting. The last verse punches like Tyson in his heyday:

People tell me it's a sin
To know and feel too much within
I still believe she was my twin
But I lost the ring
She was born in spring
But I was born too late
Blame it on a simple twist of fate

Idiot Wind is the album’s angriest song, and it would be easy to interpret it as an angry tirade against his then wife, but it’s pretty clear there’s a lot more to it than that to me, something the opening lines are a big clue to, “Someone’s got it in for me / They’re planting stories in the press.” Dylan refers regularly to the effect his fame has had on him and those he comes in contact with, and I think Pete Hamill’s liner notes explain what the ‘idiot wind’ is more eloquently than I ever could, so here it is:

“Listen to “Idiot Wind.” It is a hard, cold-blooded poem about the survivor’s anger, as personal as anything ever committed to a record. And yet it can also stand as the anthem for all who feel invaded, handled, bottled, packaged; all who spent themselves in combat with the plague; all who ever walked into the knives of humiliation or hatred. The idiot wind trivialized lives into gossip, celebrates fad and fashion, glorifies the dismal glitter of celebrity. Its products live on the covers of magazines, in all of television, if the poisoned air and dead grey lakes. But most of all, it blows through the human heart. Dylan knows that such a wind is the deadliest enemy of art. And when the artists die, we all die with them.”

In a way, Idiot Wind is, as a comment on genius.com suggests, referring to his own inflated persona, and perhaps the society which has born it.

You’re Going to Make Me Lonesome When You Go reportedly refers to an affair of Dylan’s - though as mentioned earlier, Dylan denies any of the songs are about him - and the sound certainly matches something fleeting, there and gone in the breath of a wind. Meet Me In the Morning is classic Dylan does the blues, lyrically beautiful and with an infectious groove, and Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts tells an intricate, almost novella sized story as it rattles along at pace for its near 9 minute duration, the repeated bassline mirroring Dylan’s melody, as he tells a tale of a whole host of characters with the visual brilliance of the sublime poet he is.

If You See Her Say Hello revisits the idea of someone passing on a message to a lost love that was present in Girl from the North Country, though it’s notable that this time the whole things sounds a lot sadder.

As we reach the album’s last few songs, Shelter from the Storm is a Dylan favourite for me, and one of my very favourite songs, telling the story of how Sara provided shelter for him when he was all over the place, “I came in from the wilderness / A creature void of form” and his struggles with the way things are now “If I could only turn back the clock / To when God and her were born.” It’s a self-deprecating look at a the positives of a failed relationship, where the failure is largely down to him. Each verse ends with “’Come in,’ she said, ‘I'll give ya Shelter from the storm,’” right up until the last verse, but one knows that offer of shelter isn’t there much longer. On the surface it’s a warm song, and one I turn to when I too feel in need of shelter, but the underlying message is that no shelter will be there forever, and you’ll be left fending for yourself eventually. Thankfully though, this song’s going nowhere.

Blood on the Tracks is perhaps Dylan’s final masterpiece, and rather likely the last of his albums that’ll get a 10 from me on these lists. It’s a whole lot more candid than his brilliantly indecipherable 60s electric phase, and yet, while those practically exploded with life and imagery, Blood on the Tracks twinkles more subtly, more sadly. A man can’t live in a dream forever, he’s eventually going to come back to reality, as Dylan does here. The remarkable thing though is that none of Dylan’s creative spark has gone, and that he clearly absorbed enough in those years of excess to turn him indefinitely into one of the best poets we’ve ever had. The Telegraph wrote the following paragraph about the opening track Tangled Up In Blue, to me there’s no better description of the whole album:

“The most dazzling lyric ever written, an abstract narrative of relationships told in an amorphous blend of first and third person, rolling past, present and future together, spilling out in tripping cadences and audacious internal rhymes, ripe with sharply turned images and observations and filled with a painfully desperate longing.”

As with his Blonde on Blonde and Highway 61 Revisited, Dylan perfectly encapsulates his state of mind at the time, in a way that wouldn’t be possible without his endless twisting flamboyant metaphors, where nothing is obvious. This lack of clarity allows us to put our own meaning onto the words, and thus he shows us his state of mind through the lens of our very own, a lens without which we’d understand nothing. Blood on the Tracks is a work of poetic genius.

Song Picks: Tangled Up in Blue, A Simple Twist of Fate, Shelter from the Storm, Idiot Wind

10/10