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- Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band "Clear Spot" 1972 (USA)
Review soon. |
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- The Monkees "Head" 1968 (USA/UK)
This album was the soundtrack to one of my three favorite psychedelic films of the sixties (the other two are Midnight Cowboy and Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls). The movie Head
starred The Monkees and was released to no acclaim about a year after
their groundbreaking TV show had been cancelled. More review soon. |
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- NoMeansNo "One" 2000 (Canada)
NoMeansNo
was founded by the Wright brothers (Rob on bass and John on drums)
during the late 1970's punk boom, and they became one of the greatest
unsung indie rock bands of the 1980's and 1990's. The group was
originally a guitarless duo, then for most of their career a
heavy power trio (their longest serving guitarist was Tom Holliston
from 1993 onwards). They had tremendous musical chops
and wrote ambling, dramatic, jammy songs framing Rob's everyman
sing-speak storytelling lyrics. The group continued touring
regularly in the 21st century until retiring in 2016. One was their second-to last album and is a hard rock gem that every rock fan should know about. |
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- Dinosaur jr. "Dinosaur" 1985 (USA)
Dinosaur jr. became very easy to pigeonhole by about their third album:
"ear-bleeding country" with a dose of hardcore punk topped off by the
slacker mumblings of J Mascis. They were a successful major label band
during the grunge era of the early 1990's, and were beloved enough that
they were able to reunite and carry on for another 15 years or so (and
counting). The one album of theirs that really does not fit that
formula was the debut album, called Dinosaur
because that was the band's original name (they got sued by a group of
old 60's rockers who were also using that name so added "jr." to the
end.) The first album is much more eclectic, with the folky-country
elements more pronounced and even some 1980's new wave vestiges (I
think they were into The Cure back then!) Also, it was the only album
where bassist Lou Barlow got to sing a
lot, and the only album where J and Lou sometimes sing together. Though
I am a fan of most of their albums as they are, I kind of think I might
be an even bigger fan if their music remained as varied and weird as it
was at the beginning! |
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- Bob Marley & The Wailers "Live!" 1975 (Jamaica)
Uhh,
what day is this? *cough*cough* Oh yeah, our classic album of the week
was a breakthrough album in the spread of reggae music. The Wailers
made their first album around 1965 when they were a ska trio
reminiscent of Motown's The Miracles (with Bob Marley in the Smokey
Robinson role). By the end of the 1960's they had become long-haired
rastas working with the notorious Lee Scratch Perry. The
international major label record deal came in 1972 (now with Bob
Marley's name out in front) and his star continued to rise through the
decade until his untimely death from cancer in the early 1980's. By the
time Live! was released in
1975, Bob was already the author of a global smash #1 hit song: "I Shot
The Sherrif" as recorded by Eric Clapton (which I believe was also the
biggest hit of Clapton's entire career). This album features that one
and other Marley songs that became standards, plus has the extra sheen
of Bob's charismatic delivery live in concert. I wouldn't really say
this record is "better" than a lot of his other albums, but it's a
perfect document of the period when Marley first became a global
superstar. |
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- Jean-Michel Jarre "Oxygene" 1976 (France)
This
album, consisting of a single piece of music covering two sides of
vinyl, was one of the classic albums from the dawn of "techno pop".
Released right in between Kraftwerk's breakout album Autobahn
and Giorgio Moroder's disco-synth smash "I Feel Love" (for Donna Summer),
the reason this 40-minute synthesizer hoedown sold 15 million copies
gloabally is that sections of it include a funky drum machine, thus it
was playable in your more futuristic discos of the late 1970's. But
also it's still very prog rock, comparable to Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells album (1973) and the cool records Vangelis was making during this era. |
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- Daft Punk "Discovery" 2001 (France)
In
retrospect twenty years later, this was probably one of the
most seminal albums of its era. When I hear the contemporary pop music
millenials are in to, I hear echoes of early Daft Punk in a lot of the
arrangement and production tricks (soulful vocoder vocal hooks and
chopped-up beat edits in particular). Yet when I gave this album a spin
recently, it struck me how "analog" it sounds for a futuristic funk
album. A lot of the sounds of this album come from the 70's and 80's;
they do sample old records here, but also created their own new hooks
that sound like they are from the same era. This album established DP
as the top electronic/dance band of their era, and after they
disbanded in 2021 (their final album of new material came out back in
2013) it seems clear they stand alongside Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder
among the giants of European electronic pop. Even cooler still, one of
the reasons this album is so remembered is that it hung around the pop
culture for several years - in 2003, they released a Japanese animated
film Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem
which uses this entire album as its soundtrack and I think is one of
the most successful "albums turned into a movie" ever attempted (and
that hasn't been attempted very often). Here's a few clips (songs) from
the movie version of Discovery: An alien band plays for grooving fans on an alien planet ("One More Time"). But the band is kidnapped by evildoers ("Aerodynamic")! An unlikely hero springs into action ("Digital Love"). The band are brainwashed into thinking they are humans ("Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger") and a bad guy turns them into pop stars on Earth ("Crescendolls"). Later, the hero helps them recover their true identities ("Something About Us"). Just like the music that inspired it, the visuals are a dreamy mix of 70's-80's aesthetics and futuristic themes. |
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- Les Rallizes Denudes "Blind Baby Has Its Mother's Eyes" rec. 1977-86?, rel. unofficially (Japan)
I
don't believe this album has officially been released by any legit
record label yet. For you see, the band that recorded it were
anarcho-communists who did not believe in such bourgeois decadence as
signing record contracts or making records in professional studios. The
band's sole continuous member Takashi Mizutani played underground
rock concerts from the late 1960's all the way into the mid-1990's and
the bulk of their recorded legacy consists of grey-market "bootlegs"
of their live shows. (But nobody's copyright is being violated since
Mizutani never published anything, his art was truly free, man.) If
that's not "underground" enough for you, weirder still this Japanese
band's name is made-up (incorrect) French meant to mean "the naked
suitcases". Their music is incredibly loud and distorted, making them
Japan's original "noise music" band (their original influences back in
the sixties were the two most abrasive groups of that era: The Velvet Underground and Blue Cheer).
Mizutani generally performed the same half dozen songs over and over
again for decades, but every performance was a unique ocean of guitar
with songs usually lasting ten to twenty minutes or more. Blind Baby
is often referred to as an ideal entry point for the curious noob, I
think because the first 19-minute jam sort of has a catchy hook and
groove and is even in stereo
(whether it was recorded in a studio or some sort of dubby remix of a
live performance is unknown). In 2021, friends of Mizutani launched an "offficial" website, two years after the mysterious man passed away. Presumably, some "official" albums may eventually be forthcoming. |
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- Tom Waits "Small Change" 1976 (USA)
This
week's show is a thematic special: the WAITING special. So naturally,
our Classic Album is by Tom . . . WAITS . . . (get it?) But seriously,
I probably should have added this iconoclastic artist to the hall of
fame long ago. I enjoy his "weird surreal spookhouse groove" records of
the 80's and beyond, but still prefer his original "drunken beatnik
jazz singer at the piano" style from the 1970's. Small Change
is widely considered his best album from that period, and was his best
seller of the decade with his first sorta-hit "The Piano Has Been
Drinking (Not Me)". Not that any of his albums have been big sellers,
he's the quintessential artist with a cult fanbase (like Zappa or Beefheart,
both of whom he has connections to.) Most of the songs on this album
are ballads featuring Tom and his piano, backed by classy "real jazz
musicians" including legend Shelly Manne on drums. He sings like a
drunken Louis Armstrong on every track, and he was a drunk at the time,
so this is basically an autobiographical concept album about drunken-ness. |
