Reviews by applaud01

If you're going in to hear more like Go West or DJ Culture or Let's Make Lots of Money then you may be disappointed.

More restrained than their precious albums, this still contains some gorgeous music. So Hard, Jealousy, This Must Be the Place are all excellent. And Being Boring is clearly the standout from this album, and, indeed, one of the standouts of their career.

October Symphony and Only the Wind drag it down a bit, but still this is one of the classics of 90s electro.

Coming on like the whitest version of Barry White that ever whited, or possibly your Grandpop's drunk impersonation of Nick Cave, all set against c-grade electropop backing that sounds like a Commodore 64 game soundtrack.

There are good songs here. Tower of Song, Everybody Knows, First We Take Manhattan are all brilliant - especially when they're sung by Marianne Faithful or Jennifer Warnes or Rufus Wainwright.

But then we have Jazz Police. Oh dear.

I think if they got Trevor Horn or Tony Visconti to produce then we might have had something.

But as it is it's kind of laughable.

Two things worth noting here.

One is the amount of Clapton hate on this site. And Fair enough. Although if we're here to rate personalities there's quite a few artists on here that wouldn't stand up to scrutiny. So I'm going to rate the album, while noting that Clapton is "personally problematic".

The other is a comment Mick Jagger made once. "I mean what’s the point in listening to us doing ‘I’m A King Bee’ when you can listen to Slim Harpo doing it?" And that very much applies to this album. When you can put on Robert Johnson or Ray Charles, what's the point of this?

The first point is the playing. Clapton is pretty much on fire throughout, producing solo after solo of blistering intensity. McVie is no slouch on Bass either. The drumming serves to make you appreciate other, better drummers. Mayall's voice is, well, adequate. (Although he's stretched beyond his limits in the Ray Charles cover)

The second point is its importance as a gateway for so many to the Blues. Jagger's answer to the question he raised about "King Bee" was to say people might get switched on by the Stones and then go and find the original. Blues was pretty niche in 66 and if people heard this and then went to discover Chicago Blues for themselves, then well and good.

So, this is fine, but go and listen to Mose Allison and Robert Johnson and Little Walter and see why, as good as it, this is second best.

I'll give you a tip. Go and listen to Robert Johnson's two takes of Ramblin' On My Mind and hear why he's the REAL God.

If processed cheese formed a band...

Utterly without a trace of anything genuine. Completely without passion or emotion.

The instrumental tracks are good enough. The synth is pleasant in a retro 80s way although someone could have suggested trying something other than the arpeggiator. The bass playing is the star of the show.

They seem to be aspiring to Stranded - Siren - Avalon period Roxy Music, but don't really get there.

And then there's the vocals. Words are sung. Words of such banality and triteness, dressed up as big statements and emoted in Simon Le Bon's melodramatic whine.

3 stars for the playing
-1 for the songs and singing.

As is the way with REM this contains a couple of absolute Crackers (End of the World &The One I Love) ; a couple of things that make you go hmmm (Finest Worksong has you wondering how many tines they listened to U2. Lightning Hopkins makes you want to listen to Ligtning Hopkins instead) and a few songs that you'd cheerfully skip. (Looking at you Exhuming McCarthy)

Wouldn't be my first choice to play.

Was there ever a luckier bunch of guys than Big Brother and The Holding Company? A fair to middling blues rock band - just another band in on the West Coast playing Psychedelia and they pick an unknown woman who turns out to be one of the great rock vocalists of all time.

They play Monterey, cause a sensation, record an album that's a benchmark for blues rock even today and then they're gone, leaving behind this.

Of course, it's the Janis Joplin show. Her voice is a raw miracle. The closest thing to it is probably Robert Plant, but Joplin makes Plant sound as smooth as Engelbert Humperdink, so smokey and emotional is her voice.

Whenever the album goes without her, in Combination of the Two or Oh, Sweet Mary you realise that they're not much without her.

The end of Ball and Chain - where she sings unaccompanied- makes you realise just how little they mattered. She's everything, with or without.

Of the five songs on the album where she sings lead, I Need a Man to Love, Piece of My Heart and Ball and Chain are amazing. Her vocals are transcendent.

Summertime is transformed from Gershwin's beautiful number to a slow, tortured blues. It's good, but not the greatest performance on the album.

Turtle Blue is an acoustic blues in the style of Bessie Smith or Mephis Minnie. It's pretty good, even if it stands out completely from the rest of the album.

The bands backing to Janis's singing is, perhaps, more enthusiastic than tight. At times it's downright sloppy as only 60s Psychedelia can be.

After this album Joplin left the band and burned brightly through a brief solo career. But what a performance she left.

The Concert at Filsom Prison was an extraordinary album. Cash was coming off a drug addiction and the first attempt at a prison recording came to nothing because Cash was too "tired and emotional" to go on.

The Folsom Concert had the atmosphere of one man at the end of his tether talking to an audience of men at the end of their tether. It was raw, it was emotional, it was intense.

The recording revived his career and was a huge success. It's become legendary in the years since.

This San Quentin album has the slight whiff of another trip to the well. It's all a bit showbiz: bringing on the guest stars; the engineered encore of "San Quentin"; bringing on a guard with a glass of water (a repeat of a Folsom Prison bit) so the audience can boo; the fact that it was being recorded for British television. It just seems a bit more commercial and contrived than Folsom.

It's also not nearly as good. Folsom has the killer set list of:

-Folsom Prison Blues (I shot a man in Reno, he sings and the crowd goes wild
- Cocaine Blues, about a man who murders his girlfriend after taking cocaine
- 25 Minutes to go, about a man going to the gallows
- Long Black Veil, about a man who goes to the gallows to protect his lover's reputation
- Send a Picture of Mother (I mean, to prisoners in jail)
- Give my love to Rose - about a Manet out of prison who is killed before seeing his girlfriend
- Green Green Grass of Home, about a man returning home after getting out of prison
- Greystone Chapel, written by a prisoner sitting in the audience.

It's more a shared communion than a Concert.

San Quentin is entertainment. Even the song about Cash's arrest is presented as a comedy about picking flowers.

And then there's the pretty execrable Boy Named Sue. It hasn't aged well.

Folsom Prison literally changed lives - Not least amongst them Cash's own. San Quentin made a lot of money and landed Cash a network deal for his variety show.

It's all right, but it's not his best.

It's easy to forget just how huge CCR were back in the day. They headlined Woodstock; they had hit after hit, both singles and albums; three chart topping albums in one year; their Greatest Hits collection has spent years on the charts.

No-one is going to confuse them for King Crimson. They're straight ahead, country blues Boogie with a dash of Tony Joe White. But they are experts at what they do. They turn up, they rock, they get out. They're not trying to expand your mind or change your ideas about what music is, or deliver a searing message about the dominant societal paradigm.

Even though this has Green River, Bad Moon Rising, Commotion and Lodi, it was their next album where they really hit their stride. But as moonshine liquor soaked good times go this is pretty good.

Perfectly pleasant and engaging soft electronically.

Plenty of people doing this sort of thing, some (Everything but the Girl for example) probably doing it better.

Is this an album I liked? Yes.

Is it an album I'll play again? No.

Is it an album I had to hear before I die? I doubt it.

Oh lord. An album you need to hear before you die, but probably just so death doesn't seem so bad.

The guy has a baritone like honey and then uses it to sing lyrics torn from the pages of a sensitive 17 year old's secret diary, set against overwrought orchestral backing with formless, directionless melodies.

10 songs in 30 minutes, so at least it's short. But it still outstays its welcome.

Coming out of the LA punk scene and settling into a sort of 60s retro, power pop, new wave sound, The G-Go's were probably more fun and upbeat than many of their contemporaries.

This, their debut album, has the two big hits - Our Lips Are Sealed and We Got the Beat - which remain little gems of joy.

The other songs on the album might not quite hit the same highs as those two, but are solid pop-punk delights with duds and no skips.

Thoroughly enjoyable even today.

To the extent that Country Joe and the Fish are remembered at all, they are remembered for one song. And it isn't on this album.

This album has the distinction of being the first West Coast Psychedelia album which could go either way, depending on your tolerance for West Coast Psychedelia.

Personally, I think it's the sort of album that every musician should hear, if only as a warning to not do this ever again.

The best thing on here is probably "Love", but even that dissolves into a mediocre blues jam. The rest are the sort of thing that someone at the time might have looked up from their bong for long enough to say "Wow, cosmic," before drifting off into smokey dreams.

The lyrics are unrelentingly "mind expanding", in that they don't make a lick of sense, but they sound like they might mean something.

Probably the low point is Section 43, a multi movement instrumental of extraordinary banality that sounds like the sort of thing that a promoter who couldn't afford The Doors might put on and advertise as "A Freak Out".

1 star for being the first and a half for the vocals on "Love". I rounded down.

Little pop gems drenched in fuzz guitar and sung in harmonies so sweet that there's a diabetes risk.

Imagine if Simon and Garfunkel became the lead singers of the Jesus and Mary Chain.

Probably too much of its time to he celebrated these days, but a lot of fun.

It's probably not for me, but I can see how this would appeal to a lot of people.

Enigmatic, sad songs sung by a almost whispered voice, set against minimal backing. And made all the sadder by the knowledge that this isn't an act. His life really was that sad.

Glad I heard it although I'll probably never listen to it again.

If the jazz you like is Miles Davis's Dark Magus or Ornette Coleman or Sun Ra, then this is not going to attract you.

But if you like Chuck Mangione or Spyro Gyra then this is the album for you.

Smooth with a touch of African rhythm this would grace any department store background music playlist.

As an early example of a pervasive sound that eventually devolved into muzak this is, I guess, influential.

Anyone not giving this a 5 doesn't deserve music.

By the time Muddy and the band hit Tiger in Your Tank they are smoking hot and cooking. Then they going into Mojo Working and you can hear the crowd go wild.

You should too.

I understand that many think that this is the ducks guts, but it didn't do it for me.

There were several songs that were great - Drive, Nightswimming, Find the River.

But at least two of the songs - Man on the Moon and Everybody Hurts - have become such overplayed FM radio staples that if I never hear them again it will be too soon. And a couple of songs - The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight in particular - are weak to the point of filler.

So, good in parts

How much of this was reality in 1980s Compton and how much is young bloke's chest thumping, peacocking boast is not for this 69yo White, middle class Australian to say. But it does seem to be the sort of record you might expect from a minority that's had enough of being discriminated against, profiled, disenfranchised and scapegoated.

"TIME TO PUT COMPTON ON THE MAP" and they're going to make you listen until you know the truth. (Or at least, their version of it)

And if the level of violence, misogyny and drug use is pretty confronting, perhaps life in Compton was just as confrontational.

Public Enemy is probably more sophisticated in their ideas, but this is pretty raw and angry.

Obviously important, if problematic.

These guys can play up a storm and the idea of thrash grindcore jazz is fascinating.

The tracks are short and are all individually brilliant. But because they're so relentlessly aggressive, listening to the album straight produces diminishing returns. But include this in a playlist set to random and it will certainly add a little piquancy.

But now go and listen to Ornette Coleman's "Free Jazz", which is the album that should have been on this list, and see why these guys are paying tribute to him. (Spoiler: Because Ornette is better)

Like a last dispeptic burp from.the rich food of the 60's. Anyone going into this expecting another "Dance to the Music" are in for a shock.

By this point Sly Stone was drugged and angry. The promise of Woodstock had given way to Watergate and the Race Riots of the early 70s.

The personal and political darkness combined to make this an album of unparalleled cynicism and rage. Long sinuous funk workouts move slowly while half heard vocals say things like "They say time is the answer, but I don't believe it" or "The deeper in debt the harder you bet" through a production of such murkiness that nothing would rival it until "Exile on Main St" or Bowie's "Watch that Man".

It's hard to say it's an enjoyable album, but did set the scene for the sort of angry, political black music that led to Grand Master Flash and Public Enemy.