Reviews by mitch058

Nice to get Peter Frampton in this collection, and it makes sense to have his only truly successful solo album as the selection, although there's a lot of filler surrounding his classic hits. I always remember being really impressed as a kid/teenager by the sound of the talk-box effect, and he was pretty much synonymous with that, so I have a soft spot for Frampton, even if most of this album isn't all that memorable, although those seemed like they must have been fun concerts with very appreciative crowds. Amazing that only Springsteen's 1985 live album sold more copies.

I was going to write that this is the first of two Doves albums for me in this collection, only to belatedly realize that I'd already heard their debut album nearly 400 albums earlier. Given the fine-but-largely-forgettable nature of this album, I'm not at all surprised I'd completely forgotten "Lost Souls", and my notes for that latter album pretty much confirm the same impression for both albums. I like it that "Words" got--and still gets--lots of airtime for Manchester FC games, and I'm impressed that they chose to work in an adaptation/cover of King Crimson's "Moonchild" in "M62 song". I'm also happy to see/hear that my impression of the first album--trying to be the "soundtrack for some sort of indie film involving long car rides and heavy conversations in coffehouses and large parks at night"--largely carried over to "The Last Broadcast", albeit with a better focus on discrete songs.

I enjoyed the album overall, and was very impressed tat she managed to keep a recent album (as in 2019) down to a concise 35 minutes runtime. And while it's not really a genre that I listen to much, I also appreciated the wide range of styles and lyrics (and actual singing at times) in the compact album. The highlights for me were probably the tone-setting opener "Offence", "Wounds", and the Portishead-inspired "Venom" (with a surprisingly stressful lyrics video); I was also reminded (in a good way) by "101 FM" of Boots Riley's quirky TV Series "I'm a Virgo", and appreciate seeing Michael Kiwanuka appear in "Flowers". I also enjoy the chance to listen to British rap/hip-hop, as it always seems grounded in a different heritage than US West-vs-East-Coast strutting.

I don't think I've heard much by Nick Drake before listening to this, and I'm a bit shocked at the apparently massive cult following he engendered from just a few albums (in that sense, I was reminded of Rodriguez as I listened, although it's pretty clear that Drake became *much* bigger in later years). It's a pleasant album, and I liked the layering of his weirdly-whisper-like vocals over Fairport Convention's backing sounds; it feels like the sort of album best listened to in the background (of a coffee shop?), so not too many tracks really stood out for me, although I thought "At the chime of a city clock" and "Poor boy" were particularly...nice? complete? Sad to read that he only completed three albums before retreating from the world and then from life in 1974 at the age of 26. It'll be (somewhat) interesting to see if his other two albums seem considerably different, or part of a continuum.

I've never been a Tom Petty fan, largely because there's something about his nasally/whiny voice that really grates on me, but this seems like a good early album of his to include in the collection, and "Breakdown" and "American girl" *still* hold up well after all these decades. The rest of the album is new to me, and neither memorable nor surprising, but also about what I expected (I was also struck by how a few of the tracks, especially "The wild one, forever", sound like something Bruce Springsteen and company would have produced). I always conflate Tom Petty, Ted Nugent and Rod Stewart into a collective 70s/80s shades-of-rock lead man, but it feels like that's perhaps not fair to Tom Petty, especially given how he and the band ran the circuit for four decades (and probably not fair to compare *anyone* to nutjob Nugent).

I really enjoyed this album, in part from the sense of uncertainty that infuses everything about it. I automatically assumed that Fever Ray (the artist) is a man, based on the album cover look and the opening vocals of "If I had a heart", then got confused when a woman's voice seemed to become the dominant voice in the song, and by the appearance of a creepy ghost-like woman-like character in that song's video, which itself was incredibly ambiguous and open-ended (I also wondered if this video might have been excerpts from some horror film, but it appears not). In some ways the five videos are a highlight of the album, each adding weird/sinister/dread-filled visuals (and seeming to invoke Scandinavian indigenous cultures/costumes) to songs that already seem to capture a similar sentiment, and giving a little visual variety to the often relentlessly similar rhythm/pace of the various tracks. My favorites were probably "If I had a heart", "Seven", "Concrete walls", and "Keep the streets empty for me". I'll admit there were times I was reminded of Bjork, but thankfully those moments passed quickly, although I can imagine that Sugar Ray's novelty would wear off after three or four albums. Given how much I enjoyed this solo album by Karin Dreijer, I'm a bit disappointed that we don't get any The Knife albums in this collection; it would be nice to hear how the siblings' duo band differs from this solo project. (I guess I'll just have to carve out some time to listen to them....) And what a shame that this album only appeared in a single edition of the "1001 Books" (2011 edition).

I like it that this Kraftwerk album is in many ways *very* different than the other one I've listened to in this collection ("The Man Machine"), yet pretty recognizably Kraftwerk too. The title track seems like the main and almost only attraction, and I'm glad I listened to it with headphones, as that's probably the only way to really get the simulation-of-driving-along-the-autbahn-through-various-regions-of-Germany experience (although it definitely helped to read about the album to understand that there were distinct and identifiable regions at different points in the 22-minute track). It also made me realize that the single-version of "Autobahn" (and the only version I'd ever heard before this album) is basically a completely different song, since it's not a journey at all. The other tracks on the second side of the album are less distinctive or interesting, but also more experimental/ambient, which I admire. I think I enjoy "The Man Machine" more, but I can see why this earlier album helped get Kraftwerk on the music map.

I'm not sure we really needed more than one Scott Walker album, although I suppose it's nice to get some of his original compositions rather than just Jacques Brel covers. I don't particularly enjoy his style, so there wasn't all that much that grabbed me, although the political critiques in "Hero of the war" and "The old man's back again" were surprisingly interesting. And a shame that the album was "deleted" from the label's catalog a few weeks after it was released, due to abysmal sales, sending him into a reclusive life for many years; it didn't seem *that* bad of an album....

This seems like a good choice for a James Taylor album, and I guess this is supposed to be the token American soft-rock album (since there's no Jimmy Buffett, John Denver, Neil Diamond, etc.)? I don't know James Taylor's discography all that well, so I don't have a sense if this earlier album is a bit more wide-ranging than later stuff, but I was surprised with the occasional blues- and gospel-oriented tracks interspersed with his well-known hits, and I always enjoy hearing his almost Cat-Stevens-style "Country road" and "Fire and rain" (not so much his rendition of "Oh, Susannah"). And funny to read that the "Suite for 20 G" track was cobbled together last-minute and named for the fact that adding this track meant completing the album and getting $20,000, which was probably a healthy cash infusion for a guy that was couch-surfing at the producer's house by that point. (3)

The last of the three Van Morrison albums in this collection, and easily the only one that needed to be included, even if it kind of violates the no-compilation rule. Van Morrison's legacy has been (rightly) clouded by a lot of serious character flaws and outright offensive behavior, but he definitely shines as a performer and orchestra leader on this album, and I'm glad for him and all his many fans that we has able to channel his musical talent and soul so well in the tour that produced this double album (itself apparently a reality for Van Morrison's notoriously mercurial nature). It's nice too that he included a number of cover songs representing his musical influences, although those are probably some of the weaker tracks on the album (especially "I believe to my soul"); it's a bit surprising given the unevenness of some of those tracks that he refused to include either "Moondance" or "Brown eyed girl" on the album due to perceived imperfections in the various recordings (and an insistence on avoiding any studio-based cleaning up of the recordings). I also liked it that he included some of his earliest work with Them; I don't think I ever put it together that it was him singing on the classic "Gloria" (or "Here comes the night" either). An impressively strong live album that feels like a single performance, despite being cobbled together from three different venues across several dates.

An interesting choice to have this album and "Transformer" as the lone Lou Reed solo albums, given how iconic the latter is and was, and how poorly-received this follow-up album was (and only somewhat rehabilitated in the following decades). I'm pretty sure I've never heard any of the tracks from this very Lou-Reed-esque concept album of strung out expats in Berlin, and only a few really caught my ear, mainly "How do you think it feels" and "The Kids". I *do* like reading that Reed's thwarted hope to make the album into a stage production was finally realized 34 years later, but I'm hard pressed to say why this particular album made it into the collection when there are so many other more notable and interesting later Lou Reed albums (e.g. "New York").

It's hard to listen to this album 50 years after it was released and fully appreciate how different and polarizing it was, at least for a lot of music critics who rebelled against its clinical style, yet was warmly embraced by literally millions of fans within a few years of its international release. I can see why people called it the French version of Mike Oldfield's earlier "Tubular Bells" album, but it feels like a very different heritage, and certainly a much different legacy as an early and very successful synthesizer album. It doesn't do much for me, but I suspect that's as much a result of Jarre's imprint on a large swath of later movie soundtracks and electronica albums, so that this doesn't sound all that interesting or different, in a way. But either way, it's very impressive that he cobbled together all the instruments and machines with very limited funds, and even built his own studio in his kitchen. And given the success of this album (apparently over 18 million albums sold worldwide), I can see why Chris Blackwell (of Island Records) considered turning down Jarre's album for his label one of the two great mistakes of his career (apparently the other was turning down Elton John's debut album). I also love it that the percussion beats in various tracks of this album were achieved by using adhesive tape on a drum machine's preset keys to get two styles at once (e.g. Part VI uses "rhumba" and "bossa nova", to great (and cheesy) effect).

I'm glad to see that we not only get Wilco in this collection, but there are in fact two different albums by them (and I suspect very different from each other, given what "YHF" sounds like). I'm also happy because I have a Wilco album that's not in this collection ("Summerteeth"), so I get to sample more of a band that I often think to myself that I should listen to more of.

This album doesn't really sound like what I think of Wilco sounding like, but I really enjoyed the album nonetheless. My favorites were probably "Kamera", "War on War", and the strangely upbeat "Heavy metal drummer", but there aren't really any duds among the rest, and I really appreciate the stretch Tweedy and company clearly took on this album. It's quite a bit less interesting to read about all the drama and conflicts that went into the making of the album, from ditching one Warner label for another, to booting the drummer and then the guitarist, getting sued for including a recording of the YHF Numbers Station broadcast in "Poor places", etc etc. I'm not sure I have the interest or patience to watch the documentary about the making of the album, but it sounds like that has even more of the gory details of how the sausage got made.

I've never really heard any of the tracks on this album outside of the impossible-to-miss single "What's love got to do with it", so I was a bit surprised (but probably shouldn't have been) at how...generic-sounding...the songs were, despite Tina Turner's distinctive and powerful voice. I suspect a lot of this is due to the now-very-cringey 80s production style, full of synths, drum machines and absolutely zero bass or human touch. (Curious that she ended up having four different production crews for the 9 or 10 tracks on the album, as it's hard to hear a big difference between the different teams' tracks.) The videos for her various singles were pretty fun to watch, especially comparing 80s video styles with much more recent ones. I do wish that Turner had been more involved in the songwriting or arranging, but I suspect that's largely a product of where and when Tina Turner rose to fame; I also wish that her various covers were more original or distinctive sounding (although I guess you could argue that "Help" *is* distinctive, but not in a very complimentary way).

Well, this is *not* what I expected when I saw that we had finally arrived at the first of two PIL albums in the collection. I'm not sure I'd ever heard PIL before this (or at least their early stuff), so just based on all the PIL stickers on fellow high-schooler skateboards and leather jackets, I figure it would be another late 70s punk album, with poor production quality, twitchy drums and guitars and screaming vocals. So in that sense, this was a nice surprise, although there are definitely elements of the punk sound in tracks like "Annalisa" or their single "Public image". I'm not sure I could say I enjoyed most of the tracks, but I admire the "anti-rock" attempt and approach, and interesting to get a couple of self-exiles--The Sex Pistols' Johnny Rotten (John Lydon) and The Clash's John Levene--teaming up with Jah Wobble and Jim Walker to create a weird and seemingly intentionally offensive album. I also really admire whoever was involved in the Wikipedia entry for this album, as it reads like a series of random interview anecdotes, loosely incorporated into the standard Wikipedia structure, but without *any* real attempt to describe much of anything aside from various (and often random-seeming) people's recollections. Thankfully, the "1001 Albums" came to the rescue a bit with a more standard review. I'm now a bit more curious than I was previously to see what "Metal Box" will sound like.

While I appreciate getting a British band doing glam metal American-style (apparently courtesy of Rick Rubin), I'm not at all surprised this album didn't last through all that many editions of the "1001 Albums" book. Despite Rubin's insistence that they model themselves after AC/DC and Zeppelin on this album, nearly every track reminded me more of a kind of anemic version of Guns N'Roses (probably more for how similar Ian Astbury's voice is to Axl Rose). There's nothing wrong with their take on 80s hard rock, but there's also very little to distinguish them, aside from what one (modern) reviewer hilariously (and perhaps a bit unkindly) described as "one of history's worst versions of 'Born to Be Wild.'" Kind of interesting to read the tortured path Astbury and company went to get from Southern Death Cult to Death Cult to just "The Cult", as well as the evolution of their sound from muddy doom-punk to muddy heavy metal to less-muddy glam rock.

What an odd album. Mainly in a good way, and a total mystery (to me) why it captured hearts in the UK and Europe, but I suspect it had a lot to do with how the Chemical Brothers had a hand in promoting the album, as well as creating a fantastic remix of "Delta sun bottleneck stomp" that probably drove many people to the band (and their remix in the sitcom "Spaced" probably helped a lot too). It's fascinating that it was recorded in the same studio and at the same time as The Flaming Lips were recording "The Soft Bulletin"; this album definitely sounds like it could have been a Flaming Lips album (and also fascinating that lead man Jonathan Donahue was the guitarist for The Flaming Lips for a stint just before this album). I'm not sure I had too many favorite tracks on this album, just because I'm not really all that much of a fan of Donahue's warbly vocals, but I can see why "Opus 40" and "Goddess on a hiway" became their singles from the album, and "Holes" and "Tonite it shows" are also fun for the way they channel Donahue's inspiration for the album, "Tale Spinners for Children". Also cool to know that they not only holed up in the Catskills to escape the deep downward spiral of their lives at that point, but managed to get The Band's Garth Hudson and Levon Helm to play on a couple of tracks. And many many props for the awesomely named custom instrument(ish), "Tettix Wave Accumulator", in the hidden track of "Delta sun bottleneck stomp" (and according to Wikipedia the Tettix Wave Accumulator was collecting dust in the basement of a bar in 2009...).

I'm glad we got an Eels album in this collection, but given that this, their debut album, is the only one (and definitely not their best output or even the best reviewed or popular album), I guess their style didn't jibe with the project's editors. Too bad, as I own a different Eels album, "Blinking Lights and Other Revelations", which would have been a nicer sampling of what they have to offer. Regardless, I enjoyed the album as a whole, especially their hit single "Novacaine for the soul" (and a fun floaty video), "Rags to rags", "My beloved monster", "Flower" and the aptly-titled "Lucky day in hell", although there's a degree of monotony (or perhaps just a lack of differentiation) in many of the songs that makes it hard to focus on them as much as I'd like to. (I suspect this may be part of their calling card, though, as "Blinking Lights and Other Revelations" suffers the same way.)

I don't think this collection really needs two ZZ Top albums, and I'm kind of torn between whether it should have only included this or just "Eliminator" (so maybe both? But they're just not that good or interesting...). I like the more obvious boogie blues roots on this album, and a couple of their tracks have rightfully stayed on classic rock radio for many (many many) years, but I'm also struck at how much more generic-sounding this album is, even with Bill Gibbons' distinctive voice. My favorites of the lot were "Waitin' for the bus", "Master of sparks", and of course the epic "La grange", as well as "Sheik"; I also enjoyed hearing what seems like the *very* rare co-lead vocals of Dusty Hill on "Beer drinkers & hell raisers". I was really torn about a rating (especially after generously giving "Eliminator" four stars), but thankfully "La grange" pushes it firmly into four-star country (Texas style).

I'm glad it's been several hundred albums (over 600 in fact) since my last Pet Shop Boys exposure, but I'm still baffled that there are three largely interchangeable albums in this collection. But interesting that "Actually" is their best-selling album, given how early it was in their career; maybe all those early fans got a bit disappointed that later albums didn't have much else to offer. I liked it that they enlisted Dusty Springfield for "What have I done to deserve this?" (although the video makes *no* sense and was surprisingly boring). I also kind of enjoyed the Gary Numan-esque refrain in "Shopping", the quintessential PSP sound in "It's a sin" (plus an equally over-the-top video), and I continue to appreciate that they put more effort into their lyrics than most pop-oriented bands of the time. But overall, this didn't move my needle much on my dislike of Pet Shop Boys; sorry, guys!