A blog of albums ... old and new .... that are particular favourites of mine but that not everyone has heard. Yes ... there will be the odd popular album appearing on the blog but I am going to try and concentrate on some newer and rather more obscure albums for your listening pleasure
This album, released in early 1996, is one of those albums that seems as fresh now as the day it was released. The two
best known tracks are "Bluetonic" and "Slight Return" but after a few listens, it is
hard not to fall in love with the clever lyrics and the wonderfully melodic
tunes that fill the album.
A breathtaking album, and surely
one of the best of the Britpop era (although the band would have probably been unhappy at being grouped into that category).
You often hear the old saying that pop music is a disposable genre; songs for the moment that you can forget about once the radio stop playing them. This, of course, is arrant nonsense. The Beatles made pop music. The Rolling Stones made pop music. The Who even made pop music. We still listen to them.
For me, there are three albums that are pop classics from start to finish; albums where every track is a gem and, more importantly, every track still sounds as great today as they did when first released. One of those albums is a bit of a cheat, for it is the compilation album Motown Chartbusters Volume 3. The other is "A Hard Day's Night" by .... mmmm ..... remind me!
The third is this!
This lot did not write their own music, although Mike Nesmith does get a part-credit for one track. Hell, they probably didn't even play on the album! It matters not a jot! What counts is the stuff in the grooves, the absolute perfection of every track (even the comedy track at the end), the fact that you can listen to this album anytime, anywhere, and it is guaranteed to put a smile on your face and, probably, get you singing out loud
Couldn't choose which tracks to pick so ... hey ... here's the entire album
(Theme From) The Monkees
Saturday's Child
I Wanna Be Free
Tomorrow's Gonna Be Another Day
Papa Gene's Blues
(very early copies of this album had this track listed as "Papa Jean's Blues. Worth a few bob if you have an album with that spelling)
Thirty odd years ago it shone, and was a near perfect piece of vinyl as you
were likely to find. All this time later, and I listen to this more than any of the supposed classic albums. It still
sounds as fresh and as unique and as ethereal as it did the first time I heard
it.
The reason for that is it's completeness. Not a sound out of place, not a
note too many or too few, and Mick Karn's incredibly fluid bass guitar was an almost-unique sound (only Level 42 and Stanley Clarke were using the bass in a similar way) Every track is a gem, no filler here, and it
also acts as homage to a golden era in electronic music. It stands at a crossroads;
analogue synths were the best they would ever be in terms of sounds and digital
synths were only a year or so away. Many would agree that the sounds an old
Prophet 5 or Oberheim could make after a fair bit of knob twiddling was far more
ear pleasing than even synths available today. Hence why these machines fetch
such good money nowadays.
Pulp had been kicking around since 1981, but for all intents and purposes, their
1994 major-label debut, His 'n' Hers is their de facto debut: the album that
established their musical and lyrical obsessions and, in turn, the album where
the world at large became acquainted with their glassy, tightly wound synth pop
and lead singer Jarvis Cocker's impeccably barbed wit.
It was a sound that was
carefully thought out, pieced together from old glam and post-punk records,
assembled in so it had the immediacy (and hooks) of pop balanced by an artful
obsession with moody, dark textures. It was a sound that perfectly fit the
subject at hand: it was filled with contradictions -- it was sensual yet
intellectual, cheap yet sophisticated, retro yet modern -- with each seeming
paradox giving the music weight instead of weighing it down.
This was Pulp's
shot at the big time and they followed through with a record that so perfectly
captured what they were and what they wanted to be, it retains its immediacy
years later
This is an album that is criminally overlooked for more than one reason.
Rarely has a band made such a significant leap in style and content from first to second album. Listen to the first album and this is like The Beatles releasing "Abbey Road" nine months after "With The Beatles". The cover gives much away ... the band saw this as a weightier, more mature effort than their debut. However, although the songs are undoubtedly more complex, they retain their pop sensibility
But perhaps of more importance is the influence, usually unsung, that this album had on music. Without this album, Joy Division may have been just another punk band. Without this album, we might never have heard "Blue Monday". Without this album, we might never have had a Radiohead
Killer was famously recorded and released in the same year as its predecessor, but it was far from a cheap cash-in on the breakthrough success the band found on Love It To Death. In fact, it seemed that the band still had plenty more ideas in their twisted minds, enough to write and record another classic record in such a short period of time. In short, Alice Cooper's fourth studio album takes everything that made its predecessor so good and takes it one step further. While Love It To Death was more along the lines of a straight-up 70s hard rock album, the band stepped into deeper waters with their songwriting abilities on Killer and took on a variety of influences, including blues, garage rock and even proto-metal. Bob Ezrin, the mastermind behind the band's third album, was back on board twisting the knobs once again. If not to their discoverer, Frank Zappa, it was to Ezrin that the band owed its greatest debt, and this would not be the last winning collaboration either.
Alice Cooper took the theatrical sound they had developed on "Killer" and moved it on a step, producing one of the finest concept albums of the 70s. Not just taking a lead from "West Side Story ... actually borrowing chunks of it .... they fashioned an album on a grand scale. The band still rocked, but their love of show tunes, and sleazy jazz, also comes to the for. Unjustly criticised as a one-trick pony album at the time, over the decades this
has become, rightly, critically acclaimed as one of their best records ever. It
follows the classic 'Killer' template but has a broader musical brush.
