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1974 Shortlist

David Bowie - Diamond Dogs: Another year, another Bowie record. This one, his last glam-rock album, was basically his version of 1984. Well, kind of - the Orwell estate refused to give him permission, so he put a bunch of the songs that he’d planned on using on Diamond Dogs and made it a concept album about a vaguely dystopian society. It would be wrong to dismiss this as a copy of Ziggy Stardust or Aladdin Sane, though. He deepens his voice from the Ziggy Stardust days, and even though guitar god Mick Ronson had recently departed the band, Bowie himself plays some of the best riffs in his career (“Diamond Dogs” and “Rebel Rebel” especially”). The “Sweet Thing / Candidate / Sweet Thing” set of songs is very good also, as is side two, especially “We are the Dead” through “Big Brother”.

Brian Eno - Here Come the Warm Jets: On his first solo album (not counting No Pussyfooting), Brian Eno didn’t make a giant step towards the difficult. It’s kind of avant-garde, sure, but Here Come the Warm Jets is an accessible album. It’s also got a bunch of great songs, like “Needles in the Camel’s Eye”, which rocks as hard as anything without sacrificing pop hooks; the chaotic, unhinged “Driving Me Backwards”, which includes some nice guitar from Robert Fripp; “Dead Finks Don’t Talk”; the twinkling, background-vocal filled “Some of Them Are Old”, which is one of Eno’s best early electronic songs; and the great instrumental (kind of) title track - I mean, the drums in that song? Incredible.

Brian Eno - Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy): Following Here Come the Warm Jets, this is another collection of catchy, off-kilter pop rock. It’s a very wordy album - Eno’s rapid-fire vocal attack jumps out at you, which works to great effect on “Third Uncle”, with edgy guitars and clattering drums as Eno speaks the verses. The best track is probably the first one, “Burning Airlines Give You So Much More”, which is melodic, catchy, and interesting, but other highlights include “The True Wheel”, with its cryptic (absurd?) lyrics and great Phil Manzanera guitar part; “Back in Judy’s Jungle”, which features a great electronic break; bouncy, jangly “China My China”; and the closing title track, which builds slowly and is a quieter, more peaceful song. Overall, it’s a more low-key affair than its predecessor, but it doesn’t lose any edge - it’s probably my favorite Eno album.

Sparks - Kimono My House: Sparks later became pretty well-known for their Morodor-produced disco stuff, but their 1974 album Kimono My House is a massive triumph. Starting with two big hits, “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us” and “Amateur Hour”, the Mael brothers energetically go through a bunch of ridiculously catchy glam-pop songs. The album proceeds at breakneck speed, led by a frenzied mix of keyboard, guitar, and Russell Mael’s high-pitched vocals. It’s sort of a love-it-or-hate-it album, mainly because of the singing, but it’s hard to deny the pop smarts that Ron Mael shows as songwriter - even outside of the first two songs, there’s the string-drenched “Thank God It’s Not Christmas”; “Here in Heaven”, on which Russell pushes his voice even higher; and “Talent is an Asset”, which has some very witty lyrics - a strength of the whole album (see “Amateur Hour”).

Sparks - Propaganda: I like them, okay? This album would be worth it just for “Reinforcements”, one of my favorite songs, with its driving drumbeat and catchy tune. But it has lots of other good songs too, even if it’s not quite as strong as its predecessor. “Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth” is a great midtempo song with a cool bridge, and “Something for the Girl With Everything” is another excellent song in the vein of “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us”. “Bon Voayge” is also really good.

Genesis - The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway: The last Peter Gabriel Genesis album is arguably the best one. It’s a double album - the first disc is mostly straightforward rock songs, while the second is mostly harsher, more instrumental material, like “The Waiting Room”, “The Supernatural Anaesthetist”, and the wonderfully-named “Silent Sorrow in Empty Boats”. Of course, there are some great proggy jams on the first disc too - “In the Cage” comes to mind. “The Carpet Crawlers” is another standout, a quieter song that shows how varied the music the members of Genesis were capable of making was. Like many concept albums, the concept doesn’t really make sense, but the music’s still excellent.

Big Star - Radio City: Listening to their first album, #1 Record, it’s amazing to think that at the time, it didn’t sell well at all - it’s super-catchy, harmonic power pop that seems almost too radio-friendly. There’s less such wondering this time. Chris Bell, the one who wanted them to sound like the Beatles and the Kinks, was gone, making Big Star basically the Alex Chilton show. And they weren’t worse off for it, though the resulting album, Radio City, was definitely different. But it’s another album of great, twangy power pop. They’re at their best when they combine the rougher elements of this album with the Bell stuff of the last one, as on “September Gurls” (one of the greatest songs ever written, in my humble opinion) and “You Get What You Deserve”, but there are other great songs, like five-plus minute opener “O My Soul” and rocker “Back of a Car”.

#david bowie #brian eno #sparks #genesis #big star

1973 Roundup

There were three great albums released this year, and two were by Bruce Springsteen. Since Quadrophenia was better than either of them, I had to pick one, and I picked the more consistent one (because I’m not comfortable calling the album with “The Angel” essential, even if it also has “Lost in the Flood”).

‘74 starts tomorrow - it should be a good one. Though I maintain that the real fun starts in ‘77. Just be prepared for a couple relatively bad years in ‘75 and ‘76.

I feel like I should say something more in these ones considering they have basically no content, so I'm just going to use this every four days to talk about what music I've been listening to lately and stuff. Recently, I've been getting into post-rock - Mogwai, GY!BE, etc. - but I don't know tons of it, so if you are reading this and have recommendations, that would be cool. I find it's very good music for studying/doing homework.

The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle

This is the first appearance on the list of Bruce Springsteen, one of my favorite musical artists of all time. And while this isn’t his best or most famous album, it paints a great portrait of the scene he was coming from and is an authentic image of his roots. It’s one of his greatest albums.

The album starts with the dance-y, sax-and-keyboard-driven “The E Street Shuffle”. Then there’s “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)”, one of Springsteen’s first great love songs. Essentially his attempt at a Van Morrison song, it’s a quieter song, but one with a powerfully soaring chorus and great imagery of his home on the Jersey Shore. The seven-minute epic “Kitty’s Back” is a really good, more rocking song, a jazzier one with incredible lyrics. It's an absolutely great song, emotional and a great sketch of one of Springsteen's many characters - speaking of which, Bruce Springsteen may be the only person who can name his characters and not make it seem totally awkward. He pulls off these kinds of characters so well, because he just seems completely authentic the whole time.

Although the four tracks on the first side are very good, they're a warm-up compared to the three on the second side. For starters, "Incident on 57th Street" is one of my favorite Springsteen songs - another seven-minute-plus song, which builds so naturally you don't even realize it has been until it gets quieter all of a sudden. I hate to say it about another song, but it's another one with incredible lyrics - just the first two lines, "Spanish Johnny drove in from the underworld last night/With bruised arms and broken rhythm in a beat-up old Buick but dressed just like dynamite", are awesome. Combined with a great chorus and some really good bass and organ playing, this is one of the best songs in the Springsteen catalogue.

"Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)" is the album's monolith. It's a huge song, one of the songs that shows how great it is/was that Springsteen had and has such a big band. Probably the most well-known early Springsteen track, it drives along on Clarence Clemons's saxophone, as Springsteen is by turns soft and ferocious in his vocals, and the music ebbs and flows to reflect this. It's one of the greatest rock songs ever written. The album closes with "New York City Serenade", another pretty good song, the longest one on the album - it can only be seen as not that good coming after "Incident on 57th Street" and "Rosalita".

The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle is a stunningly good album, especially for something recorded in such a short time after the last one, a great album in its own right. It might not be the best Springsteen entry point, but I'd still highly recommend listening to it.

#Bruce Springsteen #the wild the innocent & the e street shuffle

Quadrophenia

The Who began their career with energetic, aggressive mod-rock. Quadrophenia, eight years after their first album, saw them revisiting this key stage in their career, and not in an entirely positive way. It’s a story of a mod, Jimmy, who feels betrayed by bands like the Who (we even hear a snippet of their early classic “The Kids are Alright”), and by the leaders of the subculture who stifle his individuality. The concept also has to do with him having four personalities, but really this isn’t executed all that convincingly. However, this doesn’t detract from the great quality of the music.

This is an album that can be seen as kind of a back-to-basics rock album after the excesses (great excesses, but excesses nonetheless) of Tommy and Who’s Next. There are some great synthesizer moments, but they don’t dominate the album, or any song, as much as they do on “Who’s Next”. Opening track (kind of - not counting “I Am the Sea”) “The Real Me” is driven by the crunch of Townshend’s power chords and Entwistle’s virtuosic bass playing. “Quadrophenia” is the album’s overture - powerful, dynamic, and led by Townshend’s guitar and Moon’s crashing cymbals, it’s one of the best instrumentals in rock history (up there with “Green Onions”, “Frankenstein”, “Oscillate Wildly” [I went there], and “Beck’s Bolero”).

If there’s one problem with the album, it’s that Pete Townshend, who is, as we all know, an egotistical jerk, sings too much. He’s tuneful enough, but given that the band has possibly the greatest rock vocalist ever in it, the only argument for him to sing is that his voice is capable of being intensely annoying in a pitiful, whiny way that Daltrey’s isn’t - sometimes I guess this is useful for the character. (Speaking of which, having been to a show on the “Who” reunion tour where they did this album, Townshend sings even more and more unnecessarily live than he does in the studio.)

And Townshend’s singing isn’t all bad - the last part of “Cut My Hair” is fine, and his verse on “The Punk and the Godfather” is one of the main reasons the song, possibly my favorite cut from the album, is as great and as powerful a confrontation of the band’s former image as it is. “I’m One” is another really good, tender song, kind of cousin to “Cut My Hair”, with Townshend’s vocal - it’s the only song on the album that only he sings on - being totally fine (I don’t know about being better than Daltrey would have been, but still).

“The Dirty Jobs” and “Helpless Dancer” start to point the album in a direction where it’s less about frustration with his friends and with the mod subculture (as on “Cut My Hair” and “I’m One”) and more about frustration with the government and with society as a whole. “Is it in My Head” turns the album back in a quieter direction, although parts of it are loud, and “I’ve Had Enough” closes out the disc (it’s a double album both on CD and on vinyl) on a foreboding note. Our friend Jimmy has, as the title says, had enough. He lets all his pent-up anger out, and the other mods are sick of him too. He’s never really fit in (we see this early on in “I’m One”, in which he asks another person where he got his clothes, something that Was Not What Was Done), and now he goes off to Brighton after taking a bunch of drugs (“5.15”, one of the album’s best straightforward rockers), hoping to escape from his messy life and maybe gain some inner peace.

The second disc, starting with “5.15”, is darker-sounding than the first. Not that the first one was ever really “light”, but at least it always felt like there was some hope for our hero, a light at the end of the tunnel. On the second, Jimmy goes to Brighton, and after collapsing on the beach in one of the album’s best songs, the proggy mini-epic “Sea and Sand”, and singing a song about how he wants to drown (“Drowned”), meets his former mod “Ace Face”, a leader, and is betrayed and disillusioned, because this person who he’d basically worshipped is a lowly bell boy (name of song!), working for the man (man). He’s angry and he’s been let down by everything - his family, love, his friends, music - and he doesn’t see why life is worth living anymore. So he steals a boat and goes to a rock in the middle of the sea.

And this, combined with some weird pretentious spiritual stuff, is what gets us to the album’s breathtaking, incredible climax, “Love Reign O’er Me”. More than anything, it’s a showcase for Daltrey’s amazing voice and singing chops, but there are also some great string synthesizer bits and great drumming from Moon, as on the whole album. This was an album that showcased each member of the Who at the height of their powers. It might be the greatest classic rock album of all time.

#The Who #Quadrophenia

1973 Shortlist

The Who - Quadrophenia: I said in my entry for Who’s Next that this is the best Who album, and I stand by that. Not that it reflects badly on almost any album to be not quite as good as this one. The Who’s second successful rock opera, this one is both more conceptually sophisticated (there’s a kid with four personalities and they all represent a different member of the band, all of whom have their own themes to reflect this) and more consistent than Tommy. And unlike on Tommy, where the struggle was making songs that stood alone and made sense out of context, along with songs that weren’t just exposition, on Quadrophenia, the album is cohesive as a whole (like Tommy) and the songs are self-contained (like Who’s Next). And they’re great songs.

Bruce Springsteen - Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ: On Springsteen’s first album, yes, his stuff was a little derivative of Bob Dylan, but he put his own spin on things to make a great debut (fitting for one of the greatest musical artists of all time). Despite two pretty bad songs (“The Angel” and “Mary Queen of Arkansas”, the former of which is absolutely terrible), the other seven more than make up for it - most artists don’t have greatest hits albums this good. And “Growin’ Up”, “Lost in the Flood”, “For You” and “Spirit in the Night” are four of the best songs of Springsteen’s career.

David Bowie - Aladdin Sane: The follow-up to Ziggy Stardust is less conceptual and at times more hard-rocking - when it is, as on “The Jean Genie” and “Watch that Man”, it reaches the same heights as its predecessor. But it also goes in more Hunky Dory directions, with piano-driven songs like “Time”. Also of note are the loud cover of “Let’s Spend the Night Together” and, of course, the best song on the album, the rhythmic “Panic in Detroit”, one of Bowie’s best ever.

Genesis - Selling England by the Pound: This could’ve been Genesis’s peak. Instead, that was the next year’s The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, but Selling England by the Pound was their Ziggy Stardust in that they drew from both the hard rock of Foxtrot and the quirky English-ness of Nursery Cryme. And it’s got some really good songs, most notably “Dancing with the Moonlight Night”, which builds wonderfully, the great “Firth of Fifth”, and the epic “Battle of Epping Forest”. There’s also Phil Collins’s portentous lead vocal turn on “More Fool Me”.

New York Dolls - New York Dolls: This might be the first punk rock album - well, maybe that’s The Stooges or Here are the Sonics, but still, listening to bands like Television and the Ramones, there’s no bigger influence than the New York Dolls. And the music is kind of irresistible - David Johansen screaming over Johnny Thunders’s Stones-y guitars makes for some great songs, like “Personality Crisis”. The album is noisy, raucous, and kind of sloppy-sounding, but it’s a totally unique, massively influential album. Not that the music by itself is bad or anything.

Bruce Springsteen - The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle: On Springsteen’s second album, he went in a more loose, kind of Van Morrison direction. Of the seven songs, four are over seven minutes long. And it’s those songs that make this easily one of his best albums. The folkier “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” and the louder “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)” are probably the best-known songs from this album, and it’s epics like the latter song and “Incident on 57th Street” that are the standouts from the album. The album fits well together, and it’s shocking how professional and how awesome the Boss sounded on just his sophomore effort, especially considering it came out only eight months after the first one.

I’ve never really been one for Pink Floyd (although I do like Piper at the Gates of Dawn), so if you’re looking for The Dark Side of the Moon, it isn’t on here.

#the who #bruce springsteen #david bowie #genesis #new york dolls

This is what I'm listening to.

#the waterboys

1972 Roundup

Two great prog albums missed out here, but the two I picked are really just such incredible albums that I think it would’ve been hard to do anything else. Also, ten years in! Woot!

#1972

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from mars

Are you getting sick of my Bowie worship by now? I hope not, because we’ve still got Aladdin Sane, Diamond Dogs, Station to Station, the Berlin trilogy, and Scary Monsters left. Not that I’m making any promises with regards to those winning (I mean, probably no more than two of them will), but Bowie was consistently a shockingly good artist throughout the ‘70s. In a catalogue as huge, diverse, and excellent as his, it’s easy to overlook some great things. But it’s not easy to overlook Ziggy Stardust. In Ziggy, we have Bowie’s most famous and greatest character, an alien glam rock superstar messiah (or a glam rock superstar who’s the alien messiah’s disciple/messenger on Earth?), and as totally stupid as this sounds, he completely pulls it off through a combination of compelling personality and compelling music.

Musically, the album is the definitive Bowie album (though not necessarily my favorite), because of how effective a synthesis it is of the things that made “Space Oddity”, The Man Who Sold the World, and Hunky Dory so great. Songs like “Five Years” and “Starman” sound like they’d belong on the latter album, whereas “Soul Love” and “Moonage Daydream” wouldn’t be out of place on the former one. But the key difference is that the material that sounds more like Hunky Dory has some of the edge of The Man Who Sold the World, and the material that sounds more like The Man Who Sold the World has some of the flamboyant pop flair of Hunky Dory.

Oh, and maybe this should go without saying, but the songs are some of the best of Bowie’s career. “It Ain’t Easy”, the only song that isn’t Bowie’s, is bluesy and, though it seems like an easily forgettable song, is actually really good. “Lady Stardust” is a very good piano rock song about Marc Bolan. The anthemic “Ziggy Stardust” has one of the best and most distinctive riffs in a Bowie song. In the stomping, primal rhythm and riff of “Hang on to Yourself”, you can hear the roots of great punk songs like “God Save the Queen” and “New Rose”. “Suffragette City” is one of my favorite songs of Bowie’s, with call-and-response vocals and a driving guitar part. “Rock and Roll Suicide” and “Five Years” bookend the album, both starting out soft and building into epic bombast.

This is an undeniably great set of songs, an album that would define Bowie’s career forever. They’re great showcases for songwriting talent and for Mick Ronson’s great guitar playing. Definitely an essential album.

#david bowie #ziggy stardust #the rise and fall of ziggy stardust and the spiders from mars

#1 Record

I had a bit of an argument with my dad the other day about who the “American Beatles” are. He said Cheap Trick, while I, of course, said Big Star (I actually briefly changed my answer to Michael Penn, but then switched back). Cheap Trick are nice, but their sound is basically Big Star at their most raucous, plus twenty pounds of muscle. Anyway, Big Star have some similarities to the Beatles - they had two great songwriters and singers who had very different styles, and their music was definitely influenced by the Beatles - but that isn’t to say they’re derivative or unoriginal at all. Rather, their music is a synthesis of the best parts of British Invasion pop/rock - it’s a bright, sunny, great album.

#1 Record is admittedly kind of front-loaded - but it’d be hard to find a better set of four opening songs on any album. Oddly enough, of the first four, the two songs sung by Alex Chilton, who preferred rougher-sounding stuff, are quietly powerful affairs - “The Ballad of El Goodo” and “Thirteen” - whereas Chris Bell’s two lead vocal turns are “Feel” and “In the Street”, both some of the more raw-sounding material on the album, though both with the pretty harmonies that Bell pushed so strongly for in the recording process.

The great thing about this album is how versatile it is - swaggering anthems like “In the Street” and “Don’t Lie to Me” mix with tender, emotional songs like “Thirteen” and “Watch the Sunrise”. “When My Baby’s Beside Me” is sunny and propulsive, with some handclaps, that hallmark of sunny, propulsive power pop, in the chorus. Both singers are capable of loud (Chilton on “When My Baby’s Beside Me”, Bell on “Feel”, for example) and soft (Chilton on “Give Me Another Chance”, Bell on “Try Again”). But this amount of variation doesn’t feel (heh) unnatural at all.

This album is not massively innovative. It uses guitar, bass, drums, and vocals, with a little piano in places, in ways that they’d been used before a thousand times. It’s indebted hugely to the Kinks and the Byrds. It’s not a challenging listen. But there’s no arguing that it’s anything but a masterpiece of pop songwriting, and even though Chilton would go in other great creative directions after he left the band, Bell’s vocals, guitar, and the polish he added to the album make this, to me, his album more than anyone else’s, and we should all be thankful for that.

#big star #1 record

hello there c: what's up?

Good question! Right now, what is up is that Frank Turner is awesome.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFLVlvj9osk

(Answering with anything actually about myself is overrated.)

carryonstarkid

Reblog if you are a man who is offended by the lyrics in Blurred Lines

I will be writing a sociological research paper about the effects of the lyrics in Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines.

Please reblog this if you are a male who finds the lyrics of this song offensive or upsetting.

The equal post for women can be found here and for nonbinary/genderqueer here.

thefactcheckingcuz-blog

Yup.

1972 Shortlist

Lou Reed - Transformer: A year after Bowie tried to be Reed on one song, Reed spent an entire album trying to be Bowie, capitalizing on the glam rock craze of the time (including Ziggy Stardust - see below). But it would be wrong to dismiss this album as derivative - Reed puts his own spin on the T-Rex and Bowie-tinged material, and can do soft stuff far better than Marc Bolan or Ian Hunter. The album is excellent, featuring songs like the loud, powerful “Vicious”, the melodic “Satellite of Love”, and, of course, the hit, “Walk on the Wild Side”.

Big Star - #1 Record: Beatlesesque vocal harmonies, Byrds-y guitars, and a punch like the first couple Who albums make this one of the best albums of the ‘70s. Alex Chilton and Chris Bell share lead vocals, and both are more than capable singers - it’s a mistake to think of Big Star as Chilton’s band, because this album is about vocal harmonies and its polished pop sound, which were things that only Bell, not Chilton, seemed to really care about. Chilton would have his moment on Radio City and then on Third, but it’s best to just sit back and enjoy #1 Record, Big Star’s most accessible offering.

Jethro Tull - Thick as a Brick: Following the excellent Aqualung, Ian Anderson came up with another great album, again fusing hard rock with British folk to make his own blend of prog. Thick as a Brick, which is one extremely complex 45-minute song, is actually a parody of progressive rock bombast as exemplified by Yes and ELP, but it’s not as if Anderson and the band just kind of tossed it off - it’s fully-realized and the music stands on its own. Defenders of the album don’t need to hide behind it being basically an elaborate joke.

Genesis - Foxtrot: Another prog-rock album, Foxtrot is very different from something like Thick as a Brick - it owes almost nothing to blues and folk as Tull does. From the opening “Watcher of the Skies”, Genesis made it clear that this was their best album yet: the first thing you hear is Tony Banks’s symphonic mellotron, then Phil Collins’s rhythmic attack, and finally Peter Gabriel’s ferocious vocal. Other highlights include the political (kind of) sci-fi of “Get ‘Em Out by Friday” (Gabriel does what amounts to a rock opera, or maybe a rock puppet show, voicing a number of different characters) and 22-minute epic “Supper’s Ready”.

David Bowie - The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars: Ziggy Stardust has more in common with The Man who Sold the World than it does with Hunky Dory, because it’s generally a louder, harder rock album, but it owes something to both - the theatricality of the album is more evident on Hunky Dory, and a song like “Five Years”, building from piano to a huge string and brass arrangement, is more reminiscent of that album as well. But songs like “Suffragette City” and “Moonage Daydream” see Bowie going back to hard rock with a little more of a pop sensibility. Ziggy Stardust was the culmination of Bowie’s career up to that point. As you’d imagine based on my description (and also because, come on, there are at least four songs on the album that everyone knows), it’s incredibly good.

Nick Drake - Pink Moon: For someone who likes baroque pop as much as I do, it’s a little weird that this is my favorite Nick Drake album. Totally unaccompanied except for a little piano on the title track, it’s Drake’s most sincere, emotional work, tender and melancholy. His voice is breathy but compelling - Stuart Murdoch, an obvious imitator, wishes he could write songs this good or sing this well - and he’s a really good guitar player (see “Parasite”). It’s a short album, under half an hour, of stark, seriously affecting music, and one of the best folk albums ever.

#lou reed #big star #jethro tull #david bowie #genesis #nick drake

1971 Roundup

This was the first year that I came in having basically no idea which I’d pick - this became a much more common occurrence later on. It was a really great year, probably the best so far, and that means that there are a few albums that are incredibly good that I didn’t pick. I decided, after seeing how great general quality was, to pick one louder album and one softer one. The choices for the louder albums were Who’s Next, Aqualung, and Electric Warrior. Much as I like Electric Warrior, it isn’t as amazing as the other two are. Between the two remaining, I had to pick Who’s Next because it’s more consistent, and there are a number of songs on it that stand up to “Locomotive Breath” and “Aqualung”, whereas those are the only two that are close to as good as “Baba O’Riley”, “Won’t Get Fooled Again”, “Getting in Tune”, and “Behind Blue Eyes”. Aqualung was probably a close third for the year, though.

In the slow albums, Histoire de Melody Nelson didn’t have much of a chance, Muswell Hillbillies isn’t as good as, say, Something Else, and I enjoy Hunky Dory (I briefly considered putting it in the other category, but I felt it would be out of place with loud hard rock) more than Blue. So that’s why I chose what I chose.

#1971

Hunky Dory

Both of Bowie’s turn-of-the-decade albums, The Man Who Sold the World and Hunky Dory, are great, but in completely different ways. The Man Who Sold the World is a hard rock, almost metal album, whereas Hunky Dory is genre-crossing, avant-garde folk-pop-rock and material influenced by music hall and Tin Pan Alley.

The album starts with “Changes”, almost a lounge song, instrumentally driven by strings courtesy of Mick Ronson, Rick Wakeman’s keyboards, and Bowie’s own saxophone playing, with a huge chorus. “Oh! You Pretty Things” opens with simple piano and Bowie’s compelling vocal, before moving into a catchy refrain (with handclaps) about “gotta make way for the homo superior”. “Eight Line Poem” is a quiet piano pop song, featuring soulful vocals.

“Life on Mars” begins by covering the same ground as “Eight Line Poem”, but morphs into one of the biggest, most dramatic songs of Bowie’s career, thanks to a great Ronson string arrangement. It’s hard to find fault with any part of the song. After this, there’s the jaunty, piano-led “Kooks”, which, while not a bad song (in fact it’s catchy and has some nice horn parts), lent its name to the Kooks, who are terrible. “Quicksand” sports an exceptionally good acoustic guitar part from Ronson - he’s not rocking out like on the last album, but it’s hard to deny that he’s an incredibly talented instrumentalist. “Fill Your Heart”, a cover, is the lightest song on the album - if there’s one song on the album that should have been scrapped, it’s this one.

The last four songs of the album are slightly different - instead of dramatic piano pop, they tend more towards dramatic guitar rock. This might not be the most popular opinion, considering “Life on Mars" and “Changes”, but “Andy Warhol” is my favorite song on the album. It’s one of the only songs to not be filled with piano, instead having a relatively simple arrangement dominated by an interesting and driving acoustic guitar riff, another one of the best on the album, along with a very catchy chorus. “Song for Bob Dylan” sounds a lot like Dylan’s late-’60s work, with another catchy chorus and both acoustic and electric guitars. “Queen Bitch”, an awesomely intense, hard-rocking Lou Reed tribute, is another one of my favorites (I’m a rockist, useless a term as that is - so sue me). The album ends with the acoustic “The Bewlay Brothers”, but acoustic doesn’t mean gentle - the song has quiet verses and louder choruses, and Bowie’s sense of drama, combined with his trademark cryptic lyrics, remains.

In short, this album is incredible. Necessary listening if you want to hear Bowie’s transition from his ‘60s output to the iconic Ziggy Stardust.

#david bowie #hunky dory

Who's Next

Pete Townshend is kind of obsessed with the rock opera, and he’s also kind of crazy. So his decision to, after the success of Tommy, try an even more ambitious project called “Lifehouse”, involving audience participation, should have come as no surprise, nor should it have come as a surprise that the project failed miserably. Who’s Next was released out of this failure, basically amounting to an odds and sods collection from the Lifehouse project. But if Townshend thought that because of this, it wouldn’t be a great album, he was sorely mistaken - what he’s failed to realize consistently throughout his career is that it’s the songs, not the concept, that make the albums, and this has led to some astonishingly bad albums. (When’s the last time you wanted to listen to Psychoderelict? Or The Iron Man, which has as its best song something that Townshend didn’t write? Or the mediocre White City, which saw Townshend succumbing to the ‘80s with annoying dance-y arrangements on even the best songs?)

But Who’s Next is a good album that this lack of understanding led to. Even if it might not have satisfied Townshend’s target audience (himself) because of its lack of concept, Who’s Next is a great album because it’s full of great songs.

The first track on Who’s Next, the universally known “Baba O’Riley”, begins with hypnotic synths, introducing the listener right away to the key instrument on the album. Above all else, the album deserves credit for showing people what a Moog synthesizer could do. Of course, synthesizers in rock were not a new thing, but I think Who’s Next was the first popular mainstream album to use it as a lead instrument. That, to me, is what sets this album apart from the rest, and makes it as good as it is.

Anyway, “Baba O’Riley”. Great song. Unapologetically bombastic, the song starts with beeping synths, and adds dramatic piano and then Roger Daltrey’s anthemic vocals. After the first verse, Townshend’s guitar comes in, and make the song one of the biggest-sounding, greatest rock songs ever. “Bargain”, a hard rock song about how great God is (not really lyrics I can get behind, but whatever), also features prominent synthesizers. “Love Ain’t for Keeping” is basically a country-rock song, though a quite good one. The John Entwistle-penned and sung “My Wife” is sort of an absurd song, but it’s catchy and has nice horn parts. The first side closes on a (figurative) note almost as high as the beginning - piano-driven “The Song is Over”, which careens back and forth between Townshend’s downcast verses and Daltrey’s upbeat, positive, even joyous ones.

The second side kicks off with “Getting in Tune”, another quiet-loud song with prominent piano, which showcases some of Daltrey’s best singing and some of Keith Moon’s best drumming. It’s one of my favorite songs on the album. “Going Mobile” is light, entirely sung by Townshend, and not that great a song, though on most other albums it wouldn’t stick out so much. “Behind Blue Eyes” is probably the most affecting Who song - it definitely is on this album. Starting with soft singing over an acoustic guitar, the song turns into a loud, more rocking one.

And then there’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again”, possibly the best classic rock song ever. In another song to prominently feature synthesizers that make little beeping noises, Daltrey spits out verses about the failure of revolution while Townshend hammers at his guitar underneath and Moon plays the hell out of his drums. It’s a long song, but it doesn’t feel like it. Eventually, the guitar and drums fade away and all that’s left is the beeping of the synthesizers. After about 50 seconds of this, Moon plays a fill. There’s a short pause, and he does it again, continuing for five or ten seconds until Daltrey lets out a huge, cathartic scream, and sings, to end the song, “Meet the new boss / Same as the old boss”. And that’s the last we hear on one of my favorite albums ever. Three brilliant instrumentalists, including one great songwriter, and possibly the best rock vocalist of all time, had finally hit gold (to the extent that they hadn’t already on Tommy), making one of the most iconic and best albums of all time.

(All of this said, Quadrophenia’s better. *mic drop*)

#the who #who's next

1971 Shortlist

The Who - Who’s Next: There’s an extent to which I think liking classic rock has become uncool, so much that even artists clearly influenced by it will not say that they are. And mostly, I can agree with this - I fail to see the appeal of, say, Led Zeppelin, and most of the stuff that gets played on classic rock radio is terrible. I even understand disliking the Who because of who they influenced, because it’s true that in large part thanks to them, we have bands that are (to put it gently) utter crap, like Boston, Foreigner, and Journey. But I don’t see how anyone could judge this album on its own merits and dislike it. Besides bookends “Baba O’Riley” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again”, which are great songs, the rocking “Bargain”, the quiet-loud “This Song is Over”, and of course the great ballad “Behind Blue Eyes” make this one of the best albums of all time. (Worth getting the reissued version with bonus tracks if you can, just for “Pure and Easy”.) The Kinks - Muswell Hillbillies: The Kinks took an excursion into country-rock for this one, and it got them one of their best albums (probably their last great one). The album has some of Ray Davies’s best writing, from bouncy opener “20th Century Man”, to the sad “Oklahoma U.S.A.”, driven by piano and harmonica, to final track “Muswell Hillbilly”, on which we hear the ultra-British Ray Davies sing that he’s “a Muswell Hillbilly boy”, but his “heart lies in old West Virginia”. This basically defines the album - Davies is writing songs that have some connection to traditional British music, the kind that his band did so well, but also with a big connection to American roots music. It could be shrugged off as pointless genre experimentation if it weren’t so good. David Bowie - Hunky Dory: One of the albums I picked as essential last year was The Man Who Sold the World (in case you missed it, my review was basically “OH MY GOD GUYS THIS ALBUM IS THE GREATEST!!!11!!1!”). This album is not like that. Well, it is, in the sense that’s it’s a Bowie album, but instead of hard rock, Bowie reverts to the mean of folkier stuff. But there are still great theatrical moments like “Changes” and “Life on Mars?”, as well as outstanding acoustic rock like “Andy Warhol”. Rick Wakeman’s keyboards replace Mick Ronson’s guitar as the dominating instrument, but there are some great guitar moments on the album too, like the opening riff on “Queen Bitch” - do I hear “Let My Love Open the Door” in there? Overall, a great album. Jethro Tull - Aqualung: When talking (or writing or whatever) about Jethro Tull, there’s one thing you have to address first. And so I’d just like to say that, for whatever it’s worth, I think the flute’s awesome. And it really shows great skill on the part of the band that on this, a concept album of ramblings about religion and God, they’re able to do both great riff rock (“Hymn 43”, “Locomotive Breath”) and great quieter, more acoustic songs (“Mother Goose”), sometimes both in the same song (“Aqualung”). And, I’m sorry, but that flute solo on “Locomotive Breath” is basically the greatest thing ever. Joni Mitchell - Blue: And I thought the Cure were a bunch of downers. This album is a folk-pop masterpiece, with a fitting title. Every song deals tenderly with heartbreak, with heartfelt, sincere lyrics over piano and/or acoustic guitar. “All I Want”, the opening track, is one of the best songs on the album - even though it’s much brighter and happier than most of the others, its kind of stream-of-consciousness lyrics betray sadness. “A Case of You”, probably the most well-known song from the album, is another excellent one. Serge Gainsbourg - Histoire de Melody Nelson: Be careful listening to this album - there’s almost enough sleaze in Gainsbourg’s voice for it to exist physically. Funky bass and guitar lines and complex string arrangements play as Gainsbourg speak-sings about the affair he has with the fourteen or fifteen-year-old girl he hits with his car (she dies in a plane crash). This music’s biggest influence is probably soul, but it isn’t at all derivative. The mix of bass, strings, and Gainsbourg’s voice is distinctive and unique. And while the album doesn’t wear its influences on its sleeve, it’s easy to hear what it influenced: Jarvis Cocker, anyone? Also, strangely, there’s a real advantage to listening to this album while not knowing French - you can hear that vocals are an instrument, just like, you know, the instruments. It’s a very impressive album. T-Rex - Electric Warrior: This is the album that invented glam rock. Marc Bolan’s quietly powerful vocals and crunching guitars and pop hooks make it easy to listen. Strings power “Cosmic Dancer”, and hits “Jeepster” and “Get it On” are more rhythmic. Bolan is sex-obsessed, or at least that’s what the lyrics communicate. It brings up what I think is the most interesting thing about the album: you have to wonder how much of it is a facade - is this catchy, sleek, idiot-rock tongue-in-cheek? I think that the real genius of this album is that to some, it is, and to others, it’s exactly what it seems like. And I can’t deny that the songs are catchy and fun to listen to.

#t-rex #serge gainsbourg #david bowie #joni mitchell #jethro tull #the kinks #the who

1970 Roundup

I think honestly the only other album I considered was Moondance. The Man Who Sold the World was an obvious pick. I don’t really care about Let it Be (it’s the second-best album called Let it Be), and I just don’t like Bridge Over Troubled Water as much as the other three. It was a tough pick between Moondance and Stage Fright, but I think I made the right one. Of course, if it’s on the shortlist, I do think it’s at least worth listening to.

#1970

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