Reviews by mitch058

It seems odd to have a live/best-of album by a (then) obscure American band performing in front of thousands of screaming Japanese fans to be the lone Cheap Trick selection for this project, but since this was also their most popular and best-selling album of their entire career, I guess it also makes sense. I didn't recognize all that much from the album except their big hits "I want you to want me" and "Surrender" (and maybe their nice cover of Fats Domino's "Ain't that a shame"), and I was pretty underwhelmed by both their setlist and the production quality, but it certainly sounded like they and their fans enjoyed the show. Funny too to read that the album is actually from a show in Osaka rather than at Tokyo's much larger Bodukan theater; I can't imagine how bad the Bodukan tapes must have sounded like to make them choose what seems like a pretty bad recording. But either way, it's nice to see that their relentless touring schedule and work ethic paid off, first in Japan and then in the US, and largely continues to this day.

I'm both impressed that this album made it into the collection, and also somewhat disappointed to have it in the project. I own this album, and used to enjoy listening to it not longer after it released, but have gotten more and more disenchanted as the years have gone on and Manson has proven to be a clueless ass (and worse) both professionally and personally; I can't remember the last time I listened to this, to be honest. There are definitely some great tunes on this too-long album--especially "The beautiful people" (with a suitably disturbing dystopian video), "Cryptorchid" (with an interesting art video, apparently based on a 1989 experimental horror film "Begotten" by E. Elias Merhige), "Mister superstar" and the title track (with an interesting video released long after the album) (and kudos to the video for "Man that you fear" incorporating both Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" and Jodorowsky's film "Santa Sangre")--and I still appreciate the bleak and incessant nihilism, rock-opera-style, that drips from nearly every song, coupled with an interesting mix of Nirvana, Ministry and Nine Inch Nails. But even when this came out, it was pretty evident that Manson not only thought he was smarter and more insightful than the rest of us, but also than he actually is. It just took me a while to figure out he wasn't as creepy as much as a world-class creep. (I'm also glad that we only get one Marilyn Manson album, and this one in particular, but a shame that we don't get any of his *really* impressive covers, including the darkly spectacular versions of "Sweet Dreams" as well as "I put a spell on you".)

I don't think I've heard much by Elliott Smith, and I didn't recognize anything from this album, so nice to get a new (to me) voice and sound. That said, I'll admit that as I listened to all the intimate and often acoustic tracks, the immortal words of Cracker came to mind: "what the world needs now is another folk singer like I need a hole in my head". Although I suppose that's not really in good taste, given that Smith died soon after this album ((self?) stabbed to death, not shot, but still). Among the many seemingly Beatles-/Beach-Boys-inspired songs, I think my favorites were "Junk bond trader", "In the lost and found (honky bach)/The roost" and his single "Happiness/The gondola man". A pleasant change of pace from recent selections overall, but I'm a bit disappointed to see that there's another album yet to come by Smith in this collection; this was enough for me--or perhaps the other will be ("Either Or"), as it seems more highly regarded?

I've never heard of Spacemen 3 before, and I'm pretty sure I've never heard anything from this album outside of "Revolution" (which in turn sounds nothing like the rest of the album), so I'm glad to have the exposure. And the opening minute of the opening track "Honey" got my hopes up for an interesting late 80s sound, only to be somewhat disappointed by the very generic-sounding and indistinguishable sounds of (early) shoegaze-y music that followed (and followed), with only a few tantalizing departures in the Repo-Man-esque "Revolution" and "Lord can you hear me" (I guess "Suicide" was also a departure, but not one I wish I'd experienced). Not really my thing, but it seems like a well-done album, and I'm impressed to read that this album's sound is nothing like their earlier albums, and you can definitely hear the genesis of Madchester-like/rave-like sounds in a variety of tracks.

Nice to get another Sly & The Family Stone album in the collection, although I'll admit that it doesn't add much to "Stand!", especially without any breakout hits. On the other hand, outside of "Family Affair" the entire album was new to me, and while they're not as funk-tastic as George Clinton's various projects (especially so on this album), it's still a strangely compelling album overall despite generally muddy mixing/production. My favorites were probably "Family affair", the odd pairing of "Time" (with a painful attack on "Everyday people") and "Spaced cowboy", and "Thank you for talkin' to me Africa", the bleak riff to their earlier (and perhaps slightly more optimistic) "Thank you" single. I particularly like it that the album was renamed from "Africa Talks to You" to its current title as a reaction (and answer) to Marvin Gaye's just released "What's Going On"; I guess the increasingly strung-out, paranoid and estranged Sly didn't feel as optimistic as Gaye (or else he was just pissed at being blamed for a "riot" in Chicago at Grant Park).

This appears to be a seminal punk album, but it didn't do much for me. For a debut, it's surprisingly well-produced, tight, and at times even melodic, but it didn't really have much that helped transcend my mild aversion to the punk/garage sound. My problem, not theirs, of course. The best of the lot was probably "On the roof", the strangely controversial "Gary Gilmore's Eyes" (although I guess not technically part of the original album) and the somewhat haunting "Drowning men". And what a bummer that TV Smith couldn't have joined up with Television for the meta-irony, punk-style....

Even as a long-time Nick Cave fan, I will readily admit this collection has *far* too many of his albums, but if it helps any this is probably his best, and could easily be the only Nick Cave album you really need to hear before you die. That's no guarantee that everyone, or anyone for that matter, might enjoy his brand of gothic gospel--admittedly more bluesy on this atypical album, I suppose--but this album packs it all in, and it's a fun one to revisit. I've always enjoyed nearly all of the tracks on the long disc, but if I had to choose, my favorites are the opening pair "Song for Joy" and "Stagger Lee" (the latter with a great video), "The curse of Millhaven" and "Crow Jane"; I also enjoyed the weird sort of tangents in the Kylie Minogue duet of "Where the wild roses grow" (not a great video, though, and kind of weird that this album represents her only appearance in the entire collection), and the Dylan cover ensemble "Death is not the end". Funny to read, too, that he and PJ Harvey were partners at the time of the album; what a strange pair they must have made, with Harvey playing dulcimers and Cave screaming "All God's children gotta die". (Speaking of which, check out the excellent Cave-written/-scored film "The Proposition" for some serious murder-ballad vibes.)

I wasn't quite sure what to expect from an album and band I've never heard of, and I guess I was neither impressed nor disappointed. More punk-oriented than I'd prefer--garage-quality production, too-short track lengths to get things moving, etc.--but as a punk-ish album I definitely preferred it to others, especially since I could usually understand (and sometimes enjoy) what they had to say and play. And funny to hear small bits that were recycled later, often more effectively; the best example is "Three girl rhumba", which Elastica did to perfection on "Connected" two decades later; I feel like other tracks like "106 beats that" and "Strange" have similar promise, although I didn't see any covers mentioned. Perhaps not a backwater per se, but this definitely feels like an experiment that didn't get many followers, although I can also see why Husker Du's Greg Norton considered this one of his favorite punk albums.

I'm not really sure why we have two Motorhead albums in this collection, especially given the overlap with "Ace of Spades", but either way I'll give full credit to them for clearly putting on a great live show night after night. Even for a metal live album, the recording/production quality isn't all that great, but you can hear how...committed...these guys were to a blistering show (so much more so than that Deep Purple live show). Much like my reaction to "Ace of Spades" (the album), I'm hard-pressed to distinguish between various songs, and didn't even really try to make out the lyrics. I'm glad, though, to have finally heard the (title) inspiration for the Beastie Boys, and give them full credit for banging their heads *so* much harder than the hair metal bands that would follow.

An odd choice for a band that had a number of big hits over their career: a soundtrack to a truly obscure movie (starring Harvey Keitel and of course EWF). But I'm glad they got included in the collection, and this seems like a good album to showcase their style and talents (at least to my fairly ignorant ears). "Shining star" sets a high bar for the rest of the album, and while most of the longer tracks aren't quite as compelling (especially the narrative parts of "All about love"), it's a fun album and largely well-paced.

I'm not a big fan (or even connoisseur) of Echo and the Bunnymen, but it's nice to get the collection's three albums in chronological order. "Crocodile" sounded a lot like the Cure/Smiths genre, but this album made me largely think of U2, especially on driving tracks like "Back of love" or "Heads will roll", but also on the more atmospheric tracks like "Clay". This could just be because Ian McCulloch's voice and style seems very similar to Bono, but at times Will Sergeant's guitar also sounds a lot like The Edge. Definitely better music than the average early 80s pop/rock fare, but not really to my taste. It'll be (somewhat) interesting to see what "Ocean Rain" brings.

Based on a glowing review, I've had a copy for several years now of an Edgar Wright-directed documentary called "The Sparks Brothers", but I still haven't watched it, largely because I can't convince anyone to watch something that they've never heard of, undoubtedly reinforced by the fact that I have only a vague sense that it's about a couple of brothers who were involved in music and then disappeared (or something like that). That's probably why the band name for today's album sounded vaguely familiar, but it was only about halfway through the album (and after reading about the Mael brothers and this album) that I realized this album and that documentary were centered around the same history. I still haven't watched the documentary, but at least now I can sound a little more knowledgeable as I try to con someone into watching it with me.

I know the Wikipedia and "1001 Albums" entry make a lot of connections to UK glam rock (and Morrissey's lifelong fandom of this album), but I'll admit that the first thing that came to mind was that this is what Abba should have, and probably wanted to, sound like. (I didn't realize for several tracks that the vocals are in Russell Mael's very impressive falsetto.) There are elements of Queen there too, which definitely gets them more into glam rock territory, and the music and lyrics are much more interesting than Abba, but it still feels like cabaret music. A fun album, and nice to get something entirely new to me; plus I now have a little more context whenever I finally dust off "The Sparks Brothers".

Much like the other Siouxsie and the Banshees album in this collection, I can't quite get into their sound as much as I feel like I should, or at least they deserve given how influential they were. But this is still a very solid album, and when I finally realized that I could think of them--or perhaps only this album's version of them--as what The Smiths and The Cure *wanted* to sound like, then I enjoyed them more (I suspect a lot of that had to do with John McGeoch's inventive guitar playing). There weren't too many songs that really stood out for me, although "Into the light" and (for some reason) "Monitor" seemed a bit more distinctive and interesting. (Ironically, the video for "Spellbound" kind of did a disservice to the song, as all I could think of was how much this was exactly like a Boy George video, which probably wasn't what they were aiming for...)

I remember at some point in the later 90s buying a Goldie album (not this one), curious about all the critics' hype about the esoteric aspects of drum-n-bass, and feeling more than vaguely disappointed that it didn't really conform to my idea of what makes music interesting to listen to. I was a little hopeful when I saw that we got a Goldie album for today, imagining his apparently acclaimed debut album might have a little more variety than the later one I bought, but also fairly resigned that this could cover a lot of familiar territory. I guess it falls somewhere in between all of that, as the epic title track does indeed have a bit more variety at times, and Diane Charlamagne's voice continues to break up the too-precise and mathematical-feeling drum beats, but it's also nearly two hours' worth of fairly similar-sounding music that seems remarkably impersonal. The other tracks that seemed somewhat distinctive were "State of mind" and "Adrift".

Overall, I think I enjoyed this album more than their followup "Liege and Lief", largely because there were a lot fewer traditional folk songs (seemingly replaced by a bunch of Bob Dylan covers, of which "Si tu dois partir" was the best). It's well-produced, and solidly played, and Sandy Denny's voice really complements the songs well; much like "Liege and Leaf", though, there weren't a lot of tracks that stood out for me, aside from Denny's "Who knows where the time goes?" (better, I think, than all the later cover versions, although I doubt I've heard all of them). Nice to get another Richard Thompson entry in the collection, and also to find out the album title came from a previously-unknown-to-me game called "Ghost" that they played on a tour bus (before the tragic accident).

Although this is definitely *not* the style or pace of music I particularly enjoy, I'll give full credit to the Arctic Monkeys alums for diving headfirst into the hoary past to do the likes of Scott Walker (or perhaps even Nancy Sinatra) proud with an ersatz baroque pop album. There weren't too many tracks that called out to me, but the video for the title track was pretty fun to watch (and apparently surprisingly dangerous to shoot), and "My Mistakes Were Made for You" had a bit more meat than the rest (plus a good car-crash-scene video). It was a bit disappointing that I couldn't easily find a "1001 albums" edition that actually had this album reviewed, but that also doesn't particularly surprise me, as it's not all that interesting (or apparently lastingly die-worthy).

Gauging from this album alone, I suspect I've heard far more Coldcut than I've ever realized, largely as samples for artists like Fatboy Slim and others, which is a nice irony given how much Coldcut relied on samples themselves. They do a nice job at it, and I can see how this was a great album for the dancehall scene, although aside from the extra hyper-sampled bits (like "Beats & Pieces" and "Not paid enough") it's not really my cup of tea. The best of the lot for me were probably several of the collaborations like the opening track "People hold on" (Lisa Stansfield), the quirky "(I'm) in deep" (Mark E. Smith), "Stop this crazy thing" (Junior Reid) and to some degree "Smoke dis one" (Queen Latifah). And while it's no fault of Coldcut, of course, it was *incredibly* annoying to try to piece together the various tracks of this album from the battlefield of broken YouTube playlists....

I'd heard of Throwing Muses for a long time, but never really even knew what kind of music they played, let alone (knowingly) any songs by them. The album is definitely better than I expected/feared, but also seems like an odd choice for a cult-favorite band whose best days were ahead of this album. The highlights for me are probably "Green", "Hate my way" and "Rabbits dying", although all of the tracks are solid (and solidly alt-rock), and also off-kilter in a sort-of appealing, sort-of unsettling way, with bizarre gonzo lyrics throughout.

While this collection definitely doesn't need three Kings of Leon albums, and this one probably didn't need to get included along with their debut album in the first edition of "1001 Albums", it's also a mystery why *all* three of their albums got unceremoniously dropped from later editions, as they're a lot more interesting and talented than a (large) number of bands and artists that managed to hang in there. I also liked how this album marked a welcome transition away from punk-ish southern rock to a more distinctive style that seems to blend Jack White with CCR (sort of) and OK Go. I particularly enjoyed "King of the Rodeo" (in part due to the video's odd portrayal of a line dance competition/romance), the more mellow "Milk" and "Day old blues", plus the bonus track "Where nobody knows". You can definitely tell that the brothers (and cousin) are still searching for their identity and niche on this album, but they're (slightly) older and tighter and still talented and a bit quirky, which is a fun combination, although I can imagine how Caleb Followill's voice might be annoying to some.

I've been a fan of the Foo Fighters over the years, but I don't think I've ever really listened to any of their/his albums in full before now (ironically including the one album that I own, the 2007 "Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace"). It's a fun album, although definitely not Dave Grohl's strongest work, nor really the sound that Foo Fighters would later become, and also not all that well mixed/produced, oddly (although maybe that's just because he played every note and bang and word). I recognized and enjoyed the first three or four songs on the album, and was struck by how much Grohl was channeling Nirvana on hits like "I'll stick around" and most of the other tracks (especially "Good grief" and "Weenie beanie"), but thankfully experimented with a different groove on "Big me" (with a too-kitschy video) and a few others. A shame that this is the lone Foo Fighters album in the collection, as it's not what we deserve to hear from the Foo Fighters before we die, but at least we got some post-Cobain/-grunge from the gracious and talented Grohl.