Reviews by mitch058

Weird to get John Lee Hooker and then James Brown so close to each other, but I'm glad we got each of them at long last in this collection. I don't know his discography all that well, but this seems like a somewhat obscure collection of his tunes, and not especially well-recorded, but still fun to get Jame Brown live, as I suspect that was where he shone the brightest. I do wish there were more of his signature and/or compelling songs from his funk era, but I guess the focus here is on the popularity of his live shows? (That, or because Robert Christgau included this album in his "Basic Record Library" list.) Much like the lone Hooker album, it's a bit disappointing to feel like Jame Brown has been overlooked by a group of editors that don't seem particularly familiar with some forms of American music.

This is one of my all-time favorite albums, so it's a treat to get to listen to it again in full after many decades. I *was* a little shocked at how well I remembered pretty much every lyric to every song, I'll admit, but I guess I shouldn't be all that surprised given how obsessively I listened to this as a teenager. It's hard to pick out any particular songs as my favorites, but I think the trio midway through -- "Mother", "Goodbye blue sky" and "Empty spaces" -- seems to me like the pinnacle of the album, blending older Pink Floyd styles with the harder-edged sound of "The Wall". Of course, it's hard not to call out other fantastic gems like "Hey you" (with the hopeless coda "Is there anybody out there?"), "Comfortably numb" and "Run like hell", among many others. It's also amazing how well this album tracks with the film version, and it's hard not to conjure up the amazing and disturbing Gerald Scarfe animations as I listened to the tracks. And quite fittingly, the Wikipedia entry is incredibly detailed and thorough, although sad to read how brittle and dysfunctional the band had become by that point (and fascinating to finally find out that "Comfortably numb" was inspired by a muscle relaxant shot to treat Water's hepatitis on the "In The Flesh" tour); I'm not even sure how they (or at least most of them, sans poor Richard Wright) managed to put together "The Final Cut".

Hm. I was excited to see that we got A John Lee Hooker album, but I'm not sure how I feel about a late career collaboration album as the sole choice; at times it feels a bit like the posthumous Townes Van Zandt album "A Far Cry From Dead" where the producers/label just shoehorned modern session band music onto demo recordings. But unlike that album, this has John Lee Hooker fully participating, and with great choices for guest artists (especially Bonnie Raitt, but Santana is in great form too, and fun to get Los Lobos too), plus I really liked finding out that the album's commercial success gave him a lot of financial security for the remainder of his life. I don't know Hooker's music well enough to know if this is really his best album, but I'm glad he got included, friends and all.

Even though I always feel like I only get a partial experience with non-English-language albums, I enjoyed this laid-back album quite a bit. It's always fun to hear a rap/hip-hop album that comes from a different place/source/tradition than US-based East/West Coast styles, and this is definitely positioned far from either coast. I particularly enjoyed the title track (with a great dance-inspiring video), "Victim de la mode" (although I couldn't entirely figure out the video's storyline), the semi-Prince-like "La musique adoucit les moeurs" and the rightfully popular single "Bouge de La" (part I), but all of the tracks were pretty fun even if the album overall felt a bit long.

I've lost count of how many Kate Bush albums there are in this collection, but it's far too many; now that I look back, though, I realize that this is only the third of three, so I guess it's a testament to how painful I find her baby-voice brand of music. Ironically, though, this is probably the best of the lot, and really the only one we needed to get, although I'm not really sure what to make of the side two "Ninth Wave" suite. The album overall isn't as ridiculously over the top (and simply *bad*) as "The Dreaming", and she hadn't fallen as deeply into the horrible world-music-colonialism trap of "The Sensual World", so it's about as Goldilocks as we'll likely get for Kate Bush. This isn't saying all that much, I know, and there's no escape from her melodramatic performance-art videos (and *very* odd to see Donald Sutherland in "Cloudbusting"), but I suspect most of the die-hard Kate Bush fans just hoisted an ever-larger glass of Chardonnay as they danced along to the likes of "Running up the that hill" or "The big sky" or other anthemic pieces, and then settled into the impenetrable operatic Ninth Wave mini-concept-album (that would make for an incredible retro VR game soundtrack, I'll admit). I so wish this project didn't fixate on a small number of singer-songwriters, so we could get more variety (and less Kate Bush), but that's clearly not our fate.

The last (yet earliest) of the three Blur albums. I'd been hoping that perhaps it would show a new and different/interesting side to Blur, but I'm not really sure it did, partly because the other two were so many albums ago that I don't really remember them any better than I likely will with this one. I can see the sort of Ray Davies/Kinks character sketch influence--apparently part of Damon Albarn's epiphany while the band toured and circled the drain after their debut album--but they seemed to have replaced Davies' wit and compassion with simple sarcasm and disgust for suburban life (largely continued in "Parklife"). It's too long by half for what you get, I'd say, but the best of the lot for me were "Colin Zeal", "Sunday Sunday", the strangely compelling "Miss America" and "Villa Rosie". It's kind of funny how poorly this album did in the US; I guess the hatred for all things American he cultivated during their debut album tour through the US was reciprocated for this album. I didn't hate this at all, but I'd definitely say this was by far their least interesting or distinctive of the three albums in the collection, and perhaps not even deserving a slot (heresy to Blur and Britpop devotees alike)....

It's nice to finally get a taste of what Gram Parsons tried (largely unsuccessfully) to get The Byrds to achieve on their lackluster "Sweetheart of the Rodeo". I can totally see why this album bombed in early 1969, and also why it's become a touchstone for many (many many) artists, and might have even single-handedly spawned the alt-country/country-rock genre years before anyone else. There are a lot of great songs--from the eviscerating "Christine's tune" (apparently written about David Crosby's girlfriend, Christine Hinton, not long before she died in a car accident), the impressively political "Sin City", the very-country "My uncle", and "Wheels"--and an equally strong cover of "Dark end of the street". And I'm glad I read the Wikipedia entry as I listened to the album, so I could better appreciate the amazing steel guitar virtuosity of "Sneaky" Pete Kleinow. In some ways, though, the most impressive aspect of this album is how it doesn't sound nearly as dated as so much stuff from the late 60s does.

I can't believe this is the last Dylan album in the collection (at least his solo work)! And a good way to see the Nobel laureate off, especially starting us off with the indelible classic "Like a rolling stone". I also enjoyed "Tombstone blues", the somewhat un-Dylanesque (and almost Rolling-Stones-esque) "The ballad of a thin man", and the title track (minus kazoo). It's not as chock-a-block with Dylan's greatest hits as some of the other albums, but it still has the same compelling combination of rock-oriented music and intricate story-telling lyrics as many of the others. I was torn between three and four stars for this album--mainly for the unevenness of the tracks (some great, some definitely not so great), and for the fact that there are six other Dylan albums to compete with--but even with its shortcomings it's still an impressive album, and I can believe all the accolades about how foundation-altering this was in 1965.

It's interesting to get another Pixies album outside of their debut--I wouldn't have guessed that the project editors would have been all that into the Pixies, but now I see that there are three albums in total, which seems a bit overkill. Either way, I've never heard anything from this album before except "Monkey gone to heaven" (and I'm not sure I ever registered that it was by the Pixies, sadly), and if anything I'd say it's probably more cohesive than "Surfer Rosa", certainly more self-assured and polished, even if it necessarily can't have that rawness/freshness that their first album had (and a bit too muddy sounding for my taste). My favorites among the lot were probably "Debaser", "I bleed", "Mr. Grieves", "No 13 baby" and the mesmerizing "Hey". It's fun to hear another round of the Pixies, even if it doesn't seem (to me) like they really moved forward with this album, and sadly the recording process seemed to push Frank Black/Black Francis and Kim Deal even further apart. I'm really torn with a rating for this, as it's not as great as "Surfer Rosa", but it's *so* much better than most of my 3-star ratings, so four it is.

I know this album is an acquired taste at best for most people, but I'm really glad it got included. My first taste of this album, and Ministry, was hearing "Jesus built my hotrod" many times on the local college/indie radio station at the bike shop I worked at, and every time not really being able to hear the lyrics in the noisy shoproom unless I got right up to the speaker, but loving it nonetheless. I can't remember when I bought this album, but despite being convinced that I must have bought it before I saw them at Lollapalooza, that apparently wasn't possible: the album was released July 14, 1992 and I saw them a week later in Bremerton, WA. I *do* know I was really excited to get to see/hear them, especially because they'd already made a reputation of playing at ear-splitting volume (and getting fined every time for exceeding the designated limit), but sadly I ended up getting a horrible migraine as the day wore on, and I have this indelible memory of sitting with my head between my knees (along with my brother, who was badly hungover) near the porta-potties about as far away as we could get form the stage, and all I could really hear/remember was the unbelievably piercing and regularly spaced wail in "N.W.O", each time making me feel worse. (I also felt too bad to be able to go watch Mr. Lifto and the whole Jim Rose Circus Sideshow on the side stage, which also bummed me out. Thankfully, I started feeling better at some point and caught a little of Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, and the incredibly late arrival of Ice Cube and Red Hot Chili Peppers.) As for the album, I'm sure it sounds turgid to most, but I really like all of the tracks, especially the George-(H.W.)-Bush-eviscerating "N.W.O", "TV II", "Jesus built my hotrod" (of course), and "Psalm 69". (I'm also struck at how much "Scare crow" sounds like a blueprint for a lot of Rob Zombie's music.) It's kind of a bummer to read that the band was blowing their budget on drugs and pretty much hated each other when the album was getting recorded and produced, but I guess you can sort of see the decay and dissolution in the music....

I've never heard of them, or anything from this album (I'm pretty sure), so this was a nice surprise for today's album. They've got a good take on a 21st-century version of classic noodlers like The Grateful Dead or Phish, but thankfully more song-oriented and also faster-paced. I kept wishing they had a bit wider palette than the sort of faster-paced jam session that seems to dominate most of the songs; apparently they pride themselves on their live shows, so I guess that's where this comes from, but I enjoyed tracks like "Street joy" or the Meat-Puppets-esque "Drug" and aspects of "Is and is and is" all the more for the change of pace. I'm also impressed that the editors chose to include a *non*-debut album for the solo entry for a band, and a good album choice, it seems, from a talented band.

I've always enjoyed hearing and listening to Lenny Kravitz over the years, so I'm glad that we get one of his albums, although I do wish we could have gotten an album later than his debut; he definitely got more polished and more interesting as the decades wore on. I hadn't realized that--at least on this album--he wrote, produced, played and sang everything on the album, a la Prince and others (except for co-writing by Lisa Benet on a couple of tracks). It's not the best album overall, and certainly not his best, but it's kind of interesting to see him getting his footing, and nice that he had complete direction by taking charge of everything. It's a bit too throwback for my tastes, and strangely slow across most of the tracks, but a few of the singles seem like good highlights of the album (The Beatlesesque "Let love rule" and "Mr. cab driver" especially); sadly, the videos actually detract from the songs (especially the plodding "I built this garden for us" as well as "Be"). I can definitely see why the reviews for his debut were pretty mixed, but glad he persevered and found a lot of success in later years.

Now that I've heard this album, I have no idea why we also got her debut "Supa Dupa Fly" in this collection. This is definitely a better and more inspired album, in every facet, although (just like her debut) far longer than it needed to be. I liked her and Timbaland's focus on paying tribute to old-school hip-hop, as well as their combined ability to make most of the tracks sound like her own and not just retro ("Funky fresh dressed" might have gone a little too far in the retro direction, though). The first half is particularly strong--especially the trio of "Gossip folks", "Work it" (plus the remix version) and "Back in the day"--but there are other good tracks sprinkled in too (e.g. "Slide"). I can see why this became her most successful album. (And funny to hear Epstein acolytes Bill Clinton and Donald Trump called/dissed out in the "Intro" from way back in 2002....)

An interesting album, although a bit disconcerting to discover that this is just one of two Super Furry Animals albums in the collection, as this one didn't seem interesting enough to warrant another one (although of course the other one is their debut album). I kind of liked the eclectic range of the tracks, and also kind of didn't like it that most of that range was pretty backward-looking in some ways; my favorites on the album were probably the not-so-retro "[A] touch sensitive" and "No sympathy". But props to them for getting Paul McCartney to chew carrots and celery on "Receptacle for the respectable" (apparently reprising a similar role he played on The Beach Boys song "Vegetables" (on "Smiley Smile")), and for getting John Cale to play piano on "Presidential Suite". And I like the amount of attention and time they spent creating a DVD with surround sound versions of the songs, although I'm not sure they should have included low-budget videos for every track, especially since most of the videos had no obvious connection to the songs. I also liked how they seemed a bit like a more positive/happy version of Radiohead.

I was excited to see that today's album is firmly in the 21st century, but perhaps not all that surprised to discover that the Scots came fully equipped with sounds from before they were born. They do a good job updating 80s-style synth-heavy pop to fit the 2010s--especially in the mixing department, with a much fuller sound than anything from 30 years prior. They have an impressive number of singles on the album, and a few of them stand out, mainly the opening "The mother we share" and "Recover". (A bit disappointing that the many videos seemed pretty uninspired.) The remainder is solid, and it definitely gets more interesting (and more modern sounding) as you get to the second half, but overall it's not really the kind of sound I gravitate towards (a bit like The War on Drugs), which is not their fault or problem, I know. An impressively strong album for a debut though.

Well, I think I've overloaded a bit on the whole Krautrock vein in this collection, or perhaps this just isn't as good as some of the other entries (but I suspect the former is more the case). It seems like it's well-produced, and there's a decent amount of variety on the album, from the hypnotic and impressively lengthy "Krautrock" (aspects of which made me think of of the interesting credits music to the long-running show "Babylon Berlin") to "Jennifer" and "Run". "The sad skinhead" and "It's a bit of a pain", seem a bit out of place in different ways (perhaps in part because they almost seemed like "normal"(-ish) songs), and overall this doesn't really have as much cohesion or even experimentation as I'd kind of hoped for. But not at all surprising to read that it was recorded in the same studio and at about the same time as Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells".

Overall, I'm enjoying this project, but there are definitely times where I groan when I see what the day has to offer. Thankfully, albums like this help offset the rut that it feels like the editors fall into more often than I'd like. I've never heard of John Grant, nor Midlake (the backing band for this album), nor The Czars (Grant's former band before he took years off from making music), and I'm pretty sure I've never heard anything from this strange, sad/funny, haunting album by a man who checked himself into a hospital for suicidal thoughts after recording it. It's probably easier to identify my least favorite tracks--"TC and honeybear" and "Outer space"--but a few are even better than the rest: the incredibly dark and haunting "Marz" (which only becomes a surreal nightmare if you watch the video), the hilarious "Sigourney Weaver" (with its call out to "Freebird"), the equally funny "Chicken bones" (complete with a video that calls to mind James Gunn's movie "Super"), the sadly autobiographical "Jesus hates faggots", and the ending duo "Leopard and lamb" and the title track (the latter apparently written while driving from Glasgow to Aberdeen, which made me think of Rodney Crowell's similarly inspired "Glasgow girl" on "The Outsider"). Given all the demons he faced, and often retreated from, before making this album, I'm so impressed that he found a way to exorcise at least some of that in a relatively positive way. I was also reminded a lot of The Magnetic Fields throughout.

Aside from their big hit "Reward" (ironically not part of the original album), I'm pretty sure I've never really heard anything by The Teardrop Explodes, including from this album (and I'm not even sure I'd ever heard "Reward" before, for that matter). Overall it's a decent album, especially given that it's their debut and released at the beginning of a decade not known for great pop-oriented music. They *do*, however, sound a bit like a lot of other early 80s bands (and a lot like some band that I can't put my finger on), so I suspect I won't be revisiting it. But I appreciated getting a chance to hear them.

I enjoyed this more than I expected, and while I wish she was more involved in writing the lyrics or music, I'm glad she chose to be fairly active in shaping the song choices and directions (despite the liner notes attributing her as co-writer for most tracks, it seems she gave songwriters direction rather than actually penning much of anything). And she is definitely a more interesting singer/performer than some of her fellow Mickey Mouse Club grads like Justin Timberlake or Britney Spears, which is probably why she has two albums in this collection; ironically, I had completely forgotten that I'd heard her other album about 500 albums ago, and had much the same impression then. The album is *way* too long, and there aren't many tracks outside her singles that are all that memorable (and a few that aren't very interesting at all), but the singles are generally pretty entertaining, with decent videos as well ("Fighter" and "Beautiful" in particular). I can see why there was a lot of controversy surrounding "Dirty" and its video, but it feels a lot like the same sort of tension that Miley Cyrus generated when she started to assert her adulthood (musical and otherwise); she probably could have ditched the whole "Xtina" alter-ego thing, though.

I'm beginning to think that Neil Young gets the somewhat dubious prize for the most albums in this collection (nine total, including the two CSNY and Buffalo Springfield albums), but thankfully this is a well-deserved entry, and stands perhaps as his second best effort (behind "Harvest") in this collection. "Cinnamon girl" is an enduring classic and a powerful way to launch the album (and "Cowgirl in the sand" is an equally powerful way to end it), and so many of these tracks sound familiar enough to make me think I've probably heard them before, while the ones I haven't encountered before are nice discoveries (especially the haunting "Running dry"). "Round & round" is probably the weakest of the lot, but it seems it's a favorite of many (including Young), so that's probably on me. What a great launch for Crazy Horse and Neil Young, even if they get a little lost here and there in noodle land.