1977 - Clive's Top Albums of Every Year Challenge

December 18, 2020 by Clive in Clive's Album Challenge, Music

In what will likely be my final post of 2020 (don’t panic, I’ll very much be carrying on with this cahllenge into 2021 and beyond) we’re going to take a look at 1977. The year the nuclear-proliferation pact, curbing the spread of nuclear weapons was signed by 15 countries, Star Wars hit theatres for the first time, and British Public sector trade unions including firefighters undertook a strike for wage increases.

As usual, here’s what rateyourmusic.com’s users rate as the year’s top 5 albums, using their fancy new algorithm which seems to give a little less credence to how many reviews an album has, meaning less reviewed releases have a better chance of coming high up the lists.

#1 Pink Floyd - Animals
#2 David Bowie - Low
#3 Television - Marquee Moon
#4 Fleetwood Mac - Rumours
#5 David Bowie - “Heroes”

So returns from Pink Floyd and Bowie and first time entries from Television and Fleetwood Mac. Bowie achieves the rarest of things by managing to release two albums in one year that make it onto the list. As usual, five just isn’t enough, so I’m grabbing a few from further down to compete for the coveted title for 1977, including a shameless dip quite far down to grab an old favourite.

#6 Trans Europa Express
#7 Fela Kuti - Zombie
#8 Wire - Pink Flag
#11 Bob Marley & the Wailers - Exodus
#12 Brian Eno - Before and After Science
#25 Martha Argerich - 24 Préludes, Op. 28
#85 Sex Pistols - Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols

Plenty of artists we’ve not had before there, so let’s get these 12 albums reviewed and see who comes out the victor. I know I’ve said this a few times already, but this is absolutely a contender for one of the strongest years we’ve had yet.

Trans-europaexpress — 12. Trans Europa Express

Kraftwerk

Kraftwerk’s sixth album ‘saw the group refine their melodic electronic style, with a focus on sequenced rhythms, minimalism, and occasionally manipulated vocals. The themes include celebrations of the titular European railway service and Europe as a whole, and meditations on the disparities between reality and appearance.’ (Wikipedia). Their Previous album, Radio-Activity, had been their first entirely electronic one, moving away from their earlier krautrock style. Trans-Europa Express is regularly seen as a massively influential album on modern music, and was in fact called ‘the most important pop album of the last 40 years’ by the LA times.

Europa Endloss (Europe Endless in English) is a simple, dreamy song about the band travelling across Europe by train. It’s lyrics are simple and repetitive just like the electronic musical backing. The electronic percussion and synths lull you into a beautiful and yet musically primitive sleep. The simplicity of many of the arrangements was likely born out of how early this was in the development of electronic music, but it is also part of the album’s charm, lending it a slightly post-apocalypitc and industrial feel that is only added to by haunting vocals on songs such as Spiegelsall (Hall of Mirrors in English). “Even the biggest stars, don’t like themselves in the mirror” the vocals say in German repeatedly, with a reverb large enough to make it sound like an observation from god.

The songs on Trans- Europa express tend to hinge on a repeated vocal line and simple synth melody and drum beat. The title track is a great example. ‘Trans-Europa Express’ is repeated regularly through some sort of Vocoder to turn the vocals to mercury, and the skittering electronic drum beat is repeated throughout the six and a half minute track, while the synths fill the gaps with large, almost organ-like chords. It’s another strangely haunting piece, like an abandoned factory with the machinery left on. The beginnings of many electronic genres are here, and the influence Kraftwerk had is undisputable. The record has certainly aged, and its sounds are particularly primitive when compared to all the fancy stuff we can do now with electronic music. But it has aged gracefully, thanks to the musicality and atmosphere at its core, and it’s simplicity really is rather beautiful.

Song Picks: Europa Endloss, Spiegelsaal, Franz Schubert, Endloss

8/10

Chopin’s 24 Preludes, Op.28 were first published 1839, and contained 24 short piano pieces, one in each major and minor key. A Polish virtuoso pianist of the Romantic era, Chopin apparently never performed more than 4 of the 24 pieces in a single performance, and there is still debate as to whether they were intended to be played in order, or indeed written as 24 separate pieces to use as possible introductions to other works, as Preludes generally were. The fact that Chopin ordered the songs using the circle of fifths rather than simply moving up the keys in semitones suggests to me that he had thought about the ordering a little too much for the pieces to be designed for consuming independently however. The 24 Preludes, Op.28 have been recorded and performed by a whole heap of pianists, but it’s Martha Argerich’s version, released in 1977 that makes it onto these lists.

Martha Argerich is an Argentine-Swiss concert pianist, and widely regarded as one of the greatest pianists of all time. Born in 1941 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, she began playing the piano aged 3, eventually moving to Europe in 1955 and later gaining Swiss citizenship. Despite her incredible talent and rather impressive list of accolades (see her Wikipedia page here), Argerich has generally shied away from the spotlight, which would explain why this is the first I’ve heard of her.

Argerich’s performance here is masterful. Though I can’t claim to have heard these pieces played by anyone else, it’s hard to imagine them being performed more beautifully than they are here. Argerich can put dizzyingly fast lines together in a way that still feels very human, while making them sound just as effortless as the slower pieces. Those slower pieces have a delicate wonder to them, like the notes from some sunken ship resurfacing as bubbles on the ocean’s surface. There’s a whole world to get lost in here, and Argerich’s mastery of the instrument coupled with Chopin’s gorgeous compositions has absolutely become one of the piano albums I’ll point people to when they ask for my favourites, sitting proudly alongside with Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert.

8.5/10

Fela Kuti’s second album to make it onto these lists caused quite a stir. Hugely popular in his home country of Nigeria, the record angered the government there, which it criticised heavily. It angered them so much that they attacked his commune, murdering his mother by throwing her out of a window, severely beating Fela Kuti, burning the entire commune and destroying his studio and master tapes. Though the re-issue added an additional two tracks, I’ll be reviewing the original 25 minute 1977 release here, which featured just two tracks.

The album opens with the title track, a scathing attack on the Nigerian military, describing them all as zombies who just follow orders without thinking, “Zombie no go think, unless you tell am to think”. The sound is similar to the one on Expensive Shit, but perhaps larger. We’ve got a whole host of driving percussion, a scatty strummed electric guitar, and the two talking saxophones that form the centrepiece of Kuti’s afrobeat sound. Once Kuti starts chanting his political lyrics, it’s not hard to see why he had such a big impact in his home country. The music draws you in with its infinite danceability, and soon has you chanting its simple and yet astute political message along with him.

The second and final track Mr Follow Follow has a similar message, “Some dey follow follow, dem close dem eye”, but is a little calmer in it’s instrumentation, with the bass, guitar and saxes laying down an irresistibly smooth groove like the light-hearted march of a cartoon army. Fela preaches about how everyone follows instructions without questioning them by closing their ears, eyes and ‘sense’. A master of setting a theme or mood before introducing any lyrics, it takes Kuti around 7 minutes to start singing here again, and by the time he does, you’re so entranced by the groove that you’ll agree to anything he says, thankfully his message is one that we could all do with hearing.

Zombie is musically and thematically cohesive, an album that is incredibly enjoyable in itself, but which becomes even more remarkable when you know the context of its recording. It’s difficult to imagine how Kuti feels about the album that inadvertently led to the death of his own mother, but to me, this is a perfect example of the power of music to unite, to spread a message by both being accessible and revolutionary.

Song Picks: Zombie, Mr Follow Follow

8.5/10

The English band’s debut album was received well critically, but didn’t sell well. Widely seen as one of the most influential albums of the 70s, its footprints can be seen on many hardcore, punk and alternative albums since. The record features 21 songs over its 35 minute duration, focusing on short, punchy songs that get to the point quickly and never outstay their welcome.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned a lot of times how big a fan of Guided by Voices I am, I’ve always loved their immediacy, how their songs seem to be captured at the point of inspiration, rather than when they’ve been thought out endlessly in the studio, and there’s something attractively raw about that to me. Pink Flag gives me the same vibes. Many of these songs could quite easily have been turned into 3 minute radio hits, but they’d have lost something. There’s a real magic to the rawness here.

With so many songs to talk about, it’d be folly to try and cover them all, so I’ll just talk about some of my highlights. Here goes. Ex Lion Tamer seems to have single-handedly invented Brit-pop, well before that genre was to dominate the charts. The chorus is as catchy as a song about sitting in front of your TV waiting for things to change could be, an anthem for the procrastinator. Lowdown is a great example of how great Colin Newman’s vocals sound when he throws caution to the wind, while Brazil’s guitar sound is so filthy you feel as if you’re being dragged backwards through a rubbish dump. So Obvious features the kind of major chord riff that could have easily been turned into a rock classic, but was instead seemingly played into a washing machine for 50 seconds, recorded, and then left there. Surgeon’s Girl features the lines “Said you weren't a tuna fish, put in a tin / They're very big, ha-ha” while Straight Line includes another fabulous riff that gets played for 44 glorious seconds and is then cut short. Mr Suit is the perfect anti-establishment punk song, something it achieves in only 1:25 seconds with a chorus that says ‘fuck the system’ like no other, “no, no, no, no Mr Suit”. On the grungy Strange, the band decide to play for a whole 4 minutes, with a riff so fuzzy and brilliant that you feel like you’ve just stuck your head straight into the world’s warmest tube amp. The lyrics are simple but performed by Newman in a way that makes them bounce against the guitar riff gloriously. The album’s final two track end things in a blaze of glory, Gimme Love is so drawled you can barely understand what’s being said and 1 2 X U is the ultimate bounce around punk song, but with drums that sound so thin it’s like they’re being played on a load of plastic cups, and guitars that are so loud they’ve gone full circle and ended up quiet again. Chaos.

In a genre that often gets repetitive, Pink Flag is an outstanding album that’s unpredictable, inspired, has the attention span of a gnat, and is completely brilliant.

Song Picks: Strange, Ex Lion Tamer, Lowdown, So Obvious, Gimme Lov

9/10

Beforeandafterscience — 8. Before and after Science

Brian Eno

It’s been quite the decade for Brian Eno, both in terms of his own albums and his contributions to those of others, and his fifth release is another remarkable one. As usual, a whole host of musicians collaborated with Eno on the album’s material, and the it also includes Eno’s final examples of rock music, before he was to head in a more ambient direction. Notably, over 100 songs were written for the album with only 10 making the cut.

Once again, Eno’s lyrics are more about a mood than meaning, which is clear on the opening No One Receiving, where they paint a bleak, industrial picture perfectly backed by the machine-like and yet gently funky backing of the plethora of percussion driven along by the song’s ever-present guitar riff. It’s another perfect example of Eno’ ability to create a world very much his own, something that he was to excel at in his later solo ambient recordings. Backwater displays Eno’s perhaps underrated ability for simple and infectious melody, sounding like Eno’s interpretation of a light hearted sailor’s song. Once again the synths and instrumental create a musical palette that’s both unique and infinitely interesting. Eno’s emphasis on the sound of words rather than their meaning is further explored on the enigmatic Kurt’s Rejoinder, inspired Kurt Schwitters, a prominent figure in the dada movement, which you can read more about here. We see Eno’s ambient work begin to creep in on the eerie and beautiful Energy Folls the Magician and the opening side ends with King’s Lead Hat, a song inspired by the Talking Heads, who Eno would go on to produce multiple albums of, and who’s name the title of the song is an anagram of. For me, it’s one of the album’s highlights, with it’s bopping bass line and drums, topped with an irresistibly catchy melody performed in Eno’s characteristic style. It’s a track that screams ‘fun’, and fills me with joy whenever it comes on.

Side two takes a more introspective turn, with Here He Comes setting the tone nicely with its slightly withdrawn and mumbled vocal backed by some gorgeous lead guitar work. It’s a late night drive kind of a song, sparkling gently like the stars as you exit the air pollution of the city. The gorgeous, twinkling guitar work continues on Julie With… and the gentle night-time ride continues until the album’s end with Spider and I, a song that makes you feel like you’re floating into the most beautiful cosmos, with nothing but your best friend in company.

Before and After Science is very much an album of two halves. The first half perhaps more perfectly encapsulating what Eno had been trying to do with rock music than any of his previous work, and the second half beautifully slides us into his more ambient catalogue. It’s a perfectly documented turning point.

Song Picks: No One Receiving, King’s Lead Hat, Here He Comes, Spider and I

9/10

Bowie’s twelfth album and second of 1977 continues in similar vein to Low, which we’ll get to later in this list. The middle album of Bowie’s ‘Berlin Trilogy’, Heroes was the only one actually recorded in Berlin. Bowie rejoined Tony Visconti and Brian Eno, who he’d worked with on Low, and much of the other personnel remained the same, with the notable addition of Robert Fripp on guitar. The majority of the tracks were recorded spontaneously in the studio and, perhaps most remarkably, Bowie had no lyrics written before he started recording. It continues the theme of having the opening side dedicated to to more conventional songs, with the second side being given over to predominantly instrumental tracks. It was commercially successful, and the most well received of Bowie’s ‘Berlin Trilogy’ initially, though Low is now largely seen as his masterpiece.

The album comes storming out the gates with that familiar insdustrial sound on Bowie recordings since Station to Station, including the brutal machine-like drum sound, which pounds along as the rest of the musicians bounce energetically and Bowie’s lyrics remain largely impenetrable. It combines haunting and dancy in a way that only Bowie can. On the following track Joe the Lion, a tribute to Chris Burden, Fripp’s influence becomes obvious, his riff is another corker, making this one of Bowie’s best rock songs in my books. Fripp effortlessly switches between riffs and solos as Bowie’s howls create another cataclysmic song to lead us into the more gentle Heroes. There are songs that become so famous that they become very much their own thing, and can sometimes stick out when listening to an album purely because of how much more familiar you are with them than the rest of the record. Heroes could easily be such a song, and yet it fits in seamlessly, yes I’ve heard it 3000 times more than any of the other songs here, but this very much feels like the song’s home. Fripp’s guitarwork is yet again what raises the piece from great to amazing, adding in endless depth and texture to a song that could easily have become boring with its simplicity. Bowie’s vocal performance is singular, metallic, and brilliantly unrestrained, getting more shouty as the song progresses, and as Visconti moved the mic further and further away from Bowie. The song tells of a doomed relationship, enjoying it “just for one day” inspired by an affair that producer Tony Visconti was having at the time. Sons of the Silent Age is essentially about ‘average Joes’ living lives that Bowie clearly thinks are rather boring. The first side closes with Blackout, a return to the dancy, industrial sound of the opening track.

The largely instrumental second side is dominated by the three tracks that flow into each other at its core, Sense of Doubt, Moss Garden and Neuköln, the former has a similar dark, haunting and desolate atmosphere to the instrumental tracks on Low, perhaps with some added menace, while Moss Garden is beautifully relaxing, apparently written to recreate the feeling of sitting in some moss gardens in Japan. It makes me want to go and do that immediately. Neuköln brings us back to a slightly darker mood, and features Bowie on saxophone before we finish with Secret Life of Arabia, a warm disco inspired tune, topped with a dusky vocal.

I find Heroes quite hard to separate from Low, and I give the edge to Low purely because it was more groundbreaking, while Heroes was very much a continuation of what Low had started. I think Heroes does everything just as well, there’s just a little less of that intangible magic there that I can’t explain. It may simply be because I listened to Low first.

Song Picks: Beauty and the Beast, Joe the Lion, Heroes, Moss Garden

9/10

Marqueemoon — 6. Marquee Moon

Television

Television’s debut landed to widespread critical acclaim. The band had grown in prominence following their residence at the Lower Manhattan Club and Brian Eno, who seems to have his fingerprints on so much music of the 1970s, produced the band’s first four demos in 1974. The band were eventually signed to Elektra Records, who released their debut.

I’ve mentioned a few times now how one of my favourite things about this listening challenge is discovering an album that seems to invent a genre out of nowhere, this is especially remarkable when that genre is one that played such a big part in my own youth, the 2000s indie-rock revolution of The Libertines, The Strokes et al. Marquee Moon, to me, is the birth of that movement, as well as so many more closer to its date of release.

The album opens with See No Evil, a song propelled by a snake-like guitar riff in one channel accompanied by a basic off-beat chord riff in the other channel. This is all backed by some great jazz inspired, and yet straight, drumming and a vocal that cuts right through the mix with a high frequency, nasal quality that forces you to pay attention to the lyrics. Lyrics that, in this case, are about knowing one is being controlled by desires, and yet seeing the beauty in those desires. It’s the perfect indie-rock song, catapulting the album onto the scene with a number that’s both accessible and revolutionary.

Televison stand apart from other acts of the period for their mix of genres. There’s elements of punk rock, particularly in Tom Verlaine’s deliberately unrestrained vocal, of jazz in Billy Ficca’s intricate drumming, and of a combination of rock and jazz in the guitars, which use more interesting chords in one song than Status Quo probably did in their entire career. It’s a remarkable meld of musicality that’s progressive not for the sake of being progressive but because the sound created is so damn enjoyable. There’s a breeziness to it, an irresistible energetic Sunday morning feeling, a feeling that all is right with the world while music like this is being created.

The album is full of great moments. Among them the great off-kilter guitar work on Friction, which gives Mac DeMarco a run for his money - indeed the competing guitar solos throughout the song belong to the album’s many highlights. The great title track is another one, an 11 minute jam which was apparently the first take, and the engineer initially thought was a rehearsal, testament to just how well well these musicians gel, it sounds perfect. A perfect mix of instrumental intrigue, interspersed vocals, and lyrics that keep you engaged. Not least the majestic closing couplet:

I was listening
Listening to the rain
I was hearing
Hearing something else

By the time you reach the closing track Torn Curtain, which contains perhaps the album’s most affecting chorus and a cracking guitar solo by Tom Verlaine, you’re left feeling like you’ve been blessed by something completely fresh sounding, a refreshing musical shower under a mountain waterfall.

Song Picks: See No Evil, Marquee Moon, Torn Curtain

9/10

5. Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols

The Sex Pistols

The band had already been banned from playing in various parts of Britain and fired from two record labels by the time their only album was released by Virgin Records, and the controversy didn’t end there. The title meant many stores refused to stock it and some charts refused to display its name. Regardless, and probably because of this, it debuted at number 1 on the UK album charts. If you were to somehow measure which albums have influenced the most music since their release, I suspect Never Mind the Bollocks… would end up near the top. Sure we’d had punk before, notably with Ramones in 1976, but it had never been this chaotic, this free, this simple and giving this few fucks.

The album opens with Holidays in the Sun which explodes into motion following the marching bass drum and an explosive riff from Steve Jones on guitar (he also plays bass on most of the album). It’s important to note that the Sex Pistols achieved their sound not by using some sort of amp designed for distortion, oh no, they turned up the gain and volume so high on a predominantly clean amp so that it lead to the distorted racket they’re famous for today. Rotten’s lead vocals are pretty much the birth of the kind of half-sung half-shouted, theatrical vocal that became common on the punk scene after this album was released. It’s sneering, loud, bursting with a cocky attitude, and just generally bloody fabulous. The song also shows their often underrated ability to come up with a catchy hook.

Bodies, the only song to feature Sid Vicious, has a chorus that is so jubilantly cathartic it juxtaposes with the fact the song tackles abortion in such a head on and unflinching way that it appalled many people at the time. It’s probably the heaviest, most gut punching song on the record.

God Save the Queen is obviously monstrous too. Rotten shouting “God Save the Queen - fascist regime!!” and sarcastically belting out “we love our queen!” is quite probably the single most influential punk song of all time, along with the equally boisterous Anarchy UK later on, which a generation of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 fans (me included) have seared into their brains. It’s these two songs which perhaps influence in a foundational way, 50% of my own music. The Sex Pistols taught me to shout my head off, to make my thoughts heard, and to not care whatever anyone else thought. The Sex Pistols taught me freedom

Never Mind the Bollocks… says “We’re the Sex Pistols, and this is what we sound like. Deal with it.” and it’s the best statement of individuality, not caring what anyone thinks, and freedom that there’s probably ever been.

Holidays in the Sun, Bodies, God Save the Queen, Anarchy UK

9.5/10

Bowie’s 11th album is the first of his so called ‘Berlin Trilogy’. A trio of albums produced by Tony Visconti on which Bowie collaborated with Brian Eno. Though recorded after Bowie’s move to West Berlin following the drug addiction that had been apparent throughout the recording of his previous album, the album was actually mostly recorded in France. Low divided critics on release, and received little promotion. Nowadays though, it’s pretty hard to find any greatest album of all time list without Low near the top.

The album delves further into the electronic approach toyed with on Station to Station and is also probably Bowie’s least vocal album, with it’s entire second side featuring instrumentals, and the opening side featuring songs that don’t have much singing either.

Speed of Life bursts into an infectious guitar riff backed by synths and a distinctive punchy drum sound achieved by Visconti using a Eventide H910 harmoniser. It’s a relatively simple electronic track that puts Bowie’s knack for catchy melodies perfectly into an electronic context. Carlos Alomar’s serpentine lead guitar opens up Breaking Glass, on which we have our first Bowie vocal, which sparsely calls to the listener in three short verses over the top of a buzzing bass line, more gated drums, and the aforementioned guitar part that very much makes the song. It’s only on Sound and Vision that we reach our first Bowie ‘hit’. One of my very favourite Bowie songs, it’s once again lifted by a brilliant lead guitar part, this time by Ricky Gardiner, in what has to be one of the simplest and catchiest riffs ever written. Bowie’s vocals speak of an isolation in his blue house, or as Bowie puts it, “I was going through dreadful times. It was wanting to be put in a little cold room with omnipotent blue on the walls and blinds on the windows.” Bowie duets with himself, one version singing in his characteristic melodic tone, the other mumbling with a vocal that has been saturated so much it sounds like your own conscience. It’s a masterpiece of infectious mystery, and perhaps the closest song to what we had on Station to Station.

Always Crashing in the Same Car is a humble song about always making the same mistakes and never learning from them. The vocal performance is a resigned mumble, the guitars a fatalistic hum, and the synths try to break through the wall of sound like a sparkle of that good habit you should probably start cultivating. Be My Wife, the album’s second single is thought to be a final plea to his wife at the time to save their crumbling marriage, they divorced in 1980. It’s a classic, catchy Bowie number that’s followed expertly by first side’s closing track, A Career in a New Town. A song that contains some of the most heartbreaking harmonica ever cut to tape, like a cry for help from someone curled up on the floor.

As mentioned earlier, the album’s second side features purely instrumentals which open with the haunting, chilling Warszawa, a song that brings to mind a post-apocalytpic hell-scape of a city with empty houses, broken windows, crumbling walls, and faded dreams. Art Decade and Weeping Wall create similarly cold atmospheres. The latter hinting at some warmth with a percussive xylophone part that has a lovely intimacy to it. The synth melodies, however, are crushing. We finish with the masterpiece Subterraneans, its layers of synths like ages of man lost to the wind, which closes out a side of music that is as transcendental as anything I’ve heard in this challenge so far. We’ve already learnt that Brian Eno and David Bowie both made some of the best music of the 70s, but here they combine to create something untouchable, a desolate landscape of destroyed beauty, from which a flowering phoenix rises. Astounding.

Song Picks: Sound & Vision, Speed of Life, Subterraneans, A New Career in a New Town,

9.5/10

The band’s 11th studio album was famously recorded during a tough time for the band members’ personal lives. To summarise the atmosphere in which it was recorded, Christine (keyboard player and vocalist) and John McVie (bass guitarist) had divorced having been together for eight years and were strictly not talking to each other except for matters of music. Vocalists Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham were in a rather intense on/off relationship that led to lots of heated arguments and drummer Mick Fleetwood had just discovered that his wife and mother of his two children - who was not in the band - had had an affair with his best friend. Essentially, Rumours is the work of a band not really getting on, but making it work for the sake of getting some music out.

Anyway, onto the music, which is glorious. Second Hand News opens the album and very much sets the tone, you’d be forgiven for thinking the song is a happy one based on the sing-along melody and marching bass and drums. However, listen in to the lyrics and it’s clear that this is about a breakup between Nicks and Cunningham, who seems to be singing their thoughts at each other, and it’s that tension which makes this song, and the whole album, so great. Dreams was written by Nicks in a room built for Sly Stone while some more technical things were being done to the album - mixing I presume. Apparently she entered the studio and said “I’ve just written the most amazing song”. That song was Dreams, a perfect breakup song to Buckingham. The acoustic Never Coming Back Again is Buckingham’s response, where his vocals soar beautifully over the picked guitar that is so clear it sounds like it’s being plucked by diamonds. Don’t Stop moves onto the McVie’s divorce, written by Christine McVie and sung by her and Buckingham. It’s a song about moving on, plodding on intently with a straightforward bouncing bass and drum part which the other instruments embelish perfectly. It’s another fabulous pop song before we arrive at the most perfect of pop songs, Go Your Own Way, which, though infinitely overplayed, retains its initial magic when listened in the context of the album. The first side is closed by Songbird, a song that is a completely timeless, beautifully performed, and delicate meditation on love. Has there ever been a more perfect chorus than:

And the songbirds keep singing
Like they know the score
And I love you, I love you, I love you
Like never before

I think not.

I’m finding it rather difficult to not continually use the word perfect in this review, but I’m going to have to use it again here. The Chain perfectly opens the second side with an opening acoustic guitar part as recognisable as anything ever recorded. The song is once again a melodic masterpiece, and the famous finale has to be one of my very favourites featuring a guitar solo that threatens to escape the realm of sound and turn into some swirling snake, I just wish it wasn’t faded out so quickly. I’ll stop gushing now, but the final four tracks of the album, though perhaps less iconic, are still generally pop gems, though I’ve never enjoyed Oh Daddy as much as the rest.

Rumours is an album that I’ve always liked, but never loved, perhaps because all my experiences of it were of other people playing it to me and telling me I had to love it. It often takes listening to an album by myself for me to fully feel it, and that was the case here. I can confirm I’ve been completely wrong to not to absolutely adore it up to now, Rumours is probably the most perfect pop record ever recorded, certainly up to this point in the challenge. Out of endless tension within the band flowered the most brilliant, affecting, and just downright enjoyable record.

Song Picks: Songbird, Second Hand News, The Chain, Never Going Back Again

9.5/10

Exodus is Bob Marley’s ninth album, and was recorded in London after he was exiled from Jamaica following an assassination attempt on him there. Often seen as Bob’s masterpiece, it’s the album that features most heavily on Legend, the Bob Marley greatest hits collection released in 1984. Bunny Wailer and Pete Tosh had left by this point, so this has more of a solo Bob Marley feel to it, though he continued to use the Wailers name on his records. Time magazine named Exodus the best album of the 20th century.

It opens with Natural Mystic where we hear Marley’s reggae stabs and Carlton Barrett’s bass walk fade in gently. It’s a groove that cuts right to your soul, very much like the ‘natural mystic' Marley sings about. There’s a touching tiredness to Marley’s vocal, and his ability to weave a catchy melody and sing it beautifully is as good as ever. So Much Things to Say gets characteristically political, and while referring to specific events it’s essentially about his tiredness of those in power with ‘so much to say,’ while they remain ignorant to what matters. Guiltiness talks of those same people, this time focusing on how many they’ve stood on to get to the top, and how they will one day get their comeuppance, “Woe to the downpressors / They will eat the bread of sorrow”. Marley’s backing singers add a wonderful depth to the melodies on the track, which are once again gorgeous and impossible to resist.

Exodus, one of Marley’s most famous compositions, closes out the political first side of the album, and is one of the most remarkable pieces of music ever recorded. Over seven and a half minutes of music are built over only one chord, with a perfect sense of the march of millions symbolised by the walking bass lines, swirling guitar parts and the odd stab of brass. It’s the march from slavery to freedom of an entire people in musical format, and it’s glorious.

Side two gets much less political and opens with Jammin’, a song which is essentially about having a good time, and the gorgeous Waitin’ In Vain, a personal Bob favourite, which is about waiting for love while not knowing if it’ll work out. The Wailers create a sumptuous bed of music, with Junior Marvin’s warm guitar playing feeling like a hug as Marley spins a web of melodies. I’ve gone on and on about Marley’s vocal ability in a previous review, but it’s particularly evident on this song, where he often provides his own backing vocals, and everything just sounds perfect. Turn Your Lights Down Low is Bob’s Sexual Healing and the album’s two closing tracks Three Little Birds and One Love/People Get Ready are perhaps his most famous of all. The former preaches positivity in the face of adversity and is bursting with so much sunshine it’s a wonder it doesn’t burn to ashes every device that plays it. The latter is another masterpiece preaching togetherness, ‘Let’s get together and feel alright’. As that chorus fills your head, you’re left wondering why something so simple is so difficult.

Exodus is Bob’s mainstream masterpiece, the pinnacle of both his political songwriting as well as his songs of love and acceptance. It shines and preaches in equal measure, and it fills your very soul with an unparalleled humanity.

Song Picks: Waitin’ In Vain, Three Little Birds, One Love/People Get Ready

10/10

Pink Floyd’s tenth album focuses on the socio-political conditions in the UK in the 1970s and continues their liking for long songs, with only 5 of them over its 41 minute duration. The band released no singles from the album, but it was commercially and critically well received. Very much a concept album, the concept is best described by the album’s Wikipedia page:

Loosely based on George Orwell's political fable Animal Farm, the album's lyrics describe various classes in society as different kinds of animals: the predatory dogs, the despotic ruthless pigs, and the "mindless and unquestioning herd" of sheep. Whereas the novella focuses on Stalinism, the album is a critique of capitalism and differs again in that the sheep eventually rise up to overpower the dogs. The album was developed from a collection of unrelated songs into a concept which, in the words of author Glenn Povey, "described the apparent social and moral decay of society, likening the human condition to that of mere animals".

The album is bookended by two short pieces, Pigs on the Wing part 1 and 2, love songs written by Roger Waters for his wife at the time. They’re simple acoustic compositions, with the same melodies and pretty lyrics. They provide a certain contrast to the 3 longer, denser songs that make up the meat of the album.

The first of those longer songs is Dogs, a 17 minute masterpiece about the trying to find your place in world that is essentially ‘dog eat dog’, where those dogs are businessmen, perhaps most darkly summed up by David Gilmour in the second verse:

You gotta keep one eye looking over your shoulder
You know, it's going to get harder, and harder, and harder
As you get older
Yeah, and in the end you'll pack up and fly down south
Hide your head in the sand
Just another sad old man
All alone and dying of cancer

Featuring numerous instrumental breaks that get darker as the song goes on, the piece is also yet another testament to David Gilmour’s majestic guitar playing. His first solo on the song is quite unforgettable. Roger Waters’ final verse couldn’t be more perfect, performed with a detached anger:

Who was born in a house full of pain
Who was trained not to spit in the fan
Who was told what to do by the man
Who was broken by trained personnel
Who was fitted with collar and chain
Who was given a pat on the back
Who was breaking away from the pack
Who was only a stranger at home
Who was ground down in the end
Who was found dead on the phone
Who was dragged down by the stone
Who was dragged down by the stone

Having critiqued capitalism, Pink Floyd moves onto politics in Pigs (Three Different Ones), which tells the story of people caring more about holding onto power than helping those they are there to serve. The catchy repeated line of ‘haha, charade you are’ is endlessly powerful, laughing in their faces as a picture of greed, gluttony and corruption is built up over a soundtrack that includes a whole host of pig noises clearly meant to represent the waffle these frauds are coming out with. It’s a powerful, angry and atmospheric piece of music that crushes the political façade like a giant tank dressed in a clown costume.

Finally, introduced by some gorgeous electric piano and a rumbling, approaching bass line, we enter the last of the epics, Sheep, a song about those that blindly follow commands without question:

What do you get for pretending the danger’s not real.
Meek and obedient you follow the leader
Down well trodden corridors into the valley of steel.

Sheep packs a punch, finishing this pessimistic look at society with a perfect crescendo of guitars and drums that echo off into the distance, replacing the dark synths that dominated the song earlier, before we enter the aforementioned dreamy Pigs on the Wing (Part II)

Animals is a pretty spectacular look at the dark parts of the society and systems we have built. which is just as relevant today as it was in 1977. It broods, preaches and dazzles in equal measure, and it might just be my favourite Pink Floyd album.

Song Picks: All of them

10/10

1973 - Clive's Top Albums of Every Year Challenge

September 07, 2020 by Clive in Clive's Album Challenge, Music

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.

Well, hello there 1973, let’s have a look at what happened in your fine year. A ceasefire was signed ending the involvement of American groundtroops in the Vietnam war and the US also stopped bombing Cambodia, ending 12 years of conflict in Southeast Asia. Pablo Picasso died and Marlon Brando rejected his Best Actor Oscar for The Godfather in protest of the US Government’s treatment of Native Americans. TCP/IP was also invented, which a decade later would become the chosen communication method for computers over the internet.

Rateyourmusic.com users rate the following five albums as their top 5 of 1973:

#1 Pink Floyd - The Dark Side of the Moon
#2 Can - Future Days
#3 Stevie Wonder - Innervisions
#4 King Crimson - Larks’ Tongues in Aspic
#5 Led Zeppelin - Houses of the Holy

So, we have Led Zeppelin with yet another entry, along with returns from Pink Floyd, Can and King Crimson. Stevie Wonder on the other hand, makes his first appearance. Of course, as usual. I’ll take a look further down the list and throw some more into the mix:

#6 Genesis - Selling England by the Pound
#7 Iggy and The Stooges - Raw Power
#9 Herbie Hancock - Head Hunters
#10 David Bowie- Aladdin Sane
#11 Faust - Faust IV
#16 Tom Waits - Closing Time
#19 Bob Marley & The Wailers - Catch a Fire
#51 Renaissance - Ashes Are Burning
#97 Betty Davis - Betty Davis

And that’s 14 to get through this time, quite the battle royale. Let’s see who emerges the victor, and then I really should start reviewing a few less every year or I’ll never get this thing done. Anyway, here’s my reviews and ranking of the above 14 albums.

AshesAreBurning — 14. Ashes are Burning

Renaisannce

The fourth album from the English prog-rock band was the first of theirs to make it into the Billboard 200, peaking at 171. It’s also the album where they made a conscious decision to distance themselves from the more electric guitar led progressive rock bands that were starting to clog up the musical landscape and head in a more acoustic guitar led direction. Interestingly, most of the songrwiting was handled via post. Dunford, the band’s composer, who was later to join the band more fully, would send his melodies to Betty Thatcher, the group’s lyricist, before the whole thing got passed onto the rest of the band to come up with the arrangement.

Can You Understand opens the album with a dramatic piano led start backed by staccato drum and bass stabs before the whole thing explodes into motion. Once Annie Haslam’s choir-like vocals come in the whole thing has a distinctly more acoustic feel, which closes out the track and continues until the end when the soundscape expands somewhat again. Let It Grow is a gentle love-song about taking it slow and appreciating one another. The arrangement is strikingly simple for a prog-rock band and Annie’s vocals are quite wonderful, particularly the flawless falsetto she demonstrates in the chorus. Tout’s piano lines provide the perfect emotional follow-up to each chorus, twinkling like a drizzle of rain on a sunny day. It’s a lovely song. On the Frontier again demonstrates Renaissance’s main strength, their ability to craft pretty melodies, and in this particular instance creating an uplifting rallying cry for us to join the frontier. The frontier for what? Well you can decide that for yourself.

Side two opens with Carpet of the Sun and again Annie’s melody is so perfect it makes you wonder if you’ve heard this song before as it all sounds so strangely familiar and timeless. The violin, gentle percussion and of course the piano all provide luscious backing for the melodies as Annie sings a load of philosophical ideas, wrapped in the imagery of nature. The penultimate track, At The Harbour has what I’d call the album’s most ‘prog-rocky' melody, and thus is probably my least favourite song, though I do like the gentle twinkle of the plucked acoustic guitar and the evocative imagery of Thatcher’s lyrics. The album closes with the title track, an 11 minute journey through a beautiful sonic environment evoking that of a mythical forest as Haslam’s vocals seem to sing of passing into the afterlife. If the beautiful finale of the song is any indication, it seems we’ve got something pretty great to look forward to.

Ashes are Burning isn’t massively pushing any boundaries, and presents a fairly well-trodden folky sound, but it does contain some beautiful peaks and melodies. Though at times it borders on being a little cheesy, it remains an enjoyable, evocative listen throughout.

Song Picks: Let It Grow, On the Frontier, Ashes are Burning

7.5/10

13. Larks’ Tongues in Aspic

King Crimson

The fifth album by King Crimson sees a dramatic change in the band’s lineup, with only Robert Fripp remaining from the original one, and introducing four new members including drummer Bill Brufford - who left Yes after Close to the Edge, an album I loved from 1972. It draws more on Eastern European classical music, and the most striking change in sound is perhaps the removal of flutes and saxophone, and the addition of violin.

The opening 13 minute Lark’s Tongues in Aspic (Part I) is a song of contrasts. It starts with a James Muir percussive soundscape building up a tropical atmosphere before a thumping Robert Fripp riff smashes through the tropical feel like a bulldozer through a holiday resort. The atmosphere changes dramatically from then, and it becomes a haunting piece of peaks and troughs, building to Fripp’s devastating riff again before Brufford moves things along with a rattling beat accompanied again by Muir’s extravagantly varied percussion. This frantic middle-section is followed by a slow section, which sounds as if it’s coming from a mountain village, the violin having a charmingly amateur feel to it. It could easily have finished with another Fripp barrage, but it doesn’t. Building instead to an eerie soundscape of synths and ambient chatter.

Book of Saturday is a chilled, if slightly unremarkable song, the band creating a luscious, rather light-hearted landscape to back John Wetton’s vocals. Palmer-Jones’ lyrics depict the struggles of adapting to life in a new place on Exiles, a song that uses a mellotron for much of its instrumental impact, and features a typically drifting melody from Wetton. Easy Money sees the band grooving before another crescendo of percussive craziness from Muir - who seems keen to just pick up anything lying around and use it as an instrument by hitting it. Indeed he is credited as playing ‘allsorts’ in the album’s sleeve. The melody gives me slightly Pink Floyd feels, but the soundscape shows a much more Eastern feel. Talking Drum builds things very slowly back up to a rockier feel before the final track and pièce de résistance Larks’ Tongues in Aspic (Part II) dials the rock up to 10 with a whole host of weird time signatures, off-beat drumming and inventive sections. Some of the distorted guitar parts have clearly been incredibly influential and you can hear descendants of that sawed riff scattered through music over the next few decades, and even today. It’s a song that builds and builds to its riff based crescendos, ending in one that features some of the most scattered, chaotic drumming I’ve ever heard, before the guitar just swarms the soundscape like a terrifying horde of locusts, eating away everything and leaving us with silence. It’s one of the year’s best pieces of music and perhaps the first example of progressive metal.

Lark’s Tongues in Aspic has some of the highs of In the Court with the Crimson King, but it doesn’t quite have the consistency, containing some more fillery sections and songs - e.g. Talking Drum.

Song Picks: Larks’ Tongues in Aspic (Part II), Easy Money

8/10

SellingEngland — 12. Selling England by the Pound

Genesis

And the first Genesis album to grace our list is their fifth. An album about the decline of English folk culture in the face of American influence - as referenced in the title - it spawned the band's first top 30 UK hit with I Know What I Like. The album itself made it to number 3, and features many of the band’s most popular songs.

Dancing With the Moonlit Knight sets the tone for what's to come and is a pretty good indication of how much you'll like the rest of the album. The song combines folk with prog-rock as the whole album does. It starts with a folky, slightly cheesy start lamenting the loss of his country. Peter Gabriel's singing of the album's title followed by some a lovely folky soundscape seemingly straight from some band of elves. The end of the song turns to much more intense prog-rock as the organ ups the drama and Phil Collins racks up a whole heap of technically skilled beats, fills and stops, setting the tone for what is one of the finest drumming albums we've had so far on the challenge. Yep, there's more to him than that fill on the Cadbury's advert.

I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe) is a song very much depicted by the album’s cover - a painting by Betty Swanwick that the band asked her to add a lawn mower to. The song depicts someone being persuaded to change in a multitude of ways and do more exciting things, but our protagonist just wants a simple life doing what he does best, mowing the lawn. The song features a strikingly anthemic chorus, a spoken word section, and plenty of that prog-rock keyboard sound that was so loved in the early 70s. The following Firth of Fifth starts with a keyboard solo that seems to spiral in on itself repeatedly, played by the group’s keyboard player Tony Banks, who wrote the song. It’s a pretty straight example of prog-rock with it’s switching of time-signatures, intensities and moods, all ridden by Phil Collins like he’s physically tied to the ideas of the rest of the band. The guy switches from complex section to complex section like he’s been doing it since birth. Hackett’s guitar - which is a reworked version of something Banks had written - is a majestic finale to the track, and competes with some of Pink Floyd’s best solos for sheer effective, emotionally affecting simplicity.

More Fool Me is the album’s only song to feature Phil Collins on vocals, a role he was to take up permanently in 1975 when Peter Gabriel left the band. Uncharacteristically for the album, the piece is a simple love song, reportedly written by Collins and bassist Bill Rutherford in a short time while sat out on the steps outside the front of the studio. It shows Collins’ talent for a stadium filling chorus that was to become a big part of his solo career later on.

Side two opens with the 11 minute Battle of Epping Forest, a song written by the Gabriel about the gang wars in East London. It’s my least favourite track on the album, held back by the fact the lyrics seem a little squashed in and forced, which to me reduces the impact of what is some very solidly performed prog-rock otherwise. After the Ordeal is a nice enough if slightly unremarkable instrumental with a nice climax. The albums’s final epic, the 10 and a half minute The Cinema Show has lyrics imspired by T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land. The song ends in a 4 and a half minute keyboard solo by Tony Banks, accompanied by the drifting of the rest of the band culminating in perhaps Collins’ best drum work on the whole album. The two minute Aisle of Plenty serves as a bookend to the album, reprising the opening track’s melody and lyrical themes, featuring a vocally intense outro that is both haunting and great.

Selling England by the Pound is 70s prog-rock through and through, it loves getting all complicated with time signatures and mixing things up constantly within songs. I have to confess to not being the biggest prog-rock guy, but despite that I still think this is great. The vast majority of the songs are interesting, well crafted, and the whole thing fits together cohesively. Phil Collins’ breathtaking performance on the drum kit throughout is probably the thing that’ll keep me coming back though.

Song Picks: Dancing With the Moonlit Knight, I Know What I Like, More Fool Me

8/10

Aladdin Sane (a lad insane - geddit?) is Bowie’s sixth album, and the first he wrote and released from a position of stardom. Bowie was by now huge in the UK, and Aladdin Sane was partly inspired by his keenness to be a big deal in the states too. Aladdin Sane was Bowie’s follow up character to Ziggy Stardust, and described by Bowie as ‘Ziggy Stardust in America.’ The album cover was the most expensive ever up to that point and has become one of his most iconic images. The text also looks charmingly like some WordArt from Windows 98.

Aladdin Sane sounds a bit more extravagant and a smidge heavier than the previous The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, but it’s still very much glam-rock. The album opens with Watch That Man, which is about an after-party put on by the New York Dolls’ lead singer David Johansen - ‘that man’ being him. The song has an exuberant party atmosphere and introduces Mike Garson on the piano, who’s playing adds bright colour to many of the album’s songs and features a guitar riff at the end by Mick Ronson that must have been stolen endless times in the years to come. Aladdin Sane introduces our protagonist in an anti-war song which features a piano solo from Garson that wouldn’t be out of place on a boundary pushing jazz album, it’s dissonant chord stabs giving a dark edge to the otherwise bouncy feeling instrumentation.

Drive-In Saturday features one of the album’s catchiest - and perhaps Ziggy Stardust-like - choruses, and it unsurprisingly reached #3 as a single. In Bowie’s words, ”it’s about a future where people have forgotten how to make love, so they go back onto video-films that they have kept from this century,” as you’d expect from Bowie, he builds this future world with aplomb, both lyrically and musically. We move onto the world percussion fest of Panic In Detroit, about the 1967 Detroit riots before moving onto the brilliant Cracked Actor - a song about an aging actor’s encounter with a prostitute which begins with a particularly Oasis-esque riff to close out side one.

Time opens side two with more Mike Garson piano wizardry, which provides much of the song’s burlesque, cabaret atmosphere. Bowie’s melodic “we should be home by now” that opens the chorus helps raise the song from an inventive piece of brilliance, to an inventive piece of brilliance that is also infectious, and perhaps my favourite track on the album. The Prettiest Star is a gentle saxophone led song written for Bowie’s first wife, Angie Barnett and Let’s Spend the Night Together somewhat recreates the party atmosphere of the opening track, once again largely thanks to Garson’s honky-tonk piano chords. The album is closed out by the infectious romp The Jean Genie - given a real backwoods blues feel by that amplified Harmonica sound, and the less known, but quietly beautiful, piano ballad Lady Grinning Soul, featuring yet another brilliant performance from Garson, who swirls along creating ribbons of notes to cocoon yourself in.

Aladdin Sane more or less continues the trajectory of 1972’s Ziggy Stardust, adding some heavier and fuller production, as well as Garson’s brilliant piano playing. The song writing isn’t quite up to the consistently great standard of Ziggy Stardust though, and that’s why it ends up slightly lower in my estimations. Though it has to be said, Ziggy Stardust is an unfairly high bar to judge anything by.

Song Picks: Watch that Man, Time, The Jean Genie, Lady Grinning Soul

8/10

Betty Davis’ debut album is filthy, funky as all hell, and absolutely one of the sexiest albums ever. Davis was married to Miles Davis for a year and also a close friend of Jimi Hendrix’s - who Miles accused her of having an affair with. She’s featured on the cover of Miles’ 1968 album Filles de Killimajaro - which also includes a song about her - and is also believed to have introduced Miles to a lot of the music that influenced his late 60s material and beyond. Now, prepare yourself for a review that features the word ‘funk’ so often, it should probably get a Guinness world record.

Betty Davis pulls no punches, and starts with the funktacular If I'm In Luck I Might Get Picked Up. We’ve got a groovy, skipping drumbeat, a heavy guitar riff and the addition of a variety of percussion as well as an organ all creating an endlessly grooving, funky atmosphere. And then we get to Betty Davis’ voice, which is gravelly, expressive, breathy, and suggestive as she sings confidently of wanting to be taken home.

Your Man My Man features the band on top form, the guitarists, and particularly the bass bouncing around the drums like a noisy off-beat pogo stick. The clean backing vocals remind you just how much character Davis’ vocals have. There is so much energy and immediacy behind them, it’s hard to imagine her being anything but an exceptional live performer.

Stepping High in Her I. Miller Shoes tells the story of someone who comes to the city with talent and dreams, only to have them crushed. It’s based on the life of Devon Wilson, a onetime girlfriend of Jimi Hendrix’s. The song sees a change in the usual off-beat bass drum patterns you usually hear in funk, replaced by a much more straightforward beat. It gives the song a more straight hard-rock feel, one which the Jimi Hendrix-esque guitar riffing only aids. This break in funk helps the beat hit hard again when we get to the following Game is My Middle Name, featuring perhaps Davis’ most extravagant vocal performance backed by a Creedence Clearwater Revival style guitar riff, which turns an otherwise straight-rock arrangement into a surprisingly funky one.

Betty Davis’ extravagant vocals are as energetic and sexually powered as Mick Jagger’s, and it’s a heavier, tighter, and funkier version of the Rolling Stones that I’d most compare the sound of this album to. Betty Davis is the powerful arrival of one of funk’s pioneers, an irresistibly funky 30 minute package.

Song Picks: If I’m In Luck I Might Get Picked Up, Your Man My Man, Game is My Middle Name

8/10

ClosingTIme — 9. Closing Time

Tom Waits

Tom Waits’ debut album is perhaps not what you’d expect for fans of his later albums. It’s tuneful, accessible, and not at all as experimental as his later material. It is however beautiful. The album cover was apparently inspired by how Waits wanted the album to sound. He’s pictured with beer, a shot of whisky and a pack of cigarettes by a bar-piano. I’d say the cover nails it.

The album opens with Ol’ 55, one of Waits’ first songs, and one which was covered by the Eagles - a band Waits was less than keen on. It’s a simple song telling the story of a guy who only has a limited time to see his girlfriend because of a curfew. Waits’ piano is beautifully backed by some gentle drums, bass and piano, but it’s the piano itself that is the star of the show. That opening twinkle is particularly gorgeous. Waits is a convincing storyteller, with vocals that are interesting enough to add depth to the simple melody.

I Hope That I Don’t Fall In Love With You is an intriguing reverse love song about a man who sees a woman at a bar and hopes they don’t fall in love as that would only cause him to ‘feel blue,’ presumably when she inevitably left him. It again shows Waits’ ability to tell a simple story, hooking you in with a repeat of the song’s title at the end of each verse to a catchy hummable melody.

The album is packed with well-written and engaging songs like the above - with jazzier instrumentation mixing things up on songs like Midnight Lullaby - but there’s a couple of times when it goes beyond that. Martha for example is a straight up masterpiece. It tells the story of an old man calling up an old lover over 40 years after they’ve broken up. Tom’s vocal is notably more ragged, convincingly passing for a man many years older than his 23 years, which helps to sell the performance. The song is minimally backed by some strings and sparse backing vocals towards its ending as Waits sings sadly of wanting to rekindle an old, old flame. The song’s melody soars and combines with the poignant lyrics to create something that only the coldest of hearts would fail to be moved by.

Tom Waits was a regular at a bar called ‘The Troubadour’ in LA, and it was there where a performance of Grapefruit Moon floored David Geffen and got Waits signed to Asylum Records, eventually leading to this release. Grapefruit Moon is included on this album and it’s easy to see why the song had such an effect on Geffen. Waits sings his way through three gorgeous verses with a ragged vocal similar to that on Martha and a melody equally as moving. It’s unclear exactly what it’s about, but to me it’s the story of an old man - Waits’ vocal style seems to back this - looking back on his life with more than a little regret.

Never had no destinations
Could not get across
You became my inspiration
Oh, but what a cost
And every time I hear that melody
Something breaks inside
And the grapefruit moon, one star shining
Is more than I can hide

Closing Time is a humble telling of familiar stories of love and loss - and ice cream. Waits’ performances are completely present, relatable, and affecting. I’m excited to get to Tom’s more famous releases, but this is a quite remarkable debut.

Song Picks: I Hope that I Don’t Fall In Love With You, Martha, Grapefruit Moon

8.5/10

Head Hunters_Herbie Hancock.jpg — 8. Head Hunters

Herbie Hancock

Herbie Hancock’s twelfth album saw him turning to funk, and a more accessible style of music. Or in his words, ‘I was tired of everything being heavy. I wanted to play something lighter.’ It is one of the defining moments of the jazz-fusion movement, and one of the first examples of jazz-funk.

Chameleon kicks things off with a quacky bass part played by Hancock on an ARP Odyssey synthesiser, and its marching groove dominates much of the track’s drive, along with Harvey Mason’s syncopated, funky beat with an infectious hi-hat shuffle. As Mason and Hancock march on Hancock splatters clavinet all over the track, creating a 70s sci-fi vibe as he plays the thing like a saxophone. The breakdowns - at 7:21 for example - are a sublime, offbeat and syncopated dream, filling your bloodstream with ‘the funk,’ leading to seriously restless limbs. I’ve already mentioned Mason’s drumming but I’m going to mention it again as it’s him who keeps the whole thing grooving along with the synth bass - and later Jackson’s actual bass, driving it for the full 15 minutes like a lively train with an impeccable sense of timing - a Swiss train if you will. By the time conga wizard Bill Summers comes in you’ve started bopping round the room like a pigeon, hypnotised by this music. It’s got soul, man.

Watermelon Man, a song that was already a jazz standard by now having been recorded numerous times - is back with an all new funky version. This one begins with an intro by Bill Summer blowing into a variety of beer bottles. The groove laid down by Mason’s bopping drums and Jackson’s bumbling bass is so relaxed its an absolute miracle a hammock doesn’t just appear out of nowhere when you listen to it, something that is only emphasised in its cool-as-a-cucumber breakdowns. Sly is, as the name implies, something that would be a fitting soundtrack for a spy, or indeed the Pink Panther. The bass footsteps along gently, as the rest of the band provide moments of panic, as our spy is about to be caught. Somewhere in there we’ve got the groove of safety before things all get a bit hectic as our agent has presumably got themselves into an inevitable car chase. The congas skitter like the vegetables in that market stall he’s just driven through and the Benny Maupin’s sax bends like the tight alleys he’s trying to lose his pursuer in. It’s a bit of a journey this one but it’s still got that infectious dance-able quality to it that is splashed all over this record.

The album ends with the brilliantly named 9-minute Vein Melter, which relaxes things significantly, rolling on like a walk through an empty town with a loved one. There’s the un-nerving echoes of eerie instruments in the distance, but you needn’t be too concerned because Mason’s bass is always there for a comforting hug, should you ever need one.

Head Hunters is a marvellous jazz-funk odyssey, and shows yet again Herbie Hancock’s ability to create worlds and stories with sound. Here he’s managed to pave the way for a whole new genre, while still making a downright accessible piece of music that pretty much anyone can enjoy. Remarkable.

Song Picks: Chameleon, Watermelon Man

8.5/10

Faust IV is - predictably - the German krautrock band’s fourth release. It was the last album by this incarnation of the band, though the band is still active today with a different lineup. The album was recorded after they were dropped from Polydor Records - largely due to them being rather hard to classify or market - and were taken up by Richard Branson’s then new label, Virgin Records.

The album opens with Krautrock, a track of distorted brilliance, creating an industrial, echoed atmosphere that’s central ‘melody’ is rather accessible. It builds and builds but takes around 7 minutes just for the drums to come in, by which point you’re in an industrial German trance. If anything, the drums add some comfort to the intimidating din, as the robotic R2D2-like noises begin to get more frequent and jumbled. It’s an 11 minute piece that is difficult to describe as anything else other than a fall into a distorted abyss where everything fragments and crumbles, much like the room of abstract thought in Pixar’s masterpiece Inside Out - if you’ve ever seen that. Once the waves of distortion bleed into The Sad Skinhead you’re already sold to the album’s intriguing sense of mystery. The Sad Skinhead only serves to increase this mystery by being the absolute opposite of what you’d expect to follow that song, a jolly, bouncy song that owuldn’t be out of place on the Nintendo 64’s Banjo Kazooie soundtrack. Lyrically it’s somewhat darker than that, something which you only have to pay attention the first verse to notice.

Apart from all the bad times you gave me
I always felt good with you
Going places, smashing faces
What else could we do?
What else could we do?

Jennifer takes us back to the distorted and echoed sound of the opening track, but this time it’s used to create the bedding for perhap’s the album’s catchiest track, featuring only two lines which are repeated throughout: ‘Jennifer, your red hair's burning, Yellow jokes come out of your mind.’ The song’s end is a distorted explosion, followed by a completely unexpected jingle on a variety of instruments seemingly preceded by a shout of ‘everyone only play happy notes!’

Side two opens with Just a Second, a song featuring an infinitely weird twittering like skitter of synthesisers, underlaid by what sounds like a UFO turning on its engines. But you’ve heard nothing yet, as Giggy Smile / Picnic on a Frozen River, Deuxieme Tableau is probably the weirdest of the bunch. Driven by a rattling drum beat and the melody of that ridiculously nursery-rhyme-like vocal which sings lyrics that could only have been written while under the influence of a variety of recreationals. The song mashes together a whole host of genres that probably shouldn’t work, and comes out the other end as something rather fantastic, with a Dan Deacon like feeling of joy to its climax, inspired by a chirpy melody line seemingly played on a toy, over and over again. It stops completely abruptly, leaving you thinking you’re about to receive a call, every goddam time.

Läuft...Heißt Das Es Läuft Oder Es Kommt Bald...Läuft starts with two band members conversing - the title a transcript of their conversation - before launching into a song that when described would sound overly complicated, but is actually just a simple guitar plucked number containing two lines in French which translate as ‘I’m not afraid of wasting my time, I’m not afraid of losing my teeth.’ The second half prominently features the organ, and what it plays is quietly beautiful, touching, and as always, completely unexpected. It slowly distorts - obviously - gently pulsating before the organ seemingly breaks, creating a swirling crescendo which fades back into the beautifully simple part from before. Quite honestly, it’s one of my favourite musical passages of the year.

Things finish with the dry It’s a Bit of a Pain, a song featuring the brilliant lyrics, ‘it's a bit of a pain, To be where I am, It's a bit of a pain, To be what I am’ sung with the utmost seriousness. The melody is simple, but the accompaniment features some Velvet Underground levels of dissonance and madness, particularly the chattering, garbled robot that seems to be trying to convey something rather simple that we’re just too dumb to understand.

Faust IV is quite unlike anything I’ve heard before. It’s unpredictable, completely mad, weird, disjointed, and yet it’s also strangely accessible. It sounds like a band trying to thoroughly deconstruct a pop framework, rather than one completely off the leash. And in the end that catchy heart is still there, it’s just been blown to a million infinitely interesting pieces.

Song Picks: Krautrock, Läuft...Heißt Das Es Läuft Oder Es Kommt Bald...Läuft, Giggy Smile / Picnic on a Frozen River, Deuxieme Tableau

8.5/10

HousesoftheHoly — 6. Houses of the Holy

Led Zeppelin

Led Zeppelin are back with their fifth album, and their fifth to have made it on these lists. Quite the record. This one sees them actually putting some thought into the album’s name, though interestingly the title track - which was recorded for this album - didn’t appear until their next release.

The album’s cleaner and less distorted guitar led nature is clear from the off on The Song Remains the Same where - although the song definitely still rocks with a boundless energy - it’s less of a aural barrage than the heavier tracks on previous albums. Rain Song is a rare ballad from the band and features Robert Plant’s favourite vocal performance. Track three, Over the Hills and Far Away is a song about the hippie lifestyle and starts with a delightful acoustic guitar part that’s a wonderful mix of twiddly notes and solid strums. The second half is perhaps the heaviest the album gets, as the distorted guitar makes a brief return before everything disappears into the bottom of a well to be replaced by a soothing goodbye, leading us nicely into the John Bonham written The Crunge. Bonham wrote The Crunge’s funky drumbeat which Jimmy Page sings over in the style of James Brown - something that gets more exaggerated as the song goes on, emphasising the song’s not entirely serious nature. Page’s ‘where’s the bridge?’ joke at the end of the track takes this yet further. Rather unsurprisingly, the piece began its life as an on stage jam.

A lot of the album was written in a jovial atmosphere on Stargroves - Mick Jagger’s estate that he’d purchased in 1970. The estate cost him a massive £55,000 (£857,202.46 in today’s money). This jovial atmosphere is yet again evident on Dancing Days, a song with a clanging guitar riff and optimistic lyrics. Producer Eddie Kramer particularly remembers the band dancing around to the final mix in the garden at Stargroves, which is a lovely image. Now, before we talk about D’yer Mak’er we’ve got to talk about that name. Well, it’s based on the fact that ‘did you make her’ said in various British accents (e.g. Cockney) sounds like Jamaica, and the song is reggae inspired, geddit? Anyway, it’s one of my favourite Led Zeppelin songs. That riff like sunshine, Plant’s silly vocals, Bonham’s bouncy beat. D’yer Mak’er is absolutely delightful, a musical trip to a beach full of people being daft and having a good time.

No Quarter features one of my very favourite Led Zeppelin riffs - and there’s plenty of competition - as Jimmy Page saws his way over Bonham’s pounding beat. The riff magic is interspersed with Plant’s I’m-stuck-down-a-large-echoing-hole-please-help-me-out vocal that breaks up the pulverising riffs. An instrumental section towards the end sounds like a trip through some mysterious tunnel, and the whole thing is remarkably dark, Plant’s vocal sounding like that of a dying man by the time the last onslaught comes around. It’s another Led Zep favourite for me. Dark, brooding and mysteriously handsome. The album’s final track The Ocean probably sounds like a gentle sweeping epic to finish the album, but this is Led Zeppelin we’re talking about. The Ocean is in fact an AC/DC-esque celebration of their fans - ‘the ocean’ referring to the ocean of fans at their concerts. It’s the perfect way to finish an album that is strikingly optimistic and happy sounding, an album full of the gratitude of a band happy with where they’ve got to.

Houses of the Holy continues the band’s remarkably consistent run of albums and the second half is probably my favourite side on any Led Zeppelin album. It’s an album made by a band having a lot of fun, and that shines through.

Song Picks: The Song Remains the Same, D’yer Ma’ker, No Quarter

8.5/10

Future Days marks the third year on these lists from the German krautrockers. It’s their fourth album, and the last to feature vocalist Damo Suzuki. There’s no crazy story about its recording this time, which is a shame, but the album is interesting in the more ambient direction it takes. Focusing on as, critic Anthony Tognazzini puts it, “creating hazy, expansive soundscapes dominated by percolating rhythms and evocative layers of keys.”

From the start of the opening title track this dreamier atmosphere is clear. There’s less abrasiveness to the sound here and even Damo’s vocals have taken a chill pill, leading largely to quiet mumbles that fit effortlessly into the gorgeous musical soundscapes of the band. The song builds slowly on a syncopated drum beat, off-beat percussion and the repetitive picking of a guitar following an ambient start. The piece never crescendos - it doesn’t want to - and simply drifts along like the most pleasant of clouds on a calm Summer’s day. The guitars, keys and synthesisers add twinkles here, Damo appears now and again to talk about saving things for ‘future days’ before disappearing into the sky again. Around the 6 minute mark we’re launched off a ramp, the abyss looming below as things get darker and a guitar echoes from the bottom of the world’s largest pit, but it’s not long before we reach the other side of the ramp, breezing along again with Suzuki’s enigmatic ramblings. We’re launched again towards the song’s end as a synth helicopters loomingly above before everything fades out, Suzuki’s shouts of ‘for the sake of future days’ distorted and fading. It’s a gently funky, beautifully realised piece of music that’s strangely infectious.

Spray again relies heavily on the percussion to drive the track which takes a while to settle into its groove, but once it does there’s a wonderful clarity to everything. In particular the aforementioned percussion, which marches along in a way that brings to mind Miles Davis’ 1970 masterpiece Bitches Brew. Remember though on Bitches Brew there were three drummers and a percussionist, here we’ve just got Jaki Liebezeit who is clearly a master at creating percussive soundscapes. His drums blending seamlessly with the percussion - presumably overdubbed after - that colours it. Suzuki appears only rarely to add some variety to the musical soup, and the rarity of his appearances only makes his bizarrely brilliant rambles more effective.

Moonshake is that unusual beast, a 3 minute song by Can. not only this, but it’s one of the funkiest things I’ve ever heard. The bass and drums plod along as Michael Karoli’s guitar grooves around it like some funky alien around a pole - ok, that’s a weird image. Suzuki whispers along some characteristic nonsense in a way that’s somehow catchy. It’s a fabulous 3 minute example of just how singular, inventive and goddam effective Can are.

The entire second half f the album is taken up by the 20 minute sweeping epic Bel Air, which starts with the lapping of waves and a gentle chugging of a guitar. The organ darkens things somewhat but Suzuki’s vocal melody is remarkably twee. It sounds like a stroll on a beach as the sun is at the cusp of setting. Holger Czukay’s great basswork is particularly evident here, and its his quietly pulsating bass line that takes the song forward from the four minute mark, as the drums rattle on and the vocals get more and more distorted. The drums however remain so clear it sounds like you’re playing the things yourself. It all stops around the halfway mark to the sound of birds and mosquitoes before the guitar comes in with a new rhythm, this time perhaps more tropical. Suzuki continues to weave repetitive and happy melodies before he vanishes again, never to be heard again. There are points where it sounds chaotic, the drums frantic, the guitars and synth clashing in high pitched echoes, and yet miraculously it remains calming. There’s always that warm, chugging bass to return to, and although there is certainly some chaos around it, it feels like quiet chaos. The type of chaos that happens in your brain when you have a lie down and try to shut your brain off as various threads of thought try to quietly weave themselves into obscurity. Bel Air isn’t really a song as such, it’s a musical painting.

Future Days is my favourite Can album so far, it builds an atmosphere that’s impressively complex and chaotic for something so calming, and I don’t think there’s anything out there much like it. Suzuki’s last appearance on an album for the band is a restrained one, but it’s his measured, unexplainably catchy appearances that lift the sound perfectly every time it needs it. Future Days is an exercise in complex minimalism, if that is indeed a thing.

Song Picks: Moonshake, Future Days

9/10

4. Catch a Fire

Bob Marley & The Wailers

Bob Marley and the Wailers had just finished touring the UK and didn’t have enough money to return home to Jamaica. They approached producer Chris Blackwell, who agreed to advance them the money for an album so they could go back home and record it. Bob Marley returned with the tapes to London and - with the addition of some overdubs from Wayne Perkins to ‘westernise’ the sound a little - Catch a Fire was born. It’s now considered one of the greatest reggae albums of all time and began a successful period for the band under Chris Blackwell at Island Records. The album’s title is another way of saying ‘burn in hell’ and features on the song Slave Driver, Marley’s song of contempt about the slave trade. The cover above was only on the first 20,000 pressings, and opened like an actual zippo lighter, it was also used for the 2001 CD re-release.

To me, Bob Marley is one of the best vocalists of all time. His high and always perfectly in tune and characterful vocals can cut through any mix, and are the perfect companion to the concrete rumblingThe album starts with Concrete Jungle, a song perfectly demonstrating the abilities I’ve just outlined above. It jumps from gorgeous melody to gorgeous melody as Aston Barrett’s bass gently rumbles along and Bob Marley’s lyrics talk of his move to the US from Jamaica. I’ve already mentioned Slave Driver, which bounces along with a certain jolliness that defies its darker lyrics, featuring the particularly prescient couplet, ‘Today they say that we are free/Only to be chained in poverty.’ Few ever mastered the art of political lyrics without making them sound overly self-righteous quite as well as Bob. 400 Years - a different version of which appeared on the earlier Soul Rebels - is the first of two compositions by Pete Tosh on the album. His hollow, deeper vocal contrasting nicely with Bob’s as he sings sadly of 400 years of slavery and oppression. This is followed by Tosh’s second contribution, the more spritely Stop that Train, a song featuring a melody that you can’t help but song along to, and a song that perfectly demonstrates The Wailers’ ability to repeat lyrics and yet somehow never make them tiresome. Baby We’ve Got a Date sees the introduction of Bob’s backing vocalists Rita Marley - his wife - and Marcia Griffiths who complement Bob’s sumptuous melodies beautifully, and only help to increase the sunny atmosphere of the song.

Side two features more of the same, and not in a bad way, as the Wailers’ sun-drenched-concrete sound continues to transport you through classics such as the straight love song Stir it Up, Kinky Reggae and the slightly darker No More Trouble and Midnight Ravers. The latter shows the Wailer’s ability to groove along to just one chord, Bob’s melodies keeping things engaging, something they were to master on the song Exodus in 1977. The 2001 re-release saw the addition of High Tide or Low Tide (one of my Bob Marley favourites) and the jangling All Day All Night, but I won’t cover those here.

Although my favourite Bob Marley era will always be the productions Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry led - particularly Soul Revolution - this is undoubtedly one of the many highlights of his time with Island Records. Chris Blackwell changed their sound to one more accessible to Western audiences with the addition of Wayne Perkins’ guitar twinkles while maintaining the roots of what Bob’s music so engaging - and is no doubt largely to thank for Marley’s worldwide fame now. The gentle and yet dominating dubby bass lanes, those crisp off-beat guitar strums, and Carlton Barrett’s musical drums all create an atmosphere like no other, and one that was to drive Bob Marley’s career for years to come. Catch a Fire features one of music’s most powerful figures on top form, weaving gorgeous melodies for fun, and never losing touch with the strong political message of love and acceptance that his career was built on.

Song Picks: Slave Driver, Stir it Up, Baby We’ve Got a Date, Stop that Train

9/10

Considered one of the forerunners of punk-rock, Raw Power is the third album by the Stooges and sees a turn into more anthemic songs, led by the fact that the new guitarist James Williamson co-wrote much of the material with Iggy Pop. The Stooges were largely in disarray following the release of their previous album Fun House and on relocating to London Iggy Pop put together a new band to back him. He also mixed the first version of this album, which was rejected by the label for some dubious choices - particularly related to the stereo nature of the mix. Bowie was drafted in to re-mix the entire album in a day for its 1973 release. Iggy Pop was then invited to remix the album himself in 1996 for a re-release, and although I know it’s probably cheating, it’s this mix I want to review. Bowie’s mix is fine, and it’s worth mentioning it’s only the 1989 CD version I’ve heard, which I gather Iggy Pop hated, and so the original mix in 1973 may well have been better. The 1989 version I have access to just sounds a bit quiet, it doesn’t smash you in the face like Iggy Pop’s later mix does. Sure, technically I think Bowie’s mix is better and Iggy’s is compressed to within an inch of its life to make it pulverisingly loud, but I think that fits the album better. The guitars are also WAY more forward in Iggy’s mix which, again, serves the album well.

Onto the actual music. The album opens with Search & Destroy, an aural assault of the best kind. James Williamson’s guitar is an absolute force of nature. Iggy roars lyrics about a soldier’s experience in Vietnam and by the time we get to the last chorus the guitars are so loud and compressed that the whole things sounds like an unholy mess, and it’s aboslutely glorious.

James Williamson’s influence cannot be underestimated on this album, and I think the riffs are superior to those on the Stooges’ first two albums, an improvement he is wholly responsible for. Gimme Danger again features a great riff, which benefits from being pushed way to the front in Iggy’s mix. Pop’s distorted shouts have no issue being heard among the din, and it just gives the whole thing a whole load more power, which is what this album is all about.

The title track opens the second side of the album, again featuring a pulsating power-chord riff from Williamson, it’s a song about heroin, something that seemed to be a must for any wannabe edgy 70s band. There’s some rather interesting percussion on the track, including a tambourine and what sounds like a bell of some sort, which juxtoposes somewhat with the menacing, distorted guitar riff to create an atmopshere of fun and abandon. The screeching guitar solo at the end is a messy, drug fuelled cry for anarchy. It’s another piledriver of a track.

Columbia Records demanded the album have at least two ballads that could be played on the radio, one of those was I Need Somebody, a song where Iggy’s vocal is so distorted it sounds like the Strokes. It has a surprisingly catchy chorus, and a slightly calmer atmosphere than much of the album. I probably don’t need to say at this point that Williamson - who liked to write his songs on acoustic rather than electric guitar - provides yet another excellent guitar part. The calm precedes another storm, the dancy Shake Appeal, which pretty much dares you not to get up and dance as it’s gallant riff and vocals run through your veins. Iggy has stated it’s his favourite song from the album, and it might just be mine too.

The final track is Iggy’s message about how he knew the band was doomed to failure - none of their three albums sold very well during their existence - and seems an appropriate way to end their last album. He does seem to know that the band will be appreciated later on though, “we’re going down in history/we’re going down,” he shouts above another distorted barrage. How right he was.

Raw Power is my favourite album by the Stooges. To me it’s the culmination of what they were about, the final realisation of their sound, both in terms of the performance and the mix - as long as you listen to Iggy’s 1996 mix. The production does the material justice, creating a sense of anarchy, abandon, and just raw power, man.

Song Picks: Search and Destroy, Gimme Danger, Raw Power, Shake Appeal

9.5/10

Stevie Wonder’s 16th album - yep, I know that’s a lot - sees him transitioning from romantic ballads to more complex compositions. As with Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters, the album features the ARP synthesiser prominently. Stevie Wonder also plays the vast majority of the instruments on the album, being perhaps the first example of a ‘one-man band’ we’ve had on the challenge. Most songs feature him on the piano, bass moog, synthesiser, and drums while other musicians accompany him on a couple of other instruments.

Too High is a dominated by a funky ARP synthesiser line, bumbling along accompanied by a very technically proficient drum part. Wonder plays every single instrument on this thing, which is stupendously impressive when you listen to it. It’s complex, catchy and groovy, stopping and starting effortlessly with the tightness of a well knit band. it still perplexes me that he could overdub his own playing so effectively and in time. Lyrically, the song is a bit of an anti-drug warning. Visions sees Wonder joined by a bass, acoustic guitar and electric guitar which all create a sumptuous, gently twinkling atmosphere to he warmly sings of inner and societal peace before we head into the album’s first mega-hit, Living for the City.

Now, Living for the City is a masterpiece, a tale of a Black man who dreams of life in the city, only to find its just a new flavour of inequality, leaving him disillusioned by the song’s end. A poignant commentary on race-relations in the USA, it’s also a perfectly crafted song instrumentally and melodically. Wonder’s vocals are gruff and rock ‘n’ roll and his melodies as catchy as a really big fishing net. The backing vocalists give the chorus a wonderful boost, catapulting Wonder’s cries of ‘Living just enough/just enough for the city’ into the realms of musical magic.

You’d think something so brilliant couldn’t possible be followed by anything even remotely comparable right? Well, you’d be wrong. Golden Lady is a simple love song, lifted again by Wonder’s golden syrup vocals and a chorus melody that seems to have dropped down straight from the heavens. Then we segue into Higher Ground, a song famously covered by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I’d probably go as far as to say it’s the funkiest song to appear so far on the challenge, that synth quacking along like Donald Duck on the funk juice as Wonder sings of reincarnation and second chances, seemingly unaware of his effortless genius. As you make your way through Wonder’s balanced look at modern religion in Jesus Children of America, you’re once again left pinching yourself when you find out he is playing every instrument on the song.

All is Fair in Love is another of the album’s true masterpieces, and one of the most affecting songs written about love I’ve ever heard. I mean just read this first verse:

All is fair in love
Love's a crazy game
Two people vow to stay
In love as one they say
But all is changed with time
The future none can see
The road you leave behind
Ahead lies mystery

Couple the song’s brilliantly evocative lyrics with Wonder’s cataclysmic vocal performance; going from gentle, to vibrato, to belting out notes at the top of his voice, and you have yourselves a powerful, powerful song. The album ends with the positively tropical Don’t You Worry About a Thing and the possible shot at President Nixon He’s Mr Know It All, another song driven by a melody that flows like lava through the chorus

3 days after the release of Innervisions, Stevie Wonder was involved in a car crash that involved a log smashing through the car and squarely into his forehead. Amazingly, he didn’t die, and was reportedly too scared to try and play an instrument while recovering in hospital, afraid he’d lost his musical skill. When he did eventually try a clavinet and realised he could play it, singer Ira Tucker noted, ‘man, you could just see the happiness spreading all over him. I'll never forget that.’ Innervisions is the work of a man for whom music very much was his life. Blind since shortly after his birth, Wonder was signed to a record label ever since the age of 11. Only someone who had been so absorbed in music from such a young age could have made Innervisions. The words musical genius are overused, but i have no hesitation in using them for Stevie Wonder, an this album is indisputable proof of that.

Song Picks: Living for the City, Higher Ground, All is Fair in Love, He’s Mr. Know It All

9.5/10

Pink Floyd’s eighth album, The Dark Side of the Moon, is probably one of the most famous albums out there, and one you’ll hear repeated many times if you ask people what their favourite album of all time is. It’s an album that’s almost impossible to listen to outside of its almost mythical place in the zeitgeist. It’s also Pink Floyd’s best selling album, and one of the bst selling albums of all-time, with over 45 million copies sold. A concept album about ‘greed, time, death and mental ilness’ according to Wikipedia, it well and truly put Pink Floyd on the map.

The album opens with Speak to Me, a one minute introduction track that begins with a heartbeat and recordings of the band talking, before the sound of a helicopter hovers in and we drop into track two, Breathe (In the Air). Gilmour’s ‘uni-vibe’ pedal makes his axe sound like a futuristic slide-guitar, and we have the album’s first lyrics, an imagery dense poem about going with the flow. The last verse sums it up nicely:

For long you live and high you fly
But only if you ride the tide
And balanced on the biggest wave
You race towards an early grave

The following On the Run is another soundscape piece, that whirling sound created by a Synthi AKS synthesiser, and the rest of the spacey soundscape was created in a whole host of interesting ways. The sound of a variety of vehicles flying around in an empty black night on another planet is quickly stopped as we hear an explosion, followed by the gradual introduction of a ticking clock, leading us into one of the album’s highlights. Time begins with a clatter of pendulums and other metal, which fades into an ominous ticking and booming of what I’m assuming is a synth. Pink Floyd continue to hammer home the fact they really are the masters of soundscapes with the rumble of a conga from ear to ear, before a more traditional rock arrangement enters alongside David Gilmour’s vocals. The song returns to the theme of Breathe, of making the most of now. It does so in a much darker way than Breathe though, something evident in the song’s last four lines:

“Far away across the field/The tolling of the iron bell/Calls the faithful to their knees/To hear the softly spoken magic spells.” The song fades effortlessly into the epic The Great Gig In The Sky which features Clare Torry’s spectacular, traumatised sounding worldess vocal, which I used to find rather irritating but has now grown on me. The song’s title refers to heaven, and the soundscape underneath Torry’s vocal is rather heavenly, the soft piano chords are accompanied by the odd bass note, seemingly gliding across the cosmos. Torry’s vocal is angelic and cataclysmic all at once.

The we reach the first single on the album, Money. It opens with an incredibly innovative use of the sound of coins and a cash register to introduce its 7/4 time signature. It is the only song on the album that made the top 20, and in fact the only song in history to do so containing a 7/4 time signature. The song is a pretty blunt critique of commercialism, and features David Gilmour on absolute guitar god form when the song switches to 4/4, with solos that light up the piece like a Swiss firework display - go watch a firework display in Ascona and you’ll know what I mean.

Ok, we’ve critscised capitalism and the root of all evil, money. Now it’s time for war to come under the microscope in Us and Them, a song that for some reason is rarely in the conversation when talking about the greatest anti-war songs, but probably should be. We’re all just ordinary humans, the song emphatically dictates, and thus all war is senseless. Torry is back with backing vocals in what is one of the album’s hugest sounding songs, the end of each verse crescendoing into a burst of tuneful anger.

The album moves onto the keyboard an guitar solo led Any Colour You Like, which sparkles like a million possibilites, followed by Brain Damage, another song about former frontman Syd Barrett’s mental instability, before we end with Eclipse, a wholehearted list of how nothing really matters in the end, ‘for even the sun is eclipsed by the moon.’

The Dark Side of the Moon is a magnificent album. Even today, in 2020, the thing does not sound like it was recorded on this planet, the musical paintings it weaves belong to another universe. The Dark Side of the Moon is a timeless piece of art, it’s themes as universal as the stars.

Song Picks: Time, Money, Us and Them, Breathe (In the Air)

9.5/10

1968 - Clive's Top 5 Albums of Every Year Challenge

July 03, 2020 by Clive in Clive's Album Challenge

Over what will likely be the next few years I’m going to be ranking and reviewing the top 5 albums 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.

So we’ve made it to the penultimate year of the 60s, and if I continue this relentless pace of posting one every two weeks I should be finished some time in August 2022. Realistically though, I won’t be able to, and it won’t be finished until some time after that. Anyway, 1968, here’s some of the year’s most famous events: Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated, Tommie Smith and John Carlos performed the Black power salute in silent protest at the Mexico Olympics, Apollo 8 became the first spacecraft to orbit the moon and Boeing introduced the first 747 ‘Jumbo Jet’.

Musically, these were the top 5 albums released according to rateyourmusic.com’s users:

#1 The Beatles - The Beatles (The White Album)
#2 The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Electric Ladyland
#3 The Velvet Underground - White Light/White Heat
#4 The Zombies - Odessey and Oracle
#5 Van Morrison - Astral Weeks

So, we’ve seen the top three before on these lists but we’ve got a couple of newbies to the challenge bolstering up the top 5. Because I’m a masochist and like to give myself work, I’ve also spotted these 5 albums from further down the list which look intriguing:

#6 The Kinks - The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society
#7 The Rolling Stones - Beggars Banquet
#9 Aretha Franklin - Lady Soul
#11 Pink Floyd - A Saucerful of Secrets
#13 Simon & Garfunkel - Bookends

And well would you look at that? We’ve got ten albums to get through again. It’s as if I like nice round numbers isn’t it? Let’s get cracking, here’s my ranking and thoughts on the above.

odessey and oracle.jpg — 10. Odessey and Oracle

The Zombies

The Zombies’ second album, Odyssey and Oracle, wasn’t much of a success initially (and the band split up pretty soon after its release because of this) but has gained acclaim as the years have gone on. Partially recorded at Abbey Road Studios, their music bears a significant resemblance to that of Abbey Road’s most famous artists, the Beatles. There’s also more than a hint of the Beach Boys in their harmonies.

It’s easy to see how this album has gained so much acclaim, although a little puzzling as to why it didn’t initially. Odeyssey and Oracle is full of wonderfully catchy songs featuring varied instrumentation, slick production and harmonies that engulf you like a warm bath. The psychedelic nature of the album only ever serves to keep things interesting, and never leads the whole thing off the rails. The lyrics are surprisingly dark at times, something which is cleverly hidden by the comforting melodies that contain them.

Odyssey and Oracle is one of those albums you’ll swear you’ve heard before, it’s timelessly well written songs jogging memories that don’t exist, reminding you of unexplained gaps in your memory of things that should have happened, but didn’t. How could a song be this good and yet have had so little airplay? How come this hasn’t been part of my life sooner? I don’t have the answer to these questions, but I do know your musical life is about to improve should you allow this pop gem to enter it.

Song Picks: Care of Cell 44, Maybe After He’s Gone, Beechwood Park, Changes

8/10

LadySoul — 9. Lady Soul

Aretha Franklin

Aretha’s twelfth album is another vocal delight. Now, I spent most of my review of 1967’s I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You raving about Aretha’s amazing vocals, so I’ll spare you the superlatives here. Let’s just say her voice is as timeless and demanding of attention as ever, there doesn’t see to be a note in existence she can’t hit the bullseye on, and although she can get a little warbly for my tastes, it’s never completely gratuitous.

Again, Aretha’s original compositions sit effortlessly beside covers of classics such as People Get Ready and Money Won’t Change You. (You Make Me Feel) Like a Natural Woman was written for, rather than by, Aretha Franklin, but it’s hard to imagine anyone else doing the song justice. The bombastic way she sings ‘You make me feeeeeel’ multiple ways before soulfully pouring out ‘like a natural woman’ is one of those great moments of recorded musical history where you can’t help but stop in your tracks and listen.

I’d say this is a stronger album than I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You purely because the band adds a little more, the opening track Chain of Fools is testament to this. An infectious bass and drum groove and some funktacular guitar work complement Aretha’s vocals perfectly, creating my favourite song on the album.

Song Picks: Chain of Fools, (You Make Me Feel) Like a Natural Woman

8/10

VillageGreen — 8. The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society

The Kinks

Well, that’s probably the longest album name we’ve had on the challenge so far. I’m going to give the album a short review as revenge, take that. This is the Kinks’ sixth studio album and their final one featuring all the original members as the bassist left following this album.

The album is sometimes referred to as a concept album about English life, in fact music-critic Stephen Erlewine described it as a ‘concept album lamenting the passing of old-fashioned English traditions.’ The reality however is that Ray Davies, the group’s lead singer and songwriter, did not compose the songs to fit a preset idea or concept. It just happened to be that he was scribbling a lot about these themes in the preceding two years when the album’s material was written.

Let’s cut to the chase, I love this thing. It’s such a merry affair and feels like sitting outside on a fine summer’s day, beer in hand, chilling. Sitting by the Riverside sums the whole album up perfectly with the line ‘Sitting there just drinking wine and looking at the view’.

Oh, and it has a song on it called The Phenomenal Cat, which has to be a contender for the greatest song title of all time. It also starts with the flute and features a prominent tambourine as Davies sings about this phenomenal cat, has there ever been a breezier song? It’s all filled with a cheerful creativity that nicely shows what this album is all about.

A jolly collection of simple, unassuming songs about day-to-day life that have production and instrumentation varied enough to keep it engaging throughout. I’ve talked before about how hard it is to create a genuinely happy album without it being cheesy, and the Kinks have absolutely nailed it here. Put this on, and even if it’s rainy and wet outside, it’ll feel like the sun’s come out. Magic.

Song picks: Last of the Steam-Powered Trains, Picture Book, Starstruck, All of my Friends Were There

8/10

BeggarsBanquet — 7. Beggars Banquet

The Rolling Stones

The Rolling Stones’ last album before Brian Jones was kicked out the band later drowned in his swimming pool following struggles with drug addiction, Beggars Banquet sees the band getting more instrumental experimental and is a notable step up from their previous work for me.

Sympathy for the Devil features brilliant syncopated drum patterns spread across the stereo field that create a really unique drum fuelled, energetic atmosphere, which the piano and Jagger’s strained vocals perfectly complement. It’s one of those rare moments in music where everything just clicks, and is both really inventive and catchy at the same time. Factory Girl features a similarly innovative use of percussion.

Street Fighting Man, a song about riots, is a good example of Mick Jagger’s fierce and growling vocal throughout this album. A song recorded mainly on acoustic instruments (unusual for such a ‘heavy’ song), it has a really unique sense of space to it. Dear Doctor displays Mick Jagger’s often underrated ability to howl out a tune, bang in tune, and Salt of the Earth finishes the album with a heartfelt celebration of the working-class.

Beggars Banquet sees The Rolling Stones really hitting form. The songwriting has got more interesting and consistent, and the production is both cleaner and more full of ideas. It’s an album that’s a real pleasure to listen to, both fun and engaging, and featuring one of the year’s most captivating vocal performances.

Song Picks: Sympathy for the Devil, Street Fighting Man, Dear Doctor, Factory Girl

8.5/10

WhiteLight — 6. White Light / White Heat

The Velvet Underground

The Velvet Underground’s second album ditches pretty much all the accessibility of their debut which means we’re left with a 40 minute assault on the ears in the spirit of the aforementioned album’s more challenging tracks. Initially I didn’t really enjoy this all that much and found it too challenging but now, although I still don’t like it anywhere near as much as their debut, I’ve come to enjoy the creative chaos of it. I think it’s best to think of it as rock’s version of Free Jazz. An album written with complete freedom, with minimal concern for structure, melody etc.

Inevitably this means the album would go on the ‘difficult listening’ shelf, but it’s also rather rewarding when you stop trying to force it to fit your ideas of what an album and music should be.

The simplest song here is the gorgeously relaxed Here She Comes Now where Lou sings about a topic unknown (though some suggest it’s his guitar) in a remarkably out of breath manner for a song so vocally simple. The opener White Light/White Heat describes the effect of methamphetamine in much the way Heroin described the effects of its titular drug on their previous album. They’re the two most accessible songs on the album, which includes such weird delights as the instrumental, dark, mini-audiobook The Gift, the stoned, gently psychedelic Lady Godiva’s Operation and the suitably thrashing mess I Heard Her Call My Name.

Most challenging though, is closing track Sister Ray, a 17-minute noise-rock marvel that perfectly finishes this tumultuous, seemingly stream-of-consciousness record. Apparently the producer Tom Wilson walked out half-way through the recording because he was so shocked by the utter noisy chaos unfolding before him. Recorded in one take with warts and all left in, the song is a remarkable recording of a moment of unadulterated musical freedom. The drums march along uniformly while all the other instruments dart off in different directions trying to create as much, and as punishing a sound as possible, as the piece threatens to burst at the seams and explode, emphatically destroying your ear-drums. Lou Reed has talked about the topic of the song and stated, “I like to think of ‘Sister Ray’ as a transvestite smack dealer. The situation is a bunch of drag queens taking some sailors home with them, shooting up on smack and having this orgy when the police appear.” Something he describes as a ‘scene of total debauchery and decay.’ Just like that scene, the song is a complete and utter filthy mess, but if you just sit back and relax your innate resistance to its punishing dissonance, you’ll find yourself escaping reality for 17 minutes, swept away by it’s anarchy.

White Light / White Heat is a challenging album, and you’d struggle to call it an enjoyable listen in the traditional sense, but hidden in it’s jumbled spontaneity is something magic, a frenzied manifestation of a mind with no boundaries.

Song Picks: Sister Ray, White Light/White Heat, Here She Comes Now

8.5/10

Their fourth studio album is a concept album about life from childhood to old age, although this is only true of the first side, and the second side features mainly unused songs from The Graduate soundtrack, and Mrs Robinson, which was of course used.

I was immediately struck by how modern this sounded, Save the Life of My Child features some of the first synths I’ve heard so far in this challenge and the rowdy heavily reverbed ambient crowd wouldn’t be out of place on a recording today. The song has a strangely sinister tone, one that I absolutely wasn’t expecting, and it’s a great opening to the more experimental nature of this album. It the story of a bunch of people frantically trying to stop a child committing suicide by jumping off something.

America is perhaps my highlight on the album, and is a prime display of Paul Simon’s great lyrics and the duo’s melodic skill. It’s the story of Paul Simon and girlfriend Kathy’s trip around America, while contemplating the meaning of the American dream. The songs starts with some sumptuous low-key humming and each verse ends with a melody like a crackling, heart-warming fire, ‘.... to look for America’ they sing, as the image builds of a whole country of people looking for a country, which seems to disappear the harder they search.

Overs explores the point of a relationship where both parties know it’s over, but are too afraid to say that out loud. A similar topic to that of Dangling Conversation from 1966’s Sage, Rosemary & Thyme. This one has a remarkably more light-hearted feel, which juxtaposes nicely with the sad and resigned lyrics, ending perfectly with the verse:

How long can I delay?
We're just a habit
Like saccharin
And I'm habitually feelin' kinda blue
But each time I try on the thought of leaving you
I stop...
Stop and think it over

Voices of Old People is just that. The voices of old people as recorded by Garfunkel at United Home for Aged Hebrews and the California Home for the Aged at Reseda. It’s a touching and intimate break in the music which precedes the lovely Old Friends, an image of two old men sat on the bench together as the world goes by. Bookends (Reprise) marks the end of the concept part of the album as we move to the more ‘poppy’ part of the album. The highlight of which is undoubtedly the famous Mrs Robinson, a song with the most infectious of choruses, and which actually has little to do with the film, having been written before it’s inclusion. The album is also notable for the fact that it barely has any lines that rhyme, something pretty rare in the rock album world.

Bookends is definitely Simon & Garfunkel’s most experimental album, and my favourite up to now (we still have their classic and final album Bridge Over Troubled Water to come in 1970 though which could change that). It’s an album that perfectly demonstrates Simon’s lyrical skill, has some impressively clean and progressive production (particularly on that second track), and is just and album that begs for you to dig a little deeper. I’d have liked the concept nature to extend beyond the first half, but it still works well regardless.

Song Picks: Save the Life of My Child, America, Mrs Robinson

8.5/10

Pink Floyd’s second album is very much a transitional album. David Gilmour (who is so crucial Pink Floyd’s sound in the upcoming years) was joining, Syd Barrett was leaving. Gilmour contributed on all but 2 songs, while Barrett appeared on 3. Gilmour was initially brought in to cover for Syd Barrett’s ‘eccentricities’ such as when he was completely unresponsive on stage, but it was soon clear this was unworkable and Syd left the band. Notably, the band’s drummer, Nick Mason, states this is his favourite Pink Floyd album.

A Saucerful of Secrets very much feels like the birth of the Pink Floyd who would go on to record classic albums like The Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here. Less psychedelic, and more spacey. Often cited as being a very diverse album because all members of the band contributed songwriting to the album, I actually feel that this is a more cohesive record than their debut (which was mostly written by Barrett). There’s an otherworldly, dreamy atmosphere to the whole thing perfectly encapsulated in the so-fragile-it-would-combust-if-you-touched-it See-Saw. The amount of additional instruments used to create a whole universe of sound is quite remarkable, and unlike anything I’ve heard up to this point in this challenge. I felt like I was being sucked into the world’s most gentle black hole, emerging on the other side to a whole new glorious sky of stars, planets and gentle explosions in the distance. Perhaps the most notable evidence of this ‘soundscape building’ is the epic title track, a 12 minute odyssey into the slightly ominous unknown. The piece is in 4 parts, and there are various theories as to what they represent. My favourite theory is that the four parts are all different sections of a battle ( the theory goes something like part 1: set-up, part 2: the battle itself, part 3: the view of the dead, part 4: the mourning of the dead). The piece works like a charm as a musical representation of a space battle, and by the time you get to the gorgeous final part Celestial Voices (which is a piece dominated by beautifully evocative organ chords, heavily reverbed as if reaching all corners of the universe) you’re there with all your space-being friends, feeling a kind of beautiful sadness at all the non-existent space-beings that have died. It’s quite magical.

Other parts of the album are perhaps a little repetitive and ‘floaty’ for the lack of a better word. It’s hard to get a grip on some of the songs as they seem to hover just out of reach. The whole thing feels very dreamy, which can make it feel like it lacks substance. To me though, the ethereal nature of it, mixed in with the more concrete riff-led tracks like Corporal Clegg is what makes the album what it is.

The final track Jugband Blues, which is Barrett’s last composition for the band is a tearful goodbye from a troubled soul. He sings of his detachment, before releasing the last verse over a gorgeous chord sequence, seemingly floating off into space never to be seen again.

And the sea isn’t green
And I love the Queen
And what exactly is a dream?
And what exactly is a joke?

Song Picks: A Saucerful of Secrets, See-Saw, Jugband Blues

8.5/10

The Beatles, more commonly known as ‘The White Album’ is the Beatles’ ninth album and by far their longest coming in at a whopping 1 hour and 33 minutes long. ‘Now, it can’t possibly all be good if it’s that long can it?’ I hear you say. Well, actually I’d argue that all of it is at least ‘good’ with a lot of it significantly better than that, and as a package it’s rather extraordinary, actually. The fact is though, you’re unlikely to find people agreeing on which songs are the best on this album, or indeed which ones should have been left off to cut down the obscene running length. There’s 30 songs on this thing, yes 30. Thus I’m not really going to go into song detail too much as I’ll be here all day, and I’d quite like to finish this challenge sometime before 2040.

Most of the album’s material was written from March to April while the band was on a meditation course in India, and the album has the feel of a bunch of material written really quickly. It reminds me of a challenge I do every February called FAWM (February Album Writing Month) where the challenge is to write, record, and upload 14 songs for everyone else doing the challenge to hear in the month of February. This time constraint leads to less of a critical mindset, there’s no time for writer’s block, and thus you end up following through with ideas you might otherwise think are stupid. Usually, in my case at least, this leads to a bunch of pretty varied songs, some fitting simplistic styles to make them quicker to write, others just a bit mad, weird experiments that very occasionally pay off. The White Album to me sounds a bit like what would result if the Beatles did an elongated version of this challenge. Some of the material is very simple, some of it’s a bit mad, quite a lot of it is pretty special, but all of the 30 songs are just that, songs. With the exception of the psychedelic and haunting Revolution 9 there’s no interludes or longform experimental instrumentals. Not that there’s any problem with those of course, it’s just rare for an album of this length not to contain significantly more. There’s plenty of experimentation within the songs however, and you’ll notice as you listen just how many of the ideas put forward in this album have become entire subgenres. Quite the achievement.

It’s a weird one is this record. I think the Beatles have absolutely created albums that are more cohesive (e.g. Sgt Peppers). The fact is though, The Beatles has a special atmosphere to it, like you’re sitting in on some of the world’s finest songwriters spontaneously recording some ideas, and the fact that it’s just so bloody long means you’re always discovering something new. Despite its simplicity, it’s length means you never quite feel like you’ve got to the bottom of it, and that makes it an album with probably unmatched longevity in their catalogue.

In many ways, this album encapsulates to me the joy of songwriting. There aren’t many albums of this length that can entertain for their entire duration and never feel like a slog, The Beatles absolutely achieves that, in fact it goes beyond that, it’s never less than a lot of fun. 1 hour and 33 minutes of it.

Song Picks: Back In The USSR; Blackbird; Helter Skelter; Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da; Revolution 1

9/10

I mean it’s hard enough getting through this monstrous double-album due to its 77 minute running time, reviewing something so expansive is even more difficult, but having just reviewed ‘The White Album’, this should be a walk in the park ey?

Electric Ladyland is Hendrix’s third and final album before his untimely death in 1970 after an overdose on sleeping pills. It’s also the only one of his albums he produced, and thus can certainly be considered the purest, most unfiltered distillation of what he was trying to achieve musically. His past two albums were already ground-breaking but this behemoth of an album pushed things yet further and features in my eyes, some of the best psychedelic rock ever recorded. Actually, scrap that, the best psychedelic rock ever recorded.

Obviously we’ve got the ‘hits’ here such as his mesmeric cover of Dylan’s All Along The Watchtower, which Dylan himself has appraised as the definitive version. Dylan had already brought the splendid lyrics to life in his version on 1968’s John Wesley Harding but Hendrix made the song larger than life, an explosion of lyrical imagery, a memorable display of bombastic, busy drum playing, and above all, some of the most iconic guitar soloing ever recorded. Simply put, he turned it from a brilliant song into a masterpiece. Other hits include the irresistible Crosstown Traffic where the guitar appears more like a bunch of distorted backing vocalists than a guitar, with a riff that has to be one of the most infectious things ever written. Besides that we’ve also got the incomparable guitar wizardry of Voodoo Child (Slight Return). A song which starts with that famous, quacky intro, which soon turns into a riff that could plough through mountains, planets, hell, even time itself. That transition is one of my favourite moments on any album. The song is only elevated further by one of Hendrix’s finest vocal performances, it’s perfect closing track to the album. While we’re talking about vocals, it’s interesting to note that Hendrix was never particularly confident about them, and insisted on recording behind a screen when singing.

But, that’s enough about the shorter, more instantly gratifying songs on the album, let’s talk about the record’s two sweeping epics. The first one we come across is the 15-minute psychedelic trip Voodoo Chile which features drummer Mitch Mitchell at his absolute best, flurrying around the kit like a tropical storm, building up into a hurricane of fills that seem to take off into the stratosphere. The guitar improvisation is superb too and proof to me that Hendrix is rock guitar’s answer to the jazz genius of Coltrane etc. Hendrix wanted to create the feel of an ‘informal club jam’ (Wikipedia), and thus got everyone in the studio to record some background shouting etc, which is used throughout the track. The crescendos benefit from Winwood’s organ part, adding further creatively scattered notes to Hendrix’s virtuosic soloing. I think it’s quite impossible to listen to the piece and not be absolutely blown away by it’s spontaneously in-the-moment brilliance. Hendrix’s longest song is also perhaps the definitive display of how at one he was with the guitar, whatever he thought, he could do. The second epic 1983… (A Merman I Should Turn to Be) is more of a mood piece, but one that again displays Hendrix’s ability to sing the most beautiful melodies with his guitar. I particularly love Hendrix’s bass work on the track too (Redding didn’t contribute bass to this one) which has a spaced out chattering quality to it. The guitar melodies that bookend the track are as stratospheric as they are beautiful.

Electric Ladyland is an unfiltered look into the mind of one of rock’s greatest innovators, a final, colossally beautiful goodbye from someone who - although he was a massive influence on what was to come - has yet to be overtaken as a guitarist.

Song Picks: Crosstown Traffic, Voodoo Child (Slight Return), Voodoo Chile, All Along the Watchtower

9.5/10

Now, to understand how Astral Weeks, Van Morrison’s second album, came to be, I think it’s important to know about how the recording sessions operated. Essentially, Morrison sat behind a screen with his acoustic guitar and played as the band improvised around him. This band was essentially a jazz one led by Richard Davis (he played bass on Eric Dolphy’s Out to Lunch) who was accompanied by guitarist Jay Berliner (who had previously worked with our man Charles Mingus), Warren Smith Jr on percussion, and Connie Kay on drums. It’s this Davis led quartet that makes the album just as much as Morrison does.

Berliner said of the recordings, "We were used to playing to charts, but Van just played us the songs on his guitar and then told us to go ahead and play exactly what we felt." Kay said similar, “we more or less just sat there and jammed.” It’s this freedom that gives the album its unique sound. Lyrically, it’s not particularly coherent, but more a set of gorgeous images and spontaneous ideas flung into the air, much like the instrumentation that accompanies it. Put quite simply, I think it’s a unique combination of the jazz that has blessed these lists and the poetic melodies that have started to appear since the mid-60s.

Throughout the album, Morrison’s voice is beautifully melodic, his guitar playing simple and smooth like butter, and his lyrics seemingly magical:

And you know you gotta go
On that train from Dublin up to Sandy Row
Throwing pennies at the bridges down below
And the rain, hail, sleet, and snow

Combine this with a band that seems to know exactly what Morrison is going to do at every turn, and has the ability to throw the most delightfully colourful musical paint to fill in Van Morrison’s meditatively ‘present’ performances, and you have what is, in my opinion, one the greatest and most unique albums of all time. On that note, I think Madame George, some of the lyrics to which I posted above, is one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever recorded.

In terms of some closing words to this review, I think my original rateyourmusic.com review of this album summed it up rather well, so I’ll finish with that:

‘Well this is just completely singular isn't it? I can't think of anything remotely similar. Free-form jazzy country folk. There's no structure, it just ebbs and flows along as Van Morrison spins melodies over the top, weaving a tapestry that floats somewhere in the realm of the images created in our minds while reading a book, intangible and yet beautiful. An album that flies, and forces you to fly along with it.’

Song Picks: Astral Weeks, Sweet Thing, Cyprus Avenue, Madame George

10/10

1967 - Clive's Top 5 Albums of Every Year Challenge

June 20, 2020 by Clive in Clive's Album Challenge, Music

Ok, here we are at the end of 1967, let’s take a look around and see what happened besides a whole heap of great albums being released. The six day war ended with Israel’s victory, race riots broke out across the US and particularly in Detroit, three astronauts were killed in a fire at the test-launch of Apollo 1, Che Guevara was shot to death after his capture in Bolivia and pulsars were discovered. If you want to see some great photographs from the year then I’d highly recommend this article from The Atlantic.

Now, onto what we’re here for. Here’s what rateyourmusic.com’s users rate as the top 5 albums of 1967:

#1 The Velvet Underground - The Velvet Underground & Nico
#2 The Doors - The Doors
#3 The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
#4 The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Are You Experienced
#5 Leonard Cohen - Song of Leonard Cohen

Four of those are debut albums and thus new entries to our lists, only The Beatles have been here before. 1967 was such a stupendously strong year that I’m going to pick five more albums and throw them into the mix too:

#6 Pink Floyd - The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
#10 The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Axis: Bold as Love
#11 Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band - Safe as Milk
#15 Aretha Franklin - I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You
#18 Bob Dylan - John Wesley Harding

I’m not exaggerating when I say this is the strongest year yet, and it’s going to take some beating so let’s get right into it, here’s my thoughts on and ranking of the above ten albums.

PiperattheGatrsofDawn — 10. The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn

Pink Floyd

Pink Floyd’s debut album is the only one made under Syd Barrett’s leadership, and the only one to feature him extensively as he left part-way through recording their next album as his use of psychedelic drugs and reported schizophrenia made his behaviour increasingly unpredictable.

This is a less polished, messier affair than their famous albums once Syd had left, but Syd’s eccentric songwriting talents are evident here. The album starts with a bunch of songs that have sections that are surprisingly poppy (The first two minutes of Flaming could easily be a song by The Beatles) but then descend into psychedelic, spacey trips of the 60’s variety. Pink Floyd’s ability to build a psychedelic soundscape is evident on Pow R. Toc. H where a whole host of instruments and occasional ambient chatter and shouting create a whole world in a song. That kind of musical world-building is present throughout this whole album, peaking perhaps with the rambunctious Interstellar Overdrive which ends in such a mass of noise that you feel like you’ve just been hit by a brick wall, or as Abbey Road engineer Pete Brown put it, recalling walking in on them recording the song, ‘I opened the door and nearly shit myself’. Lucifer Sam is perhaps my favourite song though, a brilliant mix of an infectious hook, driving guitar riff and the kind of otherworldly soundscape that makes this album what it is.

Overall, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn leaves me a little confused, but in a good way. I love where it takes me, the band clearly know how to create an atmosphere with their sound and although the whole thing hasn’t completely grabbed me for whatever reason, there’s something charming about the weirdness of the whole thing.

Song Picks: Lucifer Sam, Interstellar Overdrive

7.5/10

Another debut album. This time by the fabulously named ‘Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band’.

At its heart Safe as Milk is a blues record, but it’s not one of those predictable blues records. No, no, no. This is creative, gritty, and more than a little bit mad. Captain Beefheart’s (Don Van Vliet for those who don’t like eccentric stage names) vocals sound like the ramblings of a mad-man who doesn’t want you to understand what he’s saying. When you can understand what he’s saying it’s often so surreal and mad that it’s rather difficult to get a grip of. Take these lines picked out in the album’s Wikipedia article, from the song Abba Zabba:

Mother say son, she say son, you can't lose, with the stuff you use
Abba Zabba go-zoom Babbette baboon
Run, run, monsoon, Indian dream, tiger moon

Oh Captain, I’m lost, lost in a sea of mad nonsense. Of course, this is an extreme example and Mr Van Vliet is capable of writing some pretty simple lyrics too, take those in Call on Me, where he spends the entire song mentioning the many times his ‘baby’ can call on him.

If you’re lost and it’s all just a bit rough for you, then I’m Glad is the song for you. A surprisingly soulful pop-jaunt including the unexpected complement of some backing singers. It wouldn’t be out of place on a Van Morrison album. Delightful.

Safe as Milk has a fantastically grungy, raw sound, that captures a great energy, aided by Captain Beefheart’s drawly, growling vocals. It feels like a vivacious mix of the delta blues and punk, and it comes highly recommended.

Song Picks: Sure’Nuff ‘n’ Yes, I Do; I’m Glad; Electricity, Plastic Factory

8/10

NeverLovedaMan — 8. I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You

Aretha Franklin

The eleventh studio album by Aretha Franklin is the first to appear on these lists, and probably her most famous. It’s essentially a great collection of performances by one of the best vocalists we’ve ever had. Consisting mainly of covers, the album doesn’t do anything all that exciting instrumentally and the production feels a little old, even in the context of 1967.

The band plod along, providing a perfectly adequate and easy-listening backing to Aretha’s towering vocal performances, without adding much to them. The album opens with one of the finest pop recordings ever, a cover of Otis Redding’s Respect, you’ll all have heard it’s infectious, dance inducing and heart-filling brilliance, and it’s one of those rare songs that gets people of every generation to the dancefloor. The album doesn’t quite continue at that level, but then if it did it would be the undisputed best album of all time and all other music would be deemed pointless. Well, maybe not quite, but it’s still an impossible bar to meet.

The rest of the album is still great and Aretha continues to captivate until the closing notes of the beautiful A Change Is Gonna Come. She is one of those singers that makes you want to sing along all the time, but then immediately makes you realise that you sound like a strangled possum in comparison. It’s worth noting how at home Aretha Franklin’s own compositions sound here. My two favourite examples are Baby, Baby, Baby, which has a deliciously calm groove, and the backing vocals provide a luscious bedding to Aretha’s splendid vocals (did I mention she could sing?), and Dr. Feelgood, which is a strong display of the raspier side of her voice.

I Never Loved a Man The Way I Loved You is the capturing of one of the greatest singers of all time, at her best. Nothing more, nothing less.

Song Picks: Respect, Good Times, Soul Serenade

8/10

Their debut album, The Doors is one of those albums you’ll always see knocking around on top albums of all-time lists and is generally regarded as one of the biggest influences on the psychedelic rock genre.

The Doors is a rock album with a jazz-sensibility. There’s a lot of instrumental sections and a freedom with song structure that is refreshing. The Doors never hesitate to repeat things as much as they feel like, and it’s in their repetition that the album cements itself into your brain, slowly hacking away at it with it’s catchy and yet un-poppy hooks like a determined and slightly scary woodpecker.

Break on Through is a prime example, it barely has a verse and is largely just a repetition of the line ‘break on through to the other side’ which builds and builds vocally as Jim Morrison is almost coughing the line out of his throat by the end of his song, having depleted himself of all his vocal energy.

The Doors sounds quite dark, Morrison’s voice has a reverb on it that makes it sound like it’s coming from the bottom of some deep chasm, a voice from the darkness, something his slightly ghostly tone only amplifies. It’s an album where I appreciate it’s artistry more than feel an urge to listen to it as such but it creates an atmosphere unlike any other album in my view, and that, combined with the great instrumental performances, original song structures, and powerful and varied vocal performance from Jim Morrison, makes this whole thing rather special.

And I haven’t even mentioned Light My Fire have I? You should go and listen to it, it’s their most famous song for a reason, and that reason is that it is splendid, magnetic, catchy, dark, hypnotic and so many other adjectives. In less adjectives, it’s a masterpiece.

Song Picks: Break on Through, Light My Fire, Back Door Man

8.5/10

JohnWesleyHarding — 6. John Wesley Harding

Bob Dylan

Dylan’s eighth album sees him returning to a calmer sound, and although he’s still backed by a band, the sound is much more acoustic and folky than that of his last few albums. I see this as less of a departure from those albums though, and more of a relaxed blend of everything from Another Side of Bob Dylan to Blonde on Blonde.

Vocally and instrumentally this is less brash than anything before it, and in fact his vocals are rather soothing here. Lyrically it still has the surrealness of some of the electric trio of albums (and Another Side of Dylan) but as Dylan himself said, ‘what I’m trying to do now is not use too many words’. The lines are more calculated, there’s no lines thrown in just for the sake of a rhyme. This loses them some of their playfulness, and to me, their magic. With his looser lyrics it felt like a rhyme could always throw a song or an image into a new, unexpected direction, as if Dylan himself had no idea where it was going, which kept things exciting. On John Wesley Harding that’s lacking a little and although the more calculated lyrics make the songs leaner, it also makes them a little colder.

Nevertheless, this still features the kind of evocative imagery you’d expect on a Dylan album. You only need to look at the final verse of All Along The Watchtower (later covered by Jimi Hendrix in what even Dylan agreed was the better version) to realise that Dylan hasn’t lost his touch:

All along the watchtower
Princes kept the view
While all the women came and went
Barefoot servants too
Outside, in the distance
A wildcat did growl
Two riders were approaching
The wind began to howl

I Dreamed I Saw St Augustine is another favourite, reminiscent of Visions of Johanna in it’s vocals, and bewitching me in a similar way whenever it comes on. The closer I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight is an underrated gem, a perfect country song, and the perfect signal of what was to come next. Even the vocals sound like they’re straight from his next album, 1969’s Nashville Skyline.

Recorded after Dylan had recovered from his motorbike accident in 1966, and around the same time as the famous Basement Tapes were being recorded (though they weren’t released until 1975), John Wesley Harding is Dylan at his most gentle, even the band plods along here, backing the change in Dylan’s vocal style perfectly. It serves as a great segue from the ‘thin mercury sound’ to a more country sound, and although it’s not as memorable as his best, it’s still one I turn to regularly, and a reminder of just how singular Dylan is. There’s no other album that sounds quite like John Wesley Harding, a black and white mix of folk, country, and lyrics to spin carefully shaped images in your mind.

Song Picks: John Wesley Harding, All Along The Watchtower, I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine, I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight

8.5/10

Are You Experienced Is Jimi Hendrix’s debut album, and widely regarded as one of the greatest rock debuts of all time. It’s another album that had different songs on the UK and US release. I’m going to be reviewing the US edition because I prefer the cover (see above, isn’t it glorious?), and because it has Purple Haze on it, and the UK edition doesn’t. Frankly, you’d have to be rather silly to review an album without Purple Haze on it if there’s a version out there with it on.

The aforementioned Purple Haze opens the album, and might just be the most emphatic announcement of the arrival of any artist on the first track of their debut in history. After a staccato intro Hendrix comes in with one of the best guitar riffs ever written, which is soon added to by some superbly scattershot drumming from Mitch Michell and another messy, infectious, riff from Hendrix, backed by Noel Redding’s gritty, wide-as-a-landscape bass. It encapsulates everything that’s great about The Jimi Hendrix Experience.

Hey Joe was the band’s first single after Hendrix was plucked from backing guitarist obscurity and eventually ended up under the management of ex-Animals member Chas Chandler. Chas had enjoyed Hendrix’s performance of Hey Joe live and in a moment of rock ‘n’ roll history, sought to find Hendrix a permanent band, which ended up with the aforementioned Redding and Mitchell. The three perfectly complement each other and Hey Joe is another great example of this. They lay down an infectious groove which expands into a cosmic whirlwind of guitar solos, busy and brisk drumming and solid bass grooves holding the whole thing together. Mitch Michell is, in my eyes, one of the main reasons for Hendrix’s success, I can’t imagine a more perfect drummer for him. He has a light-touch jazz style that means he can be superbly busy and mesmeric while never taking over the song. This busy, hyperactive style goes well with Hendrix’s brilliantly filthy and virtuosic guitar work. Hey Joe’s solo sections are a perfect example of this.

The Wind Cries Mary is an example of Hendrix’s often under-appreciated lyrical skills. With a Dylan-esque talent for imagery he builds a variety of scenes which conclude with the wind uttering ‘Mary’ in one way or another, culminating in this fabulous last verse:

Will the wind ever remember
The names it has blown in the past?
And with its crutch, its old age, and its wisdom
It whispers no, this will be the last
And the wind cries Mary

The album’s 60 minute running length is chock-full of great psychedelic rock and blues songs and features classics such as the Hendrix guitar showpiece (well you could say that about all of them to be fair) Foxey Lady, the blisteringly pacey and irresistible Fire, and of course the rolling, fabulous Mitch Mitchell showcase Manic Depression.

The only negative thing to say about Are You Experienced? Is that it feels a little more like a greatest hits collection than an album. The production quality is not completely consistent (see the great I Don’t Live Today, which sounds rather thin), and it just doesn’t feel as cohesive as what was to come. I’m being nit-picky there though, as this is honestly one of the best rock albums you’re going to hear, and the fact it’s a debut is honestly rather mind-blowing.

Song Picks: Purple Haze, Hey Joe, I Don’t Live Today, The Wind Cries Mary, Manic Depression

9/10

SgtPeppers — 4. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

The Beatles

The Beatles’ eighth album was their first following their retirement from live performance in August 1966. It’s a concept album performed by the fictionalised Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, an idea born in Paul McCartney’s brain on a flight where he thought of creating a song including an Edwardian military band. Again, like Revolver, it incorporates a whole variety of musical influences such as Indian, psychedelic and circus music. To me, it perfects what Revolver began.

The album starts with the delightful title track as over the hum of a crowd talking the band announces it’s arrival, ‘It was 20 years ago today, that Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play…’, the crowd cheers and we’re off. It’s a fun song full of positivity, joy and fun, and it perfectly sets the mood that you’re listening to a fictional band’s performance. Although the crowd noise never re-appears (until the penultimate goodbye track from the band), you’ve still been transported into that environment, and it’s partly that context that makes the album so wonderful to me.

The album is a radiant beacon of joy. It’s whimsical, full of catchy, almost nursery-rhyme like melodies, and yet it never gets annoying. Quite the feat.

With A Little Help From My Friends sounds like a kids song (save for the ‘I get high with a little help from my friends’ line) and perfectly encapsulates the childish fun that a lot of this album has. Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds was inspired by a picture drawn by Lennon’s son, who came home from nursery one day with a picture of his friend Lucy in the sky, and it was titled as the track is. The song is generally believed to be about LSD, with the title alluding to that (Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds) however Lennon has strongly denied this (you can watch him denying it here). I believe more in the line that it’s a reflection of his love of ‘Alice In Wonderland’ as a lot of the imagery in the song’s brilliantly vivid lyrics reminds me of Lewis Carroll’s style. The iconic opening verse is a great example:

Picture yourself in a boat on a river
With tangerine trees and marmalade skies
Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly
A girl with kaleidoscope eyes

Anyway, whatever the song is about. It’s a merry, catchy, jovial song which shows a band unafraid to create something which could be considered quite childish, and to me, it’s that childish sense of fun that makes this album so special. The fact that this song was inspired by a child’s picture, just makes that idea even more great.

It feels kind of foolish to talk about all the songs on this album, similar to The Beach Boy’s Pet Sounds from 1966, this album feels like a whole, and talking about individual songs doesn’t do the album much justice. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is vivid, colourful journey into the mind of some of the best pop songwriters we’ve ever had. Even When I’m Sixty Four, which I find too simplistic out of context and don’t usually enjoy, shines in the context of this album. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is an unbridled joy, and has a special place in my heart. I’m going to stop my review there before I use the word ‘joy’ even more times than I already have.

Song Picks: Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, With A Little Help From My Friends, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Getting Better, Within You Without You

9/10

Whereas Are You Experienced? sounded like the greatest of greatest hits collections, Axis: Bold as Love sounds like an album. The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s second album was released just 7 months after their first, and sees them venturing deeper into psychedelia.

Before we start talking about the album, let’s talk about that controversial cover, which none of the band had anything to do with and Hendrix particularly disliked. He didn’t see the relevance of the band being depicted as various forms of Vishnu, and felt it would have made more sense if the cover was influenced by his Native American background. The cover was banned in Malaysia because of how it appropriates the Hindu god.

At 38 minutes, this album is significantly shorter than the band’s debut, and it feels like a tighter, more cohesive ‘experience’ because of it. Hendrix is clearly pushing what he does in the studio here with the opener being more of a skit than a song as Mitch Mitchell interviews him about space with both their voices warped before the guitar travels around the stereo field, creating the image of falling into a psychedelic black hole. It’s weird, but it really puts you into the mood for what’s to come.

The album also features Hendrix performing some softer material, Up From The Skies has wonderful gentle bounce to it, Hendrix’s voice sounding particularly warm and comforting as he sings about an alien visiting earth and being less than impressed with what’s going on. Again, the use of the stereo image to swing Hendrix’s guitar around makes the whole thing an otherworldly experience. Castles Made of Sand is honey in song form. It’s sweet, gentle and smooth as all hell, using the change of the seasons as a metaphor for the changes in Hendrix’s own life. Perhaps most famous of the soft songs though is the gorgeous Little Wing, which ends in a magnificent, stratospheric and yet chilled solo.

Besides these breaks in the schedule though we’ve got the band at their absolute rocking best. Spanish Castle Magic sounds huge and features a riff that could obliterate whole planets. As Hendrix’s starry solo bounces around half-way through the track you feel as though you’ve been shot into space out of a cannon. Guitars may sound thicker nowadays, and drums more slick and punchy, but there’s still not many songs out there that can compete with the sheer ferocity of this track. Neil Redding’s ability to carry a track on his own is really emphasised on the poppy Wait Until Tomorrow where he provides a lot of the thrust of the song. A track that also features some great phasing work on the drums, making Mitchell’s drumming sound positively cosmic. Speaking of cosmic, let’s talk about the end of the closing title track. Mitchell’s short and otherworldly drum solo marks the start of a Hendrix guitar solo that, when combined with the seriously psychedelic sounding drums, is like some ginormous god picking you up and spinning you through the whole universe. It really is that good.

The whole band is on top form on Axis: Bold As Love, and though they were already stupendously good at creating tracks that were infectious, heavy and transformative, this is where they really nailed what it means to make an ‘album’. I’m rather excited about 1968’s Electric Ladyland, the band’s final album.

Song Picks: Spanish Castle Magic, Little Wing, Axis: Bold as Love, Castles Made of Sand

9.5/10

songsofchohen — 2. Songs Of Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen

Excellent, Leonard has finally joined the party! Although, this is not an album you’d want to put on at a party unless you want everyone to leave feeling all melancholy and reflective, having spent the ‘party’ staring at the ground contemplating the pointlessness of their existence . Songs of Leonard Cohen is the wonderfully originally named debut album (yep I know, another one) from the Canadian poet.

It’s very much an acoustic guitar led album, but features lots of subtle touches that gently add to the album’s dark atmosphere (see Master Song & Winter Lady), including Nancy Priddy’s gorgeous backing vocals.. What really makes the album though, is the combination of Cohen’s gentle nylon-string guitar fingerpicking, his almost spoken word singing style, and most importantly of all, his poetic lyrics.

In a way, the guitar playing and ‘singing’ is quite bland, but in this context, where the words are so majestic, that’s exactly what you need, nothing should distract you from them. The album opens with the famous Suzanne (first published as a poem in 1966) which features a heavenly chorus ending in the so-good-I’ve-run-out-of-superlatives line ‘For you've touched her perfect body with your mind’. The final verse is a great example of how stupidly brilliant our man Leonard is with words:

And Jesus was a sailor
When he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching
From his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain
Only drowning men could see him
He said "All men will be sailors then
Until the sea shall free them"
But he himself was broken
Long before the sky would open
Forsaken, almost human
He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone

Excuse me while I just go and rip up everything I’ve ever written. The album continues much in this vain and I could plonk pretty much any of the album’s multitude of other verses here and marvel at their glory.

By the time So Long Marianne, one of the greatest songs ever written, comes round, what is a surprisingly full band sound complete with drums doesn’t sound too out of place. After all, though the album is quite sparse in many ways, when you really listen in there’s actually rather a lot going. The drums I’ve mentioned are overly busy, but not quite enough to distract from a song that is as touching, poetic, enveloping and sadly catchy as So Long Marianne, one of the multitude of timeless songs that 1967 has brought us.

The Songs of Leonard Cohen is like a book of poetry in musical form. Perfectly performed and produced, it’s the fleeting meeting of two art forms, creating a melancholy classic that sounds so unique I don’t think you ever forget your first listen of it. I, for one, can remember exactly where I was when I first entered its mystical world.

Song Picks: Suzanne, So Long Marianne, Master Song, Winter Lady

10/10

Velvet&Nico — 1. The Velvet Underground & Nico

The Velvet Underground

It’s unthinkable now that an album as iconic as The Velvet Underground & Nico wasn’t an immediate success, but it wasn’t. The album was initially a sales failure (entering the album charts at number 199), many record stores refused to stock it, radios didn’t play it, and critics largely ignored it. This is largely attributed to the controversial topics the album contains such as drug abuse and prostitution. However, I think a big part of it was just that it was so far ahead of it’s time that people couldn’t handle it. Nowadays, the album enjoys a well-earned status as one of the best albums of all time. In fact, the rateyoumusic.com community rates it not only as the best album of 1967, but the sixth best album of all time, higher than any album we’ve had so far on this challenge.

The album has been so influential on subsequent music that Brian Eno famously said that although it only sold 30,000 copies initially, ‘everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band’. The album’s recording was funded by Andy Warhol, who managed the band and also created that iconic album cover, perhaps the most famous album cover of all time. Although Warhol is listed as the producer too, he didn’t really have much influence over the sound, but Lou Reed states the fact that he just let them do exactly what they wanted is the main reason for the album that resulted, and in that way you could say he’s had a pretty big influence on it.

Part of the genius of the album is just how varied it is and yet how unified it sounds. The opener Sunday Morning is a beautifully blissful track that embodies the feeling of a sunny Sunday morning. The xylophone gently skips along as Lou Reed’s vocal seems to glide over you like a cloud, but a big fluffy white cloud as opposed to a sinister dark one. It’s a beautiful song. Compare this with the raucous closing track European Son and you’d never know they came from the same album. The band marches on into an aural oblivion of shrieks and fuzz and clatter and noise and out of tune guitars, a complete and utter chaotic assault on the ears. But the journey to that ending, and the musically suicidal ending, makes complete sense somehow.

As the band progresses from the marching, relentlessly cool I’m Waiting For The Man, to the melodic (and Nico’s first vocal performance) Femme Fatale, to the challenging and yet surprisingly catchy S&M inspired song Venus In Furs you get the feeling that every song on this album is going to be unlike anything else, a small fragment of brilliance. And it turns out that feeling is right. Run, Run, Run rushes along brilliantly, telling its stories of drug-hunting and abuse with a noisy spring in it’s step. The brash guitar ‘solo’ as sign of the chaos to come. All Tomorrow’s Parties sounds like a warped folk song, Nico’s vocal adding a great surrealness to the so-free-it’s-close-to-falling-apart instrumentation. Heroin though, is the most Velvet Underground song here, a song that tells of the use of the titular drug, alternating between a gentle guitar part and a rapid thrashing of chords, as the Reed’s vocals and thoughts barely keep up. All the while there’s a drone that gradually turns into a messy, scrambled squeak as the song enters it’s chaotic finale. It’s the free-est thing I’ve heard since Free Jazz way back in 1960, an uninhibited mess of noise and ideas that turns into something brilliant and incomparable. Then we’re back into a more accessible sound with There She Goes Again, a delightfully catchy number complete with backing vocals and ooooo’s. Nico returns for her final vocal appearance in a song where her German accent (that adds so much to her vocals) is particularly prominent, I’ll Be Your Mirror. The penultimate track The Black Angel’s Death Song is a perfect primer for the aforementioned noisy closing track European Son. There’s just enough to latch on in Reed’s vocal to keep you sane, even if a violin screeches along in an out of tune manner throughout the song. By the time European Son has come and gone, you’re left wondering who has just walked off with your mind, but you also feel strangely free.

The Velvet Underground & Nico is an experience like no other to listen to, it’s both challenging and endlessly rewarding. There’s a perfect mix of accessible stuff, and stuff that is just completely mind-bending. It’s both a mess and a masterpiece.

Song Picks: Sunday Morning; Heroin, Run Run Run, There She Goes Again

10/10