This is the essence of Julian Cope, a wayward and eccentric individual, but one dripping with talent. . The music ranges from acoustic sketches to synth workouts to gentle kosmiche to jangly anthemic pop, and the lyrics encompass megaliths, how great his wife and kids are, lullabies, and rages against capitalism, all seen through his particular strand of English mysticism. Its joyful record, one that pulses with the delights of being alive. A lot of songwriters can do melody or experimentation, but not both. Cope however has the happy knack of being able to weld great tunes to strange noises, and for every burbling synth oddity or half finished strum here there’s a corresponding pop gem with a huge chorus. As you might expect from a twenty track double album, not every single song is a winner, but everything is at least interesting and if you don’t like one tune there’ll be another one along in a minute. It’s a varied grab bag of Cope’s obsessions, a celebration of one of the best artists this country produced in the last quarter of the twentieth century, and who is criminally underrated these days following his self-enforced exile from the mainstream music business.
Kind of gave up around this point. For me it was inferior to the 2 or 3 previous ones. I have never seen him live solo, but did manage 2 Teardrops gigs in Liverpool early 80s
What a nice surprise to see this here. He still had one excellent album in him, Interpreter, before the weirdness took over and the tunes disappeared. At this point in time he was probably my favourite artist. For me it’s not quite up there with Peggy/Jehovahkill but it’s bloody good.
I was around for pretty much Nirvana’s entire lifespan, and also pretty much exactly the right age. My sixth form mates and I were Sub Pop kids from when the NME started writing about the label, so we all had copies of Bleach early on (I have the original Tupelo green vinyl pressing, which would be worth a bit if my brother hadn’t scratched it as soon as I went to uni). I remember five or six of us chaotically dancing to Negative Creep on an otherwise empty dance floor in the alternative club. First time I saw them was at Nottingham Polytechnic in October 1990, which was good messy fun, then the Reading 91 appearance, famously below Chapterhouse. I was in the front three or four rows of people going mental while the rest stood and watched. And then Nevermind and Teen Spirit happened.
It was a strange experience to watch something I knew and loved explode so quickly. I’m not being Mr Indie Wanker, it was also great. Loads of great memories from the time, like watching them on Jonathan Ross in my mate’s bedroom when they played Territorial Pissing instead of whatever had been announced, laughing as the campus glam rock band started covering Teen Spirit instead of the Black Crowes, watching the yellow corporate whore T-shirts appear all over the city (I will admit to being bit of an indie wanker by loudly preferring my original white circles of hell crack smoking motherfucker version). Nirvana were everywhere that autumn and winter, and I was loving it. It was kind of like a slow motion version of the euphoric rush you get from Nirvana’s best records. I saw them again at Rock City in December (luckily I’d bought the ticket months in advance) and that was the last time I ever saw them. By the time In Utero came out I’d discovered the delights of loud electronic music in fields, and so I was interested and enjoyed it, but the passion wasn’t the same. It wasn’t them, it was me. Still undeniably a great band, and I’m so grateful that I was there at the time. I learnt about Kurt’s death from Teletext late one night on Channel 4, and can still remember the moment now.
There’s a good clip from Japanese TV about that Rock City gig.
I still listen to Nevermind several times a year, and it is still a perfect blend of punk attitude and pop smarts. It’s not a rough diamond at all, it’s polished to within an inch of it’s life, but it is still completely thrilling. This is the best song, don’t @ me
Aaah, yes, um … it’s a good album, but is it really a great one?
Age and listening habit wise I should’ve been front and centre for Nirvana. I owned Bleach and played it many times, so to this day I don’t get why I was non- plussed by Nevermind.
Of the albums released in September 91, Primal Scream’s Screamadelica (released on the same day) is the one I go back to.
Although hearing Drain You again does make me want to play Nevermind again to see if I missed something
Screamadelica is one of those records with some spectacular tentpoles (Come Together would be very high in my list of top 100 songs), but a lot of the stuff in between doesn’t grab me the same way. It was on my list for this project for a very long time, but ultimately just missed out. It was pencilled in for a spot somewhere between 26 and 50, but I’d already published the lower parts of the list before I decided to drop it for something else. If I was doing it all over again (definitely not), it’d very likely sneak in
That’s a nice observation of the album. and the group. Somehow I managed to sidestep Nirvana at the time: I liked the preceding Pixies/ Sonic Youth/ Husker Du/Throwing Muses axis so much that I thought Bleach wasn’t good enough and stopped paying attention to this one. I was probably remiss about that and of course I now regret not seeing them play the tiny Norwich Arts Centre in 1990
For me, Nevermind has always hinged on Territorial Pissings. You get all the big, radio-friendly crowd pleasers in the first half, then Polly – which sort of sounds like an album closer in a lot of ways and could easily swap places with Something In The Way – followed by TP, which has the 0-60 acceleration of an album opener.
It’s a really odd bit of sequencing when you look at it, and it sends a meat cleaver down the middle of the record: the two poles of its sound, back-to-back, taking us from acoustic misery to the band absolutely thrashing it out. But it’s also taking a meat cleaver to the past, with the 60s-baiting at the start of Territorial Pissings giving way to that howl of inchoate frustration that kicks the track off proper. The peace and love generation birthing the inner pain and rage generation. Much of the “proper songwriting” and commitment to melody of the first half giving way to the greater discord of the second.
And it’s the second half where all the real gems are. Drain You is definitely up there with the best songs on the record; it’s a great lyric, a great vocal and it has that almighty roar when the instruments kick in after the first line. I can remember winding those few seconds back on a walkman over and over again listening to that moment and wondering what it must be like to be one of three people capable of making a noise like that.
I like my Nirvana ferocious, so my favourite songs on Nevermind these days are probably Territorial Pissings, Stay Away, Drain You and Something In The Way. The latter because it’s the zenith of a certain version of their sound, because I don’t think another band could have produced it and because it blows me away that decades later we got an entire Batman movie based on it, and that didn’t even seem weird. Oh, and On A Plain has the best couplet in the entire album (amidst stiff competition): “The greatest day that I’ve ever had/Was when I learned to cry on command”. Simultaneously bang on brand and brilliantly self-mocking.
So, for me Nevermind has always really been two records. The first six tracks are a mini-album that also function as a greatest hits set of a sort. Radio Friendly Unit Shifters. The second six tracks are the greatest punk band that has ever been or will ever be burning through their set at high speed; shorter, grittier songs. The only thing disturbing the conceptual purity of this vision is that Breed and Lounge Act should be swapped around.
I would love to have been in the room when they sequenced Nevermind, because if ever a band had an uncomfortable duality it was Nirvana, and it’s a duality that’s clearly expressed here. If I have a complaint about the whole thing it’s that they should have loosened the sheen of the production as the album progressed.
Great comment. You don’t mention what format you experienced the album in, but it’s worth noting that that hinge is exactly the break between sides one and two in old money.
This is another album very closely tied up with that particular time of my life when I was into the free festivals of the early 90s, a crusty by any other name. RDF were stalwarts of that scene, the anarchopunk answer to the dub poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson or Benjamin Zephaniah. Frontman Chris Bowsher declaims (‘singing’ would be far too generous a word) his lyrics over some thunderously heavy dub backing. The words are bitter and angry but empathetic, anthems for the dispossessed and those done down by the cruel and vindictive government of the day (plus ca change, eh?). The real rewards are in the music, the relentless bass pulse and the echoing drums. I had this and the preceding album Borderline Cases taped on either side of a C90, and when I hear it now, it provokes one of those Proustian rushes, a memory of being sat on an InterCity train somewhere in the Midlands, rushing past the cooling towers of a concrete power station. I’m not sure how this album would fare to someone coming brand new to it in 2023 but this urban ragged dub punk poetry has been with me with thirty years and I don’t think it’ll ever leave.
What a thoroughly enjoyable and informative thread this is. A fine combination of record reviews and autobiography. Your writing is superb.
All these personal memories are so marvelously described: from a record shop in Portsmouth to “InterCity train somewhere in the Midlands, rushing past the cooling towers of a concrete power station.”
When you have finished it, you should print it out as one document for friends and family to browse through.
My favourite new band of the last five years. I’ve written before in this list about how the combination of frantic punk rock with big melodies and hooks is basically my musical happy place, and Melbourne’s Press Club absolutely nail that sound. It’s the Hüsker Dü template updated for the twenty-first century, and it sounds fantastic, with punchy riffs and a firebrand vocal performance. It’s full of energy, thrills, and general lust for life. There’s a real sense of integrity and passion around them, and it helps that they are one of the best live bands I’ve ever seen. Frontwoman Nat is a force of nature and a full blown rock star. They should be massive.
Don’t know Sleeper Agent but I will check them out!
I hope you and Bingo have managed to see Press Club live. They are spectacularly good. The first time I saw them in Bristol I immediately bought tickets to go and see them again in Cardiff a few days later.
Replying a bit late (although it’s been a while, I do hope that you haven’t been trapped under a large piece of furniture for three weeks😉)
Nope, not seen them. But then again I don’t go to many gigs so it’s not surprising. I’ll probs stick to bouncing around the kitchen when they next appear on Shuffle…
A supergroup of sorts, JTB featured Blake Swarzenbach, late of Jawbreaker, Chris Daly from Texas Is The Reason and Jeremy Chatelain of Handsome, all big or biggish names in the post hardcore scene. This was their debut, and their masterpiece (the second album is decent, the third is unlistenable). It’s not a word I’d often use in a positive sense, but this is one of the most adult alt rock records I know, in all the right ways. It just sounds good, you know? You can tell time and care has been taken over the production, instead of the banging it out in twenty four hours option a younger band might be forced to take. Don’t worry, that doesn’t mean it’s a polished piece of tasteful boredom – there is still plenty of distortion and crunch in the guitars, and a muscular rhythm section, played off against quieter introspective ballads. And, yes, it’s emo but it’s years on from the slamming the bedroom door and shouting I hate you approach. It’s about cynicism and depression, about finding yourself a fair chunk of the way through your life and realising it hasn’t turned out like you thought it might. Broken marriages and motel bedrooms, bad thoughts on sleepless nights.
Swarzenbach’s lyrics have a literary flair unusual in the genre (he was an English major and it shows). The heartbreaking Conrad in particular could be a modern classic short story, and every song has some snappy couplet or arresting image at its heart. It’s a record that paints pictures in your head, vibrant and vivid. It even manages the difficult trick of making a love song sound like something fresh and new, as the closer Sweet Avenue ends on a note of beauty and the hope of a nascent relationship.
There’s a reason why there’s only going to be one or two alt-rock, indie rock, call it what you like records higher than this on my list. I’ve loved it ever since it came into my life sometime in the late 90s, and it gave me one of my most High Fidelity moments when I was blasting it over the speakers in a Portsmouth record shop and two or three people came up to ask what it was.
Yeah, turns out this is the greatest live album of all time. If the holy grail of a live recording is to make you feel like you were there, then my word does this deliver. That old cliche of ‘you can hear the room’ is for once actually appropriate and not hyperbolic embellishment. This is an astonishingly warm and intimate album, driven by Hathaway’s soulful electric piano and Steve Wonder-esque vocals. It’s a soul record – it couldn’t be anything else when you feel this close to the raw heart of the performer – but the sense of talented musicians coming together and creating in the moment is also very jazz, especially in the lengthy ten minute plus jams of The Ghetto and Voice Inside (Everything Is Everything). It’s not just the musicians that make this the record it is, though. The audience is such a vital part of the recording, clapping and hollering ecstatically throughout. The give and take between them and the band is incredible, a huge positive vibration of love, never more so than in their almost gospel choir singing along on You’ve Got a Friend.
So much groove, so much atmosphere, so much joy, so much fun.
Brilliant album! Two of its contempories are as good, if not better: Don’t Fight the Feeling: The Complete Aretha Franklin & King Curtis Live at Fillmore West and Curtis/Live! and Bill Withers Live At Carnegie Hall, especially Don’t Fight The Feeling, which is best Complete, rather than two separate albums.
As for feeling as if you are there, you can’t beat Sam Cooke – Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963, James Brown – Live at the Apollo, Bob Marley And The Wailers Live!! and The Buena Vista Club Live. You can almost touch the sweat at the Harlem Square Club, the female shrieks on Lost Someone are perfectly timed, the audience participation on Lively Up Yourself are thrilling and there is absolute adoration for the band from Cuba.
It’s rather astonishing that you can buy this album in a little Original Album Series boxed set with four other of Donny’s releases for the price of a couple of cardiac threatening pastries. One of the best of all time.
West Coast by Studio celebrated it’s fifteenth anniversary a couple of years ago. There weren’t any deluxe remasters or box sets. It’s an album that never troubled the charts or the arbiters of cool. I can’t even remember how I came across it. There’s no origin story, no great rock n roll myth, to Studio. They were just two guys from Sweden who thought it’d be a good idea to make an album that sounded like Can, Neu, Happy Mondays and The Cure dancing together in the rays of the rising sun somewhere in the Balearics. Somehow they pulled it off and gave us this gem, effortlessly pretty disco, krautrock, dub, and indie pop replayed through a sun kissed filter without falling into generic Cafe Del Mar blandness. Perhaps that makes it sound like Record Collection Rock, a faithful ticking off of the approved influences, but to think that would be to miss just how invitingly lush and lazy, blissful and beautiful, this music is. These are long hypnotic tracks that somehow stay the same while shifting and reinventing themselves like old Underworld records used to do, all delay and echo, off kilter afrodub rhythms, synth washes and trebly guitars. Music to get lost in.
It’s an obscure record, but not one without influence. It could well have kickstarted the Scandinavian disco scene, a signpost to the stuff Diskjokke, Lindstrøm, Prins Thomas and others would start doing a little later. Studio themselves never made another record (there’s a collection of their remixes of other artists called Yearbook 2* that is worth tracking down, if only for their unutterably gorgeous take on The Rubies’ Room Without A key), but this one assured their place in my heart. One of the great lost albums. There’ll be magazine features about in twenty years.
*Studio’s discography, though tiny, is rather confused. As best I can piece it together, most of the tracks on West Coast were originally 12″ singles that were compiled on a vinyl LP that was subsequently reissued on CD. Then there is another CD, Yearbook 1 that repeats several of the tracks from West Coast in slightly different versions along with some odd tracks from compilation albums and samplers. None of it is rubbish.
18. Cassandra Jenkins – An Overview On Phenomenal Nature
The most recent record on this list by some distance. The third song here was my introduction to her, found in the early 2021 lockdowns. “Hard Drive” is a tour de force, a spoken word account of meetings with various people – a security guard, a bookmaker, a driving instructor – that builds and builds on waves of glittering guitar, piano and drum loops. It’s a stunning song, one that will have you playing it again as soon as it finishes. And the good news is the rest of the album is pretty special too. The sound takes in traditional singer songwriter, folk, jazz, even some ambient. The palette throughout is restrained with hushed saxophone, gently rolling drums, keys for melody and atmosphere, and some lovely fluid, occasionally fuzzy, guitar, alongside strings and woodwind where they are needed. Across the record they coalesce into terrific arrangements, ornate yet direct, intimate but outward looking. The whole thing sounds luminous and honeyed, a triumph of production. The lyrics are snapshots and stories from everyday lives, part narrative, part poetry. It makes sense that Jenkins has supported Craig Finn from the Hold Steady, although the sound here couldn’t be more different from his main band. The words are held together with a sense of awe, a recognition of the extraordinary wonder and range of life, from the glories of nature to deep grief (Jenkins was in David Berman’s band for his Purple Mountains tour, which was derailed by his suicide on its eve – “Ambiguous Norway” here is about that “Farewell, Purple Mountains / I see a range of cumulus / the majesties transmutation / distant, ambiguous / The skies replace the land with air / no matter where I go / you’re gone, you’re everywhere.”). It all comes together on the closing The Ramble, seven minutes of shimmering keyboards, throaty sax and field recordings of birds and insects. There are no words, but it doesn’t need them to reach the transcendence the record has been building towards for the past half hour. Close your eyes and you can see bullrushes against a golden late summer sky, and feel a lover’s head on your shoulder and the sun on your face.
I saw her at the end of 2021, one of my first gigs after things started happening again, and it was a perfect capstone to that strange year, with none of the intricacies of the album lost. Maybe it’s a bit odd to describe a record that’s barely out of nappies as an all time favourite, but. it’s hard to imagine there’ll be a better ambient indie folk-jazz set released in the coming years.
Panopticon is a long running project that seeks to take the Norwegian black metal template of music intimately linked to that land and apply it to US landscapes and traditional sounds. Maybe you didn’t realise you needed a metal / bluegrass fusion in your life, but they are here to prove you wrong. Vicious riffing allied to Appalachian folk might sound like a stretch, but it sounds perfectly natural here, fluid and integrated. Just listen to how the plaintive Americana opening of Where Mountains Pierce The Sky gives way to some absolutely skyscraping riffs, the way the Long Road triptych (see? There’s even something here for prog fans!) moves from pure acoustic whimsy to raging metal to a spaced out Floydesque section and back again. The music is drenched in emotion, unafraid to wear its heart on its sleeve, and sorrowful and uplifting by turns.
It’s a careful assembly of moving parts that makes it all the more impressive that Panopticon is a one man band – Austin Lunn plays everything here. It’s an insanely ambitious record, and one he pulls it off in fine style. It could be an indigestible wad of genres, but it works brilliantly. Absolutely soaring music, possibly my favourite metal album. It also sports one of my favourite pieces of artwork, a tremendous photo of a low sun in a snowy forest
oh go on, have a few videos, for all of The Long Road, to give you an idea of the scope
Probably the new Rime Of Memory I expect? IIRC you quite like Saor, so you might get along with it! Or it might just give you the horse staggers.
For the benefit of the other three viewers of this thread, I’ve been a bit derailed by an insane couple of weeks at work. I was hoping to have it done by the end of the year but probably won’t now. Still, it’ll brighten up those dull January days when you all lose your collective rag over the blatant cheat I have at number one…
Keep going, Kid! I mean, when convenient, obviously. Just wanted to reassure you there are more than three other readers of this thread. Or maybe I’m simply one of the other three. But in any case, I’m loving these posts, and even when I don’t enjoy the recommendations I enjoy the writing. (And I often enjoy the recommendations. How did Fu Manchu pass me by???)
did you miss me? I’ve had a busy few weeks, with some insane times at work, and then having the entire ground floor of our house relaid, which turned out to be the very definition of domestic chaos. Who would ever have thought that there would turn out to be a drain there? Anyway, thanks for the kind words and encouragement. Let’s get back into it…
16. Wu- Tang Clan – Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)
A great part of the appeal of pop music is the idea of a band as a gang, a tight knit group that’s impenetrable to outsiders, yet also makes the listener feel part of the team, in on the secret, The Clash understood this, and a decade plus later the Wu-Tang Clan took that stance and ran with it. With the core group running to nine members, they’re almost certainly going to be the largest band in this list, and they’re all distinct individual personalities, with a special chemistry between them. There’s the larger than life brashness of Method Man, the cool and calm cerebral technique of the Genius, and the sheer unhinged mania of Ol’ Dirty Bastard. Everyone brings their A-game. It’s the Hollywood story of the no hoper kid from the wrong side of the tracks seizing their chance and stepping up. The MCs leave hooks and memorable lines all over the album – “up from the 36 chambers!”, “when I get up and move my body…”, “who’s your A&R? A mountain climber with an electric guitar?”
Then RZA’s production is astonishing. It’’s dusty, scratchy and eerie, but also rugged and chunky, strewn with little minor key piano riffs that stick in your brain like a fishhook digging into the soft meat of your cerebellum. The final stroke of genius was incorporating the kung fu vibes of the films RZA loved throughout the record. I’m a suburban white kid from small town England who knew nothing of Staten Island or the projects, but years of late night television watching had primed me for this, getting me all excited when a piece of dialogue from Five Deadly Venoms or Shaolin Vs Wu Tang dropped. It was quirky and different enough to make the record stand out, and lent it a unique flavour that set it apart from a sea of identikit gangsta rap and G-Funk.
It’s a chaotic record, but it’s also funny, dark, angry, inventive, realistic and absurd. It all comes together on Da Mystery Of Chessboxin’, which is still one my favourite hip hop tracks ever. An opening snatch of dialogue that evokes mysticism, violence, careful thought and discipline, (almost) the whole crew taking verses with none of them dropping the ball, and a relentless beat adorned with a spooky off kilter piano lick.
As an autobiographical aside, this is almost certainly the last album I received via the medium of a mate taping it for me on one side of a C90 (cheers, Del). I can’t remember what was on the other side now, but this electrifying classic will never be forgotten.
I love the barking mad philosophy behind it. From Wikipaedia:
Part of the album’s title originates from the Five Percent philosophy, known to adherents as the Supreme Mathematics, which attaches the number 9 with the meaning “to bring into existence”. Because the Wu-Tang Clan was made of nine members, each of whom has four chambers of the heart, the album was subtitled “36 Chambers”, being the total of the nine hearts of the members.
In reference to the 1978 kung fu film The 36th Chamber of Shaolin that the group enjoyed watching, the Clan considered themselves as lyrical masters of the 36 chambers, and arrived onto the rap scene while appearing to be ahead, and more advanced over others, with “knowledge of 36 chambers of hip hop music when everyone else in hip hop was striving to attain the knowledge of 35 lessons”. Also, while the human body has 108 pressure points (1 + 0 + 8 = 9), only the Wu-Tang martial artists learned and understood that 36 of those pressure points are deadly (9 + 36 = 45) (4 + 5 = 9). The lyrics and rhymes of the 9 members are to be considered as 36 deadly lyrical techniques for pressure points. All of this is the basis for the album title, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), being that 9 members x 4 chambers = 36.
There’s a lot of interesting stuff about the Five-Percent Nation in RZA’s excellent book, The Tao Of Wu.
It’s a book so good that when a friend discovered I hadn’t read it, he somehow managed to have it couriered to me for the following day, despite the fact I was on a beach holiday thousands of miles from home. It’s a short but sweet recounting of RZA’s life to date, incorporating Hip Hop koans, , arguments for vegetarianism and chess tips. Great pool read.
I think there’s a universality to this album that you don’t find in a lot of Hip Hop. It’s a bunch of kids letting you into their weird little world, knowing that you have your own weird little world too.
It also birthed several of the greatest music videos ever made. I still covet one of those hoodies; I’m not sure they were ever released as Wu Wear.
I have a Wu hoodie. It’s from an etsy seller so I very much doubt it’s licensed product, but the quality is superb: black with da big Batman “W” on the front and a smaller one on the hood in bright yellow. It goes a bit OTT on the transfers with “Wu Tang” running down one arm (I’d prefer it if that wasn’t there – if you know, you know) so I dont wear it outside the house. That and I’m a middle class white bloke in my 7th decade.
I’m sorry to break it to you like this, but this isn’t the first online music community I’ve been part of. Around 2000 -2005 I was very active on the forums of Punk Planet magazine (don’t bother looking for them, they’re not there anymore). One of the buzz bands there was The Weakerthans, a Canadian quartet with their roots in spitting punk (one of them was in Propagandhi!), but who were now playing a more elegant, literary music that owed as least as much to indie pop, folk and country as it did punk. The fervour was so great that in those pre-streaming, pre You Tube days, I took a punt and ordered this CD all the way from America, and, yeah, it turned out to be just as good as my online friends were saying. I had it on constant rotation for a year, always finding some connection in it every time I listened.
Singer and lyricist John K Samson’s voice may be frail but it’s the perfect carrier for his words of melancholy introspection, with all their beautiful simplicity and directness, their tales of breakups, loneliness, and the perils of small towns, their tenderly detailed observations of the minutiae of a life. It’s an album which had, and still has, a direct line to my heart. It’s so clear, so true, so affecting.
Twenty years ago they toured Europe off the back of this record. No Irish date of course, but I was so desperate to see them that my wife & I flew over to catch the show at the Garage in London, where I met someone from the PP boards, one of my first real life meetings with someone I knew off the internet (not the very first, that honour must go to my dear friend Etain, also from PP, who took us under her wing when we moved to Dublin. It’s been far too long since I’ve seen her, I’m going to sit down and wrote her an email after I’ve done this). I had one of my favourite gig moments there, when the band started playing None Of The Above (a song which is, er, not on this particular album). The entire room sang the opening lines, and I had this sudden epiphany that this little band, whose music had come to mean so much to me but to no one else I knew in real life, had had the same impact on at least several hundred other people, and they were right there with me right then, feeling like I did. It’s still a crystal sharp memory a couple of decades later, and I still love this album.
14. The Congos – Heart Of The Congos
Despite being produced at the legendary Black Ark by the even more legendary Lee Scratch Perry, this album was ignored on release. Rejected by Island, a few hundred domestic Jamaican copies crept out, to no impact at all. I’d never even heard of it until the mid-90s reissue on Blood And Fire, which reestablished it in the reggae pantheon.
Being recorded in 1977 as the two sevens clashed, it’s right in the heart of the classic roots era. It’s not a typical roots sound though, apart from a few flashes. Rather, this is swirling, dense and murky, the springy percussion riding on a wave of bass that is not so much fat as obese. It’s hypnotic and otherworldly, but always devotional and righteous. There are also dubbed up moos on at least two songs. While Scratch provides that marvellous production job, the heart of the album is in the brilliantly emotive vocal performances, tenor and falsetto winding around each other and anchored by a deep baritone. The lyrics are full of biblical tribulation, but they sound like soothing contentment. Like taking your soul for a really good bath, nice and deep and hot.
It completely passed me by as well until the Blood and Fire reissue. The extra CD with the dubs is excellent. It was actually released in the UK on the Beat’s Go Feet label in 1980. I’d like to see any reviews of that if any appeared in the weeklies.
Mercury Rev were essentially dead when this came out in 1998. Disintegrating lineups and disastrously selling albums saw them slip out of as much of the public eye as they were ever in, and very few people were interested in what they were going to do next. Turned out that their plan was to ditch the fuzz and distortion and take a right turn into orchestral whimsy. Deserter’s Songs is a cracked Disney fantasia, woozy, romantic and earnest, played on eccentric instrumentation, piccolos and bowed saws, harpsichords and clarinets.
It’s completely out of time, but very firmly in a place, rooted in the beauties of upper New York State. When I saw them on this tour, the backdrop was a painting of the Catskils, and at a particular point in the set, a whole host of fairy lights came on in the sky above them. Simple, yes, but oh so effective, capturing the album’s whole vibe of a child falling asleep in a log cabin as stars come out over the mountains in one lovely moment. That gig, at Portsmouth Wedgewood Rooms is a strong contender for the best show I ever saw, a band that knew they’d been given a second chance grasping it for all they were worth. They’s played most of DS through the main set, alongside catalogue favourites like Chasing A Bee, Frittering, and Car Wash Hair, to the point where I was wondering what they could do for an encore. What they did was Cortez The Killer. I believe I heard those opening notes and spontaneously levitated.
This is a terrific otherworldly fairy tale of an album. There’s an instrumental version of this album as well, available in all the usual places. Sometimes I think it might be even more magical, if that’s possible.
Nice choice! The band were always a little out of step with the times, and although I still prefer the stoner-poetry of “Yerself is Steam” , I will re-listen to this.
I’m talking about the power of love now, I’m telling you what love can do. This snippet from the last song here is the story of this record in a nutshell. It’s Isaac Hayes’ testament to the tortures of love. Utterly drenched in strings, it’s opulent and melodramatic, overblown and heightened in every respect. And also, let’s not forget, so damn funky. There’s just four tracks here, but the album runs to forty five minutes. It’s soul alright, but it’s a long long way from Motown Chartbusters.
The opening seconds set the scene, as two quick drumbeats give way to a huge swathe of syrupy strings and psychedelic fuzz guitar. It’s Walk On By, but not as we know it, Jim. The quiet poise and self restraint of Dionne Warwick’s version is blown out of the window here in a great twelve minute roar of symphonic soul, the last half of which sees Hayes on his knees, ripping the words out of his shattered heart, while massed strings, dirty guitar and Hammond organ rise to a frenzied climax around him. And that’s only track one.
Next up, Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymystic is a huge funk jam, revolving around an insistent bassline adorned with crystalline echoing piano runs. The relentless pulse is hypnotising and the forward momentum undeniable, almost an (infinitely funkier) precursor to the motorik sound that Neu! would develop in the coming decade. Afterwards, One Woman is the most straight ahead track here, and clocks in at a frankly weedy five minutes. Even at a relatively concise length, the dynamics and the build here are fabulous, as impassioned wails and swooning strings come together in the final minute, only to fade out. I certainly would not have grumbled if this one had run to seven minutes or so.
If it’s build you’re after, then the last track here is what it’s all about. The take on Jimmy Webb’s By The Time I Get To Phoenix is just short of nineteen minutes. The opening half is minimal, just a simple repeated bass pulse, organ drone and ride cymbal. Hayes spools out a monologue over the top, his spoken word telling of a young man who falls foul of love and infidelity, diving into detail (you want to know what model and year of car the subject of the song is driving? Ike’s got you covered). He is spellbinding, a master of oratory in the manner of a preacher. And then, round about 8:40, he starts to sing, and the unerring repetition of the music gives way to a simple drumbeat and the strings begin to sing. The remaining ten minutes of the song are a gradual ratcheting up of a dial, as Hayes’s singing becomes ever more impassioned, the horn riff ever more piercing, the emotion ever more explosive.
It’s a stunning record, a perfect example of where vision and ambition can take you.
Stunning record worthy of a place in anyone’s top twenty. And, as @John-Walters once said, “surely the best photo of a perfect, shiny, baldy bonce there has ever been.”
That stupid one album per artist rule I set myself at the beginning of this makes this a very difficult decision. If I pick this one, then I can’t have Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, On The Beach, Mirrorball, Sleeps With Angels, After The Goldrush, or any of half a dozen other great NY records. So why Ragged Glory? Mainly because of all his great albums, this is the first one I came to as a contemporary new release, and also because when the mood catches you right there is no finer sound in rock music than Neil and the Horse at full gallop.
It’s long and loose, full of arching guitar solos, informal and spontaneous. Volume and distortion are the watchwords here, but there’s room for melodies and catchy choruses as well. There are many great individual moments – the relentless pounding at the end of Fuckin’ Up, the lyrical looping guitar lines of Over And Over (this album has some of Neil’s best electric playing ever on it) – but the triumph of the album is the vibe, the atmosphere. If you didn’t already know it was born out of four guys jamming in a barn you wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out. There’s something essentially good natured about it. You can hear the friendship and camaraderie between these musicians coming out in the playing and the lyrics, which are largely concerned with hippie nostalgia and looking back, without much anguish or introspection, but a wry satisfaction. Satisfaction allied to a massive great slab of feedback, mind you.“Dinosaur” is usually a bad word when writing about rock music (sorry J!), but this record was born to roam prehistoric swamps. The earth shakes when it approaches. It’s maybe the most appropriately named of all Neil’s records. It’s ramshackle, primitive, and – yeah – glorious.
It is great – I am glad there’s a Neil Young album on your list
It was my first Neil purchase – (though Freedom, along with Decades was my prior introduction to his canon). Mansion on The Hill, Days that Used To Be, Farmer John, etc – there isn’t a duff track on it and I can hear them all in my head still without putting it on.
My only problem with it is the sameness of it all – the mood stays the same throughout, and it’s soaked in feedback. Sleeps With Angels has great slabs of Neil solo – Trans Am, Safeway Cart – but they are interspersed with quieter, gentler tracks like Train of Love.
I’m not sure whether F*!#in’ up or Piece of Crap is the better joke song, though.
Sleeps With Angels is a brilliant record, and Change Your Mind is one of my favourite ling Neil jams. The one and only time I ever saw NY&CH, Piece Of Crap was the second song, which was…unexpected.
I took a similar path (although I did buy Freedom, having read great things (“NY is back”) about the Japan-only release Eldorado EP).
To be honest, I could happily stop at Ragged Glory. I bought a few after in hope, but nothing since gets repeat plays. I know, it’s me not him. I’m pleased Shakey is still around to release records 34 years later, I just don’t want to buy them.
I feel much the same. The first two of his I bought were Freedom and Ragged Glory, and everything since just feels like diminishing returns – to the extent that I often don’t bother to check.
As stated above Sleeps With Angels is a great album, I also liked Harvest Moon and Silver and Gold. With The Horse there’s Greendale and Psychedelic Pill that are very listenable this century. Is it as good as his 60s/70s stuff? Probably not, but I am glad he put them out.
The only contemporary NY album I have bought as I had been so impressed by what I heard on the John Peel show. His live appearance on SNL from this time (which I didn’t know about) is legendary.
Another act where it is very hard to pick just one album. Any of the Bill Berry era albums could have been on this list. I’m not sure any band has ever had such a sustained run of brilliance. From Murmur to New Adventures, R.E.M. released ten albums in thirteen years, and every one of them is fantastic (okay, if you put a gun to my head I might admit that Fables and Monster are slightly less fabulous than the others, but it’s a very fine margin).
So why Document? Because it was my first, another album I fell in love with via the medium of hometaped C90s. I borrowed it off Matthew Bowden in the first year of sixth form, made a copy in the twin deck cassette player that was part of my midi stack (oh, the 80s) and listened to it over and over on the school bus in those days when my entire record collection ran to maybe twenty tapes. It was probably a good place to start with R.E.M. It had the hit single The One I Love, and it was direct enough to appeal to my adolescent taste (think Fables might have left me cold at that age), but also weird enough to make me realise that there was more to this lot than a radio anthem with catchy chorus and that investigating them would pay off. And indeed, I was there buying Green on release, and I didn’t get off the bus again for a very long time.
The album pivots on the two big singles. On either side of them, the opening run is angry politically engaged rock music (and doesn’t Disturbance At The Heron House seem all the more prescient in the light of the Jan 6th riots?), steely and somehow cryptic yet unambiguous, which is a very REM dichotomy, whereas side two is starker and more experimental. It turns its back on the political engagement of the first half, in favour of something almost post apocalyptic as we move from the Shaker rituals of Fireplace through repeated mentions of birds and departure to the eerie groove of Oddfellows Local 151’s visions of immolation.
Everybody here is brilliant. I love Stipe’s voice, Buck’s jangle and crunch and Berry pretty much being the entire rhythm section, but I have to make special mention of Mike Mills, R.E.M.’s secret weapon. Those lovely melodic high basslines and glorious backing vocals (his singing “time I had some time alone” in It’s The End Of The World will never not make me smile) are such a key part of their sound. The best band that ever came out of the USA and it’s not even close.
You mean your favourite US band I think 😉 It is a magnificent career though. Also my first R.E.M. album. I think it is a little patchy, probably not making my top 5 by them. The highs are very high though, Welcome to the Occupation also being my favourite track I think
I went to have an overdue listen this morning and was surprised to discover that, on Spotify at least, It’s The End Of The World… has twice as many listens as The One I Love. Would not have guessed that, although I guess the former better befits our current mise en scene.
Out of interest, who are the other contenders for best band to come out of the US?
The crucial test for me is “who was as good for as long” and I don’t know that I can think of very many credible contenders. There is still an American band to come very high in this countdown, so in theory that’s at least one album I like more than any R.E.M. record (which only highlights the essential daftness of assigning numerical values to things, but hey it’s too late to stop now), but that band’s entire discography isn’t up there with R.E.M.’s.
The Dead? Lasted longer, hit some awesome heights but also loads of useless noodling. Fugazi? Similar lifespan to R.E.M.’s imperial period, but released less albums and some of them were Red Medicine. Nirvana? A firework that burned very brightly but very briefly. The Beach Boys? Mike Love. Public Enemy? Couldn’t keep their relevancy up and were wrong footed by cultural shifts. The Band? Suspect at least some of them were Canadian, and they’re not that great anyway. Maaaaaybe Parliament / Funkadelic but probably not.
“Who was as good for as long” is a fair benchmark, and it certainly leaves them well placed. It also immediately disapplies the likes of Pixies, the Velvets, Nirvana, etc.
We’re looking at an imperial period of about 15 years, including 10 great albums. That’s going to be tough to beat.
Fugazi gets you 12 years and 7 albums (including – as you rightly note – Red Medicine). Maybe you can roll Minor Threat in there for a little extra edge, but that’s probably cheating.
You can make an argument for Pearl Jam, who have certainly kept on going, but I’m not convinced their actual imperial period was all that long, and it certainly isn’t 10 albums.
The Band would also be a contender, but you’d probably need to count he Dylan stuff.
Talking Heads, maybe? There’s a decade worth of great stuff there, and 8 at minimum very good records. Fleetwood Mac?
The obvious other heavyweight in the division is probably Metallica. They’ve been absolutely enormous for 4 decades, so they have REM beat on that front, but then you could argue that only the first 5 albums are really essential.
Pearl Jam’s imperial period – Ten through Yield – is as good as anything and it’s remarkable how the NME / Nirvana sneering has stuck to them even after the thick end of 35 years. Their crime was to not be grunge, and to be earnest musos. And that’s it, really. And the Guys Who Know have kinda never forgiven them, while giving a critical pass to all kinds of terrible crud.
Btw – I really like the Brendan O’Brien remaster of Ten. But my PJ album of choice will always be Vs – an absolutely savage belter of a record which comes right out of the gate snarling and frothing and doesn’t let up for much of side one. And then gets going again, still covered in foam and phlegm. And contains a musical quotation from Ben by Michael Jackson, so doubleplusgood 👍👍
However, Ten through to Yield is only five albums, and one of them is No Code which is a bit patchy (but has Hail Hail and Off He Goes on it, so come on, it’s still great).
The Ramones?
Maybe in terms of influence, but maybe not appeal to a broad audience (despite the T-Shirt sales), and some of their later albums are (to put it kindly” and acquired taste
ZZ Top?
No question on longevity, but consistently great?
Foo Fighters?
Longevity, but may be not the invention or growth of REM
ZZ Top have never been *great*. Entertaining and very good, sure. Great, never.
If Foo Fighters had released their debut followed by The Color and the Shape 10 times, we could talk. What actually happened is that they released the debut, The Color and the Shape, then 10 albums of “hey, is this Dave Matthews but with screaming?” Were it not for rock’s least elusive Lawrence Llewelyn Bowen impersonator and their commitment to being genuinely adorable live, they’d be a footnote.
Green Day used to be *great*, and then stopped being, and their not-great era encompasses their entire period of success except for Dookie. I’m glad they exist though.
Hmm … very much my thoughts about “greatness” of the above. Very good (with obvious flaws) but not truly great.
At least it inspired a response (as I expected it to)
Re: Green Day (apart from Dookie) – as it is the 20th Anniversary, I listened again to American Idiot. I maintain that is still a great album
Great album: in contrast to dai, this one is definitely in my top 5 REM albums.
Having said that – in contrast to the Kid, my number one REM album has been and remains Fables. I was hooked from the first time that I heard the opening notes of Feeling Gravity’s Pull and that feeling of weird excitement has never let up in nearly 40 years (1985 was it?).
1. Automatic for the People
2. Murmur
3. Life’s Rich Pageant
4. Green
5. Hmmmm it could make it or maybe Reckoning or Fables or New Adventures or Out of Time
Ah this is the one where the Byrdsian magic is lost and the words emerge from the mist among less subtle, more mainstream rock. Still great stuff therein, as would be the case for years to come, but…
Floodland is the second Sisters album, but only frontman Andrew Eldritch remained from the earlier incarnations, alongside his trusty drum machine Doktor Avalanche.It’s a solo album in all but name (Patricia Morrison was nominally a member of the band at this point, but her exact level of contribution has always been shrouded in mystery), and a transformation from the earlier sound. The drum machine bedrock is still there but the music on top is all synths and sequencers, with barely an electric guitar to be heard (the most memorable riff on the whole thing is played on the bass). It owes as much to John Carpenter as it does Motorhead. It’s an epic record, one that sounds so huge it should be no surprise that Jim Steinman was involved on a few tracks, of which This Corrosion is maybe the one they are still best known for. Eldritch called it a disco party run by the Borgias, which to be honest is pretty hard to beat as a description of a ten minute dance floor thumper packed with venom. Corrosion and other big songs like Dominion are gloriously bombastic and over the top, but offset by quieter moments, like the entirely (sequenced) piano driven 1959 or the ghostly bass pulse of Driven Like The Snow.
Eldritch’s lyrics come to the fore throughout, an intoxicating mix of pun and allusion, stealing from TS Eliot and riffing off Dylan and Shelley. Throughout the record, the words are dense and multi-layered, rewarding careful consideration. They are much concerned with apocalypse, armageddon, floods and love gone bad, but there’s a knowingness and a half glimpsed smirk that stops it becoming an entirely po-faced affair. Eldritch is acknowledging that we’re all doomed, but inviting you to pull up a chair and enjoy it with him.
A theme I’ve returned to throughout this list has been the idea of band as gang, and the Sisters fit right into that, no matter how many of them there actually were at this point. There was a totality of package to them. All the records have a common design template which means they stand together, but not with anything else. It’s part of their appeal, the gang mentality that had served the likes of The Clash so well. You either get it or you don’t, and if you get it, you *really* get it. There’s a constant tension between simplicity and complexity in their music, monotonous and relentless beats paired with clever lyrics and complex instrumentation. They can construct epic melancholic grandeur and at the same time revel in big stupid rock music. They’re intellectual and also gloriously dumb, and one of the finest British bands of my lifetime.
The Crom was from Hinchingbrooke, near Huntingdon, about 20 miles away from Ely. I got married in his house. I had two live bands and a free bar at the reception, no wonder he didn’t send us a card, the miserable sod.
He inherited his mother’s house in Ely, and lived there for a decade, when he was MP for Cambridge. After which he started chopping off heads.
I was about 10 at this time and seeing his name a lot in the NME I didn’t realise Andrew Eldritch is an assumed name. I hadn’t heard it in any other context. So a few years later seeing the word “eldritch” used as an adjective I thought, “Great description, but how many people are really going to get that reference?”
I tuned into the Sisters in 85 after ‘Wake’, spent the next couple of years mainlining the back catalogue and soaking in bootleg live recordings, anticipating Floodland with Pavlovian saliva at the cryptic adverts in the inkies. When it came, This Corrosion was bombastic, but it was the white-suited dissolute diplomat in Petra that turned me on, keeping me feeling there was still juice in the bottle. Lucretia was exciting, promising much, and I tuned into TOTP to see each single mimed live. But in the end I felt burned out.
“They were never quite as good after Gary Marx left” said somebody once, and that’s my opinion now. Although much better produced than FALAA, Floodland is for me a tripod of songs, one of which fades when it should flourish. Harsh maybe, but listening to it tonight, it’s only Dominion/Mother Russia, Driven Like The Snow and Never Land (full version please) that carry any of the weight of the earlier catalogue. A gang in spirit, TSOM may be, but this album is effectively a solo album, missing the collaboration with his first cohort – Marx, Hussey with his 12 string and Adams with his mighty mighty bass.
Like TSOM mk1, TSOM mk2 fell apart acrimoniously, and this time without any live shows, or any sense of Patricia Morrison having any role than cosmetic, which just adds to the sad sense of what might have been if they could have genuinely built on her history with The Bags/Fur Bible/Gun Club and weakens the legacy of Floodland further.
I think FALAA is definitely weaker than Floodland. I came very close to picking the Some Girls comp instead, as I think those 82-84 EPs are their undisputed high point, but the inclusion of the Damage Done 7” and the weaker Body Electric put me off….
Fair enough – it is after all your list. I’m intrigued, if you want to say, as to what the weaknesses are. Side 1? Murky production? I’m not sure there’s a better opener than Black Planet – but then those piano chords were the first thing I ever heard by the band, so I am somewhat biased.
Mentioning Some Girls, I’d put The Reptile House ep joint first if it qualified.
Side one is definitely not as good as side two. I believe Hussey wrote the music for that side and Gary Marx did side two? The only track I would go out of my way to save from that first side is Marian. The others aren’t bad, but they’re not Temple Of Love or Burn, are they? I am however baffled by your assertion re Black Planet. I think it’s one of their weakest songs and a really poor opener, especially when the title track was right there. Still you know what they say about opinions…
Indeed, we’ve all got one. I’m quite enjoying this disagreement – I hope you are too.
Yes, FALAA is a Hussey/Adams split with the exception of No Time To Cry and Possession which were both collaborations. I prefer the second side too – just get expectant goose bumps from the opener.
Temple of Love and Burn, eh? Both are the worst songs on their eps for me, bombastic and banal respectively. It would be boring if we all thought the same. Gimme Gimme Shelter and Fix instead. I love Fix.
I’m with the Kid, I think Floodland is the best of the three albums, though like him I think the run of EPs from 82 – 84 is their high point. Funnily enough, I think the recent radio sessions album that covers that period may be the best Sisters “album” as it were.
Thought this or FALAA was going to finish a bit higher. Intrigued to see what’s next.
It all started in Nottingham in autumn 1990. I saw a cassette of this album in HMV, and I recognised the name from knowing that they’d supported my beloved New Model Army on their most recent tour. I took a shot in the dark and bought it. When I got back to my little room in a hall of residence and stuck it in the little tape player that was all I could fit on the train when I moved, it was love at first listen. It absolutely clicked with me right away, and it’s still my favourite album of theirs to this day (I’ve been playing it as I write this, and I know every word of every song). My mate Steve flipped for it as well, and we finally got to see them a few months later when they played at a free festival nearby. At the time, it was probably the best gig I’d ever seen in my life (you have to remember I’d come from the deep southwest where no bands ever venture), just walking on air afterwards, complete euphoric bliss.
And then after that summer they put out the One Way single and Levelling The Land album, and they weren’t mine and Steve’s little secret anymore. No moaning or looking for indie points from me though, I was still most definitely on the bus. The gigs on the LTL tour were the first time I’d ever properly followed a band, and Steve and I did plenty of consecutive shows, sleeping in train stations or on strangers’ floors (fond memories of a house in Birmingham where the housemate of the girl who had put us up seemed awfully confused as to why two lads with long hair and army surplus boots had been to see Level 42). Those gigs were so much fun, a group clearly on the up with a real buzz around them, and every night felt like a victory lap for our little band.
After that, real life and gainful employment came knocking, and the enthusiasm had to be tempered. I still went to see them when they were playing anywhere I was living or working. I kept up with the albums as well, which stayed strong up till the fifth, Mouth To Mouth. I didn’t like the next one much though, and I started to drift away, not helped by living abroad for a fair chunk of the 00s and missing the live shows. That separation was helped by the next few records being pretty forgettable (not joking, I literally forgot Truth & Lies existed until I went to dig out AWCTW just now). In the late 00s, back on these shores, I finally gave up pretending I was anything other than a hippy and started going to likeminded festivals again. Inevitably I saw the Levellers a few more times, and really enjoyed them. They didn’t really do a lot of new, and it was certainly a little bit of a nostalgia trip, but it was also a lot of fun. Their own festival, Beautiful Days, is a great experience with good vibes throughout. They play twice each year, kicking off with an acoustic set in the tent, and then closing the main stage on Sunday. I have some really fond memories of my daughter jumping up and down waving a glow stick and absolutely losing her shit to them there when she was nine or so (she would now completely deny that this ever happened). Yeah, the setlists didn’t have a lot of material later than 1994 or so, and perhaps they were creatively spent, but the gigs were always fun. But then they put out the Peace album in 2020 and somehow it is an absolute stormer, the best thing they’d done for twenty five years or more, sounding like a revitalised band.
They were also a massive gateway band for me. I found them at exactly the right time, and from them I branched out deeper into folk music, deeper into anarchopunk. Maybe if it wasn’t for the Levellers I would still be into Christy Moore and Culture Shock, but maybe not (and it says a lot that I can hold one band largely responsible for pushing me in two such separate directions). I don’t think I would have discovered the free festival scene without them either, which led to some of the best weekends of my life circa 1992 (you haven’t lived until you’ve seen someone breathing fire off the roof of Wango Riley’s Travelling Stage while Poisoned Electrick Head are rearranging your DNA live onstage). There’s something else about them I love, which I’m finding quite hard to articulate, which is that they celebrate Englishness, without all the shit that goes with that idea. Not the England of the Daily Mail or the Conservative Party of course, but a strand of outsider creativity, not doing what you’re told and loving the land that chimes very strongly with me. And the Steve that I went to the gigs with all those years ago is still a really good mate, and we went out for a few drinks just a couple of weeks ago. It’s been a thirty year friendship largely soundtracked by the Levellers.
Fundamentally, they’re a part of my life. We have been entwined for three decades and more, sometimes at a distance, sometimes right up close, and I can’t see that ever changing.
Kid, this is such a wonderful post and I loved reading it.
I had a massive Levellers moment as a 13 year old when Levelling The Land came out. Listened to that album endlessly. Bought the long sleeve red T-shirt with the logo on and wore it everywhere. Mocked incessantly by my siblings for the crusty folksiness of the band – at the time their favourite music was being produced by a bloke off pirate ratio named (I shit you not) “Steve The Nutter”. It was the last hurrah for proper style tribes before Britpop sort of varnished everything over.
I agree with everything you say about Englishness. You’ve really put your finger on something there, because that was exactly what I loved about them too.
The love affair was short lived and I haven’t listened to them in over 30 years. May well give them a spin over the weekend on the strength of the above. Cheers.
I remember when the Levellers played the university SU in late ’90 or early ’91 (I was on the crew). I pressured my pal Vicky to go, and visited her the following lunchtime, to see what she thought. She had, along with the 1,000 or so audience, somehow gone crusty overnight.
Vicky played her tape of AWCTW for the duration of my visit – “when you said they were great live, I had no idea how great”. She spent the rest of her time at university with dreads, much to the horror of her middle-class Epsom parents, and joined up as a traveller after she graduated.
I last saw her at Glastonbury in the mid-’90s, up in the green fields, doing something with a travelling circus.
Another great write up. The Levellers were a definite presence in Brighton in the 90s when the there was still (just about) an actual counter culture based on the large number of squats, the “crusty” scene, and the Stanmer Park festivals. The group also existed despite general hostility from the music weeklies. That said, I can’t say I was the greatest fan of the music but I respected them and would still put them alongside Blyth Power as a type of modern folk music.
This often gets lumped in with the “Bristol Scene” or trip hop, but I don’t think it’s really either of those things. It might well be a foundational text in those genres, but to my ears it’s a UK hip hop record, albeit one with huge dollops of reggae and soul in the mix. We’ll get to the headliners in a minute but my own favourite songs here are the ones in the line of the title track and Five Man Army, hushed intimate whispers right in your ears, sparse low key production that pulls up loads of samples and puts them in just the right place. They’re skeletal but never cold, playgrounds for the voices on the mics. It’s a great ensemble effort, with so many different voices floating in and out, playing off each other, picking up lyrics, responding to and finishing lines. So many of those couplets are memorable and quotable – it’s a rare week where I don’t sing to myself “hip hop you don’t stop cos I’m not sloppy, I like the beat so we need another copy” (which doesn’t even really mean anything, but nonetheless has been stuck in my head for thirty years). Likewise Daddy G’s Fiddler On The Roof interpolation from the same song never fails to make me smile. And as for rhyming Subbuteo and Studio One…
It’s not all mellow hip hop vibes though. Blue Lines features two bona fide modern soul classics, powered by Shara Nelson’s terrific vocals. Safe From Harm opens the record, riding that huge Billy Cobham sample, and you all know the towering Unfinished Sympathy. Those strings, that piano, that nagging little glockenspiel (?) riff…it’s such a powerful and influential track that people even ripped off the video. The album closes with the gospel reggae of Hymn Of The Big Wheel, Horace Andy’s sweet falsetto promising hope and renewal in the face of struggle and ecological disaster.
Blue Lines is the album as comfort food, something to put on and lose yourself in, another one of those records that brings you into its own world, a stoned late night ramble through a fantastic record collection, a melange of genres and influences bought together by wit and weed. It’s one of the best and most British albums ever made.
Isn’t it a fabulous record? Some days Five Man Army is the best track on there, just because of that bassline.
And to think that the same group came out with Mezzanine, a record with an almost diametrically opposed feel to it (although arguably within the same genre) and some days I think it’s the better record.
By happy coincidence I’ve been listening to Blue Lines loads this week, for the first time in ages.
It’s definitely not a Trip Hop record (whatever that label is worth when all is said and done), but I’m not sure it’s a Hip Hop record either. Rather, it seems to occupy its own personal genre of Black British Music – it takes a little of everything and throws it in the pot without bending itself too far in the direction of any particular sound.
“A stoned late night ramble through a fantastic record collection” is the perfect description, and I agree that it’s certainly one of the most British albums ever to have been made.
Oh, and just to counterbalance some of the below: Unfinished Sympathy rules. What a vocal.
There’s an argument that it couldn’t have happened without Soul II Soul, who bestrode the world like a large-trousered colossus at the top of the 90s. Who’s listening to SIIS now?
A quick look at Spotify reveals that a lot of people are still listening to the singles from Club Classics Vol 1 (27m for Keep On Movin’, 118m for Back To Life). Very similar numbers to the singles from Blue Lines.
The Club Classics album tracks, much less so. Shame, as it’s a great record – just maybe a little of its moment.
Muso ponce alert, but the thing about Unfinished Sympathy is the tune is unresolved, so it never quite hits the, um, climax and leaves me wanting a bit more. Insert your own joke about seven and twelve inches here.
It’s a bit like a tantric bonk, according to Sting, anyway.
6. The Pogues – If I Should Fall From Grace With God
A wonderful cocktail of excitement, adrenalin, romance and grimy beauty. This was one of, if not the first, “proper” albums I bought, on cassette when I was fifteen or so. I vividly remember sitting in my bedroom listening to it on my little mono tape player and turning the volume down really low with my finger hovering over the pause button in case my mum heard the swearing. I was a sheltered lad from a quiet part of the country, and my word, did I learn things from this record. There is so much in it, berserk punk bursts, sweeping epic melancholia, weird hybrids of Irish music with Spanish and Middle Eastern sounds, ragged romance, republican politics, gothic horror, and an all consuming lust for life. This is the Pogues at their height, building on the (also excellent) Rum, Sodomy And The Lash and before the wobbles of the next couple of albums, Shane not yet tipped over the edge, still writing sharp and beautiful lyrics and delivering them in that rich lived in voice. And it wasn’t just Shane of course – Philip Chevron’s Thousands Are Sailing would be the best song written by almost any other band, a brilliant account of the immigrant’s life and it’s triumphs and sorrows.
I never got to see them at this time, probably just as well as I suspect frail young me might well have died at a Pogues show in their prime. I did catch them a couple of times on the reunion tours, notably a Cardiff show where Cerys Matthews sang the Kirsty parts in Fairytale, and a midsummer gig in Tokyo where, calendar notwithstanding, they played Fairytale anyway and my Japanese friend got so excited he lost pretty much all his English and just bounced up and down shouting “Christmas song! Christmas song!”
Ultimately, it’s a really exciting record from the minute it starts to the moment it ends, and what more can you ask for?
I bought this when it came out in the January of 1988, and when I went off to university in the September I took it with me. The first coursemate I met there was Irish, and we went to a house party with three second-year Irish friends who had beards (well, two did – Sally didn’t), Guinness, and tapes of the first two Pogues albums. I had a lovely time, but had to have a little rest in a hedge on the way back as my legs had stopped working.
Totally agree that this was their peak moment (even if Rum Sodomy & The Lash is my preference).
But, I think this is the most consistent too, and hangs together better than RS&TL.
Shane’s passing last year had me going back and listening again (like many others I’m sure) and this album is an absolute treat from soup to nuts, and despite it’s seasonal appeal Fairytale sits just right in the flow of the album.
And Fiesta may well be the barmiest track committed to record (can anyone actually decipher the lyrics without the printed sheet?)
I prefer Rum too. I bought If I Should Fall first though when it was released and I was so blown away I picked up the other 2 albums within days. Then became really obsessive about seeing them live.
Also bought this when it came out, one of the first ‘cool’ albums I bought. That Christmas I’d been doing a paper round while listening to Red Roses for Me and Rum… on a C90 over and over on my walkman and also fallen hard for the Fairytale single. So I was hugely excited by the idea of this and it didn’t, and still doesn’t, disappoint. In fact it’s as good as you say it is. My eldest is hugely impressed that I own the original Fairytale on vinyl. Or so she says.
Like others I went back to the Pogues after Shane’s death. This is definitely their high point but both Peace and Love and in particular Hell’s Ditch are much better than their reputations would have it. They’re just not quite If I should Fall…
If 80s 4AD had put out country albums they might sound a little like this. With Daniel Lanois at the controls, the trad Nashville sound of Emmylou’s previous album, the underwhelming Cowgirl’s Prayer, is swapped for spooky and rattly late night ambience as country twang gives way to endless reverb and delay. It sounds fantastic, a deep warm shimmering cocoon of sound to lose yourself in. It’s a perfect marriage of a beautiful ethereal voice, a distinctively atmospheric sound and some impeccable song selection (songwriters here include Neil Young, Steve Earle, Bob Dylan (the beauty and tenderness of this Every Grain Of Sand is enough to make you think for a moment that perhaps his Christian rock period is perhaps unfairly maligned), Lucinda Williams, Gillian Welch, and Kate and Anna McGarrigle as well as Harris and Lanois themselves). An awful lot of these songs deal with grief and loss, but they are not raw or painful, more filled with a gentle balm that soothes and offers hope, a promise that’s realised in the vision of old and lasting romance across the final two tracks.
It’s an astonishing record, a melancholy, haunting masterpiece, one that exists in its own time and space, the sound of gossamer and gauze, with just enough grit to keep it from cloying.
Fantastic pick. It’s an album I often go back to, and it really works best taken as a whole.
Where Will I Be is such a fabulous signal of intent with which to start a record, but my favourite, taken on balance, is May This Be Love. You can really feel the fingerprints of Lanois – that “gossamer and gauze” sound you so well describe.
Looking forward to the last 4. My money is on Chocolate Starfish and the Hotdog Flavored Water for number 1.
The song had also been covered rather decently in 1994 by bluegrass duo Tim & Mollie O’Brien.
So Gillian was already known in the music business.
A quirky detail. “Gillian Welch” has always been the duo Gillian and Dave Rawlings. But record companies were only interested in signing female artists.
This is an album I missed at the time. It came out in 1996, but I didn’t hear it until the early 2000s, thanks to someone I worked with championing the band in the pub one long night. Big thanks to Ryan, wherever you are now, because it’s become an all time favourite of mine, and the Whigs have turned out to be one of my favourite bands.
The one line pitch is 90s alt rock, but made by men who were really into vintage soul and funk. It’s influenced by Norman Whitfield as much as it is the usual rock canon suspects, giving us a blend of caustic rock and lush soul. Frontman Greg Dulli wrote the whole record, and his constant subject matter is those entwined perennials, love and crime. His vision of love isn’t all hearts and roses, but a twisted destructive thing, powered by jealousy and revenge. It’s a great vocal performance throughout, a tortured howl of vengeance, self loathing and remorse. The sleeve notes are all couched as if this were a film (“Shot on location at…” instead of “recorded at”, etc) and fittingly so, for this is classic noir, drawing on the same vein of crime movie iconography that inspired so much hip hop around this time (lyrically at least this could be a hip hop record, full as it is of street level storytelling around the grimier seams of life).
It kicks off with the absolutely perfect opening 1-2 of the scene setting slow burn of “Crime Scene, Part One”, which is a strong contender for best track one side one ever, into the howling rage of “My Enemy”, but in truth there isn’t one bad song here. The music deepens the straight ahead rock band format of the Whigs’ previous albums with keyboards and strings, allowing Dulli to indulge his symphonic soul leanings – check the intro to “Blame, Etc”. It’s all powerful, punchy and emotive, culminating in the epic “Faded”, which is a song that to this day should be closing stadium gigs in front of a lighter waving crowd, half of whom weren’t even born when it came out.
But that was not to be. ‘Black Love’ is an fantastic record but one that wasn’t the hit it should have been (to be fair, when your lead single opens with the line “got you where I want you, motherfucker” you can’t really expect a whole heap of radio play). The band broke up after one more album (the also excellent ‘1965’). Dulli has reactivated the name in recent years and put out some records that are really good on their own terms, but not reaching these heights. I fear this album is now largely forgotten, but if you know, you know.
and here’s a bonus clip of a live Faded from their first reunion tour (where to be fair they do seem to be playing to a pretty big crowd). The musical quote at the end is typical behaviour – I have recordings where they’ve incorporated bits of Papa Was A Rolling Stone, Housequake, Superstition, even songs from Jesus Christ Superstar into their own material. Fantastic band.
Another band that I discovered through the alternative clubs of Plymouth in the very early 90s. On those nights out, I was always hearing this one brief track, full of punky energy but with a bouncy danceable vibe. I loved it, and somehow discovered it was Civilization Street by a band called Culture Shock. And so Rival Records wanders once more into this story, where I bought a copy of this album, complete with “pay no more than £4.50” branding on the sleeve, so I could get hold of that song, and found so much more.
Let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way. This is ska-punk. There’s no avoiding it, but please be assured it couldn’t be further from preppy Yanks with trombones. It’s altogether more ramshackle and ground level take on those ideas, and predates that US sound by a decade or so. Frontman Dick Lucas had previously been in Wessex anarcho legends Subhumans, and the other members had been in various Wiltshire punk outfits. Culture Shock had a brief life, only three years or so, and they’d already split up by the time I discovered them, but in that time they played hundreds of gigs, became stalwarts of the free festival and DIY scenes and recorded this full length plus a couple of mini-LPs.
So much anarchopunk, and protest music in general, is just pointing at things and saying they’re shit. Culture Shock were the antithesis of that, relentlessly upbeat and positive, celebrating the joy that can come from swimming against the tide. Dick’s lyrics have a level of observation and creativity that is miles ahead of simplistic sloganeering. They’re never preachy, but prefer to make you ask questions and join dots, forever striving for inclusivity and peace. The words are thought provoking, and the music is pure fun, full of playful bouncing reggae basslines, punchy phased guitars, even some dubwise experiments. It’ll make you dance and put a smile on your face at the same time.
I’m reluctant to say a record changed my life. We’re all the sum of our experiences, and so many different things go into shaping an individual human…but this album and its underlying philosophy have been a colossal influence on my outlook. Perhaps I would have got there anyway, but discovering this at an impressionable age pushed me towards vegetarianism, the idea of constructive protest, an affinity with subcultures and alternative lifestyles, and did more to make me ask questions than my teachers ever did.
As I said above, they’d broken up before I even discovered them, and so for decades I only experienced them as an artefact, three records and some lyric sheets. Then out of the blue they got back together about ten years ago. Being from Wiltshire they’d always had a decent following in Bristol, and I finally got to see them with 700 other people in a disused church. A gig I’d been waiting literally twenty years for. They came out and opened with the song that’s track one side one here. I would have been crying happy tears if I hadn’t been jumping around like a lunatic. I wrecked a perfectly good pair of trainers that night and I have no regrets.
It’s not something I expect loads of other people to like. Something that has such an impact almost by definition has to be so keyed into to you that most other listeners won’t make that connection. It’s not in any way a credible album, or probably one that will be making anyone else’s lists, but it means the world to me.
Another walkman on the school bus classic. New Model Army have been my favourite band for years, and this is where the love affair started. It’s their masterpiece, a perfect collision of folk, punk and rock. Four albums into their career, this is the sound of a band making a quantum leap forwards in sound and songwriting. The breadth of material here is tremendous, from the half-terrified, half welcoming invocation of apocalypse in opener I Love The World to the spitting fury and anger at Britain in the 80s of the final track Archway Towers. In between there’s compassion for broken homes and broken lives, anger at those who left a small town for the big city, ruminations on family and bloodline, and celebrations of getting away and living a better kind of life.
Justin Sullivan’s lyrics could easily fall into dogmatic preaching, but he leavens them with enough poetry and sensitivity to avoid stereotyped punk ranting. The music is urgent driving post punk, that also knows when to take the throttle off and indulge in some folky reflection. It’s not difficult or challenging music, there are strong melodies and catchy choruses throughout (the backing vocals on Stupid Questions are a masterclass). It’s an album where the rhythm section shines, fitting for a band who always claimed to be influenced by Northern Soul as much as the Ramones, with excellent melodic bass throughout, and one the best drummers around in the late Rob Heaton.
This may be the high point of 80s alternative and post-punk. It’s a fabulous articulation of the discomfort some people felt with the Thatcherite ethos of the time, told with fire and passion, and enough hope and optimism to soften the darkness.
Like I said at the beginning, they’re my favourite band. I’ve seen them north of a hundred times now, if you count Justin solo shows and other permutations of the main band. (That is over a thirty plus year period though, so only averages out at about three gigs a year. That’s not mad, is it?). They’re a brilliant live experience but a difficult band to pigeonhole – I’ve seen them at a metal festival, a goth festival, a folk festival and a hippy festival and they haven’t seemed out of place at any of them – and they’ve never been fashionable (but then neither have I), but they have continued making great records. Love them.
And there’s even a sleeve note to the effect that the album title was taken from the works of prominent Northern revolutionary Quaker, who I can only imagine is our own @salwarpe
Thanks for the tag, Kid. I had a feeling NMA would be right up at the top of your list. A bit too rough and ‘cloggy’ for my prejudiced tastes, I had ‘No Rest’, whose eponymous single I really enjoyed, but have never really dived further into their catalogue. In my mind they’re like a more folky Saxon, and I do mix up Slade and Biff Byford in my mind somewhat – lots of northern down-to-earth macho imagery in my mind. Probably sacrilege to hear.
About the Quaker thing, I did know Slade (or Justin as his parents presumably would have called him) had connections with the Society of Friends – born in Jordans, Bucks, where the Meeting House was made with timbers from the Mayflower ship that carried the Pilgrim Fathers (and presumably Mothers) to America, and growing up in Bradford. I knew Quakers from both places, but never came across the Sullivans. It’s a small world, but obviously not that small.
Likewise for Edward Burrough, the source of the album quote. Dying in prison at the age of 29, having spent a life as one of the first generation of Quakers, he petitioned the King and got him to stop the hanging and flogging of Quakers in Massachussets. It must have been an extraordinary time – a very young church, full of passion and conviction with members constantly in and out of prison. In some ways, that radicalism is with us to this day, though many Quakers now come to it late in life.
Anyway, I think I’d better listen to this album. I’m much more familiar with songs from your top choice. The River is my first and favorite Springsteen album, and just reading the song titles sets them off playing in my mind. I love it. An album that I always pair with London Calling for its ambition and strength.
Thanks for doing the whole list – some very interesting and diverse choices!
1. Bruce Springsteen – the orange tape that a guy my dad worked with made me
Home taping is killing music, eh?
It’s 1984. I’m a young kid, still a year or two away from being a teenager. I like pop music. I listen to the top 40 countdown on a Sunday night and watch Top Of The Pops every Thursday. There’s a song by someone named Bruce Springsteen I’m really into. It’s called Dancing In The Dark, and I keep playing back my taped off the radio recording of it. My dad takes note of this, and has a word with a big Springsteen fan he works with, and a day or two later comes home with a tape his workmate has recorded me. It’s all of Born In The USA on one side, and a selection of songs from Born To Run, Darkness, and The River on the other.
On one level it was a simple act of kindness, which is greatly appreciated to this day, but I also suspect that it was born from the same urge I have in myself, a need to evangelise, to share this great thing that you love and hope that other people get it too (case in point: this thread). And boy did it work. This tape was my first exposure to the idea that an artist could have a catalogue and a body of work, that there was a narrative to artistic careers. It put me on a path of being really into music, of it becoming my main hobby and interest, even my career. It was also banger after banger after banger, twenty five songs that were all fantastic.
I’m not going to dwell on the albums themselves here. We all know them, and saying that Thunder Road or My Hometown are great songs is not really accomplishing anything that hasn’t been done fifty thousand times before. The important thing is the effect on my life. It’s not the only factor in my love of music of course, but it was an ignition point, a Big Bang that has led pretty much directly to eg spending much more effort and time than is rational talking about my favourite albums on an internet backwater for other likeminded souls (may god bless you all).
The artifact itself is long gone, lost somewhere in the detritus of a life, but the impact has reverberated down the years since. I can still easily recall it to memory, the orange BASF logo, the handwriting on the J-card, the way he’d written the year of release next to each album heading (catnip for a nascent trainspotter like me). I just need to hear the intro to any of these songs, and it’s all there in my head, my very own madeleine.
I love Racing In The Street now, I’m not sure what my twelve year old self would have made of it though. It’s also one of Bruce’s longer songs, so you could fit two in it’s place instead (which I have to imagine is why Jungleland wasn’t there either)
Brilliant final pick, lovely way to round it out. Sounds like your Dad did some absolutely top fathering here.
There’s something really special about being able to pick out these moments where flame met kindling, and the above made me wistful for the days of home taping. Not the world’s greatest format, the cassette, but probably the best for sharing. Can’t say fairer than a carefully selected mix (with all the ball-ache of getting it taped), accompanied by a handwritten track listing, ideally with typographic flourish.
And that’s that monkey off my back. Thanks to everyone that has humoured me with this, commented and argued. It’s been a long old journey, bit of a slog at times, but overall a lot of fun and it’s given me some good times revisiting some great music. There are records that I feel daft for leaving out, and others that on reflection are too high or too low, but this is how it worked out. Maybe some of the injustices will be remedied in the inevitable deluxe box set tenth anniversary expanded reissue of this thread. Cheers!
Props to you Kid for going with an obvious rock superstar ( who of course is a superstar for a reason). I was anticipating another album I have never heard from an artist I had never heard of.
25. Julian Cope – 20 Mothers
This is the essence of Julian Cope, a wayward and eccentric individual, but one dripping with talent. . The music ranges from acoustic sketches to synth workouts to gentle kosmiche to jangly anthemic pop, and the lyrics encompass megaliths, how great his wife and kids are, lullabies, and rages against capitalism, all seen through his particular strand of English mysticism. Its joyful record, one that pulses with the delights of being alive. A lot of songwriters can do melody or experimentation, but not both. Cope however has the happy knack of being able to weld great tunes to strange noises, and for every burbling synth oddity or half finished strum here there’s a corresponding pop gem with a huge chorus. As you might expect from a twenty track double album, not every single song is a winner, but everything is at least interesting and if you don’t like one tune there’ll be another one along in a minute. It’s a varied grab bag of Cope’s obsessions, a celebration of one of the best artists this country produced in the last quarter of the twentieth century, and who is criminally underrated these days following his self-enforced exile from the mainstream music business.
This was his last coherent period.
I followed ho avidly during the 80/90/early 2000’s but then he got a bit too weird for me.
Me too. To my great regret, I’ve never seen him live
Kind of gave up around this point. For me it was inferior to the 2 or 3 previous ones. I have never seen him live solo, but did manage 2 Teardrops gigs in Liverpool early 80s
What a nice surprise to see this here. He still had one excellent album in him, Interpreter, before the weirdness took over and the tunes disappeared. At this point in time he was probably my favourite artist. For me it’s not quite up there with Peggy/Jehovahkill but it’s bloody good.
Prob my fave drude album. Love the CD in its neat non-standard case. Great group photo of the epon girls too.
24. Nirvana – Nevermind
I was around for pretty much Nirvana’s entire lifespan, and also pretty much exactly the right age. My sixth form mates and I were Sub Pop kids from when the NME started writing about the label, so we all had copies of Bleach early on (I have the original Tupelo green vinyl pressing, which would be worth a bit if my brother hadn’t scratched it as soon as I went to uni). I remember five or six of us chaotically dancing to Negative Creep on an otherwise empty dance floor in the alternative club. First time I saw them was at Nottingham Polytechnic in October 1990, which was good messy fun, then the Reading 91 appearance, famously below Chapterhouse. I was in the front three or four rows of people going mental while the rest stood and watched. And then Nevermind and Teen Spirit happened.
It was a strange experience to watch something I knew and loved explode so quickly. I’m not being Mr Indie Wanker, it was also great. Loads of great memories from the time, like watching them on Jonathan Ross in my mate’s bedroom when they played Territorial Pissing instead of whatever had been announced, laughing as the campus glam rock band started covering Teen Spirit instead of the Black Crowes, watching the yellow corporate whore T-shirts appear all over the city (I will admit to being bit of an indie wanker by loudly preferring my original white circles of hell crack smoking motherfucker version). Nirvana were everywhere that autumn and winter, and I was loving it. It was kind of like a slow motion version of the euphoric rush you get from Nirvana’s best records. I saw them again at Rock City in December (luckily I’d bought the ticket months in advance) and that was the last time I ever saw them. By the time In Utero came out I’d discovered the delights of loud electronic music in fields, and so I was interested and enjoyed it, but the passion wasn’t the same. It wasn’t them, it was me. Still undeniably a great band, and I’m so grateful that I was there at the time. I learnt about Kurt’s death from Teletext late one night on Channel 4, and can still remember the moment now.
There’s a good clip from Japanese TV about that Rock City gig.
I still listen to Nevermind several times a year, and it is still a perfect blend of punk attitude and pop smarts. It’s not a rough diamond at all, it’s polished to within an inch of it’s life, but it is still completely thrilling. This is the best song, don’t @ me
Aaah, yes, um … it’s a good album, but is it really a great one?
Age and listening habit wise I should’ve been front and centre for Nirvana. I owned Bleach and played it many times, so to this day I don’t get why I was non- plussed by Nevermind.
Of the albums released in September 91, Primal Scream’s Screamadelica (released on the same day) is the one I go back to.
Although hearing Drain You again does make me want to play Nevermind again to see if I missed something
Screamadelica is one of those records with some spectacular tentpoles (Come Together would be very high in my list of top 100 songs), but a lot of the stuff in between doesn’t grab me the same way. It was on my list for this project for a very long time, but ultimately just missed out. It was pencilled in for a spot somewhere between 26 and 50, but I’d already published the lower parts of the list before I decided to drop it for something else. If I was doing it all over again (definitely not), it’d very likely sneak in
Also persuaded by the noise that I needed to buy Nevermind only to think afterwards, ah well nevermind.
That’s a nice observation of the album. and the group. Somehow I managed to sidestep Nirvana at the time: I liked the preceding Pixies/ Sonic Youth/ Husker Du/Throwing Muses axis so much that I thought Bleach wasn’t good enough and stopped paying attention to this one. I was probably remiss about that and of course I now regret not seeing them play the tiny Norwich Arts Centre in 1990
Apparently you are me and I am you!
And you are I, and I am too…
Excellent stuff.
For me, Nevermind has always hinged on Territorial Pissings. You get all the big, radio-friendly crowd pleasers in the first half, then Polly – which sort of sounds like an album closer in a lot of ways and could easily swap places with Something In The Way – followed by TP, which has the 0-60 acceleration of an album opener.
It’s a really odd bit of sequencing when you look at it, and it sends a meat cleaver down the middle of the record: the two poles of its sound, back-to-back, taking us from acoustic misery to the band absolutely thrashing it out. But it’s also taking a meat cleaver to the past, with the 60s-baiting at the start of Territorial Pissings giving way to that howl of inchoate frustration that kicks the track off proper. The peace and love generation birthing the inner pain and rage generation. Much of the “proper songwriting” and commitment to melody of the first half giving way to the greater discord of the second.
And it’s the second half where all the real gems are. Drain You is definitely up there with the best songs on the record; it’s a great lyric, a great vocal and it has that almighty roar when the instruments kick in after the first line. I can remember winding those few seconds back on a walkman over and over again listening to that moment and wondering what it must be like to be one of three people capable of making a noise like that.
I like my Nirvana ferocious, so my favourite songs on Nevermind these days are probably Territorial Pissings, Stay Away, Drain You and Something In The Way. The latter because it’s the zenith of a certain version of their sound, because I don’t think another band could have produced it and because it blows me away that decades later we got an entire Batman movie based on it, and that didn’t even seem weird. Oh, and On A Plain has the best couplet in the entire album (amidst stiff competition): “The greatest day that I’ve ever had/Was when I learned to cry on command”. Simultaneously bang on brand and brilliantly self-mocking.
So, for me Nevermind has always really been two records. The first six tracks are a mini-album that also function as a greatest hits set of a sort. Radio Friendly Unit Shifters. The second six tracks are the greatest punk band that has ever been or will ever be burning through their set at high speed; shorter, grittier songs. The only thing disturbing the conceptual purity of this vision is that Breed and Lounge Act should be swapped around.
I would love to have been in the room when they sequenced Nevermind, because if ever a band had an uncomfortable duality it was Nirvana, and it’s a duality that’s clearly expressed here. If I have a complaint about the whole thing it’s that they should have loosened the sheen of the production as the album progressed.
Great comment. You don’t mention what format you experienced the album in, but it’s worth noting that that hinge is exactly the break between sides one and two in old money.
Cassette tape! The way Mother Nature intended proper music to be heard.
And then there’s the tactile element. You can’t strew a download in a hedge, can you, eh?
The “inner pain and rage generation”… good line… why?
Because we missed the 60s, obviously 😘
Yeah, growing up with central heating was fkin NIGHTMARE
23. Radical Dance Faction – Wasteland
This is another album very closely tied up with that particular time of my life when I was into the free festivals of the early 90s, a crusty by any other name. RDF were stalwarts of that scene, the anarchopunk answer to the dub poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson or Benjamin Zephaniah. Frontman Chris Bowsher declaims (‘singing’ would be far too generous a word) his lyrics over some thunderously heavy dub backing. The words are bitter and angry but empathetic, anthems for the dispossessed and those done down by the cruel and vindictive government of the day (plus ca change, eh?). The real rewards are in the music, the relentless bass pulse and the echoing drums. I had this and the preceding album Borderline Cases taped on either side of a C90, and when I hear it now, it provokes one of those Proustian rushes, a memory of being sat on an InterCity train somewhere in the Midlands, rushing past the cooling towers of a concrete power station. I’m not sure how this album would fare to someone coming brand new to it in 2023 but this urban ragged dub punk poetry has been with me with thirty years and I don’t think it’ll ever leave.
What a thoroughly enjoyable and informative thread this is. A fine combination of record reviews and autobiography. Your writing is superb.
All these personal memories are so marvelously described: from a record shop in Portsmouth to “InterCity train somewhere in the Midlands, rushing past the cooling towers of a concrete power station.”
When you have finished it, you should print it out as one document for friends and family to browse through.
Rugeley? (They knocked em down a year or two back.)
thanks KFD!
22. Press Club – Late Teens
My favourite new band of the last five years. I’ve written before in this list about how the combination of frantic punk rock with big melodies and hooks is basically my musical happy place, and Melbourne’s Press Club absolutely nail that sound. It’s the Hüsker Dü template updated for the twenty-first century, and it sounds fantastic, with punchy riffs and a firebrand vocal performance. It’s full of energy, thrills, and general lust for life. There’s a real sense of integrity and passion around them, and it helps that they are one of the best live bands I’ve ever seen. Frontwoman Nat is a force of nature and a full blown rock star. They should be massive.
Love Press Club – great choice!
Great record this. On the same-ish subject I wonder if Celabrasion by Sleeper Agent will be in here, I love that one.
Don’t know Sleeper Agent but I will check them out!
I hope you and Bingo have managed to see Press Club live. They are spectacularly good. The first time I saw them in Bristol I immediately bought tickets to go and see them again in Cardiff a few days later.
Replying a bit late (although it’s been a while, I do hope that you haven’t been trapped under a large piece of furniture for three weeks😉)
Nope, not seen them. But then again I don’t go to many gigs so it’s not surprising. I’ll probs stick to bouncing around the kitchen when they next appear on Shuffle…
21. Jets To Brazil – Orange Rhyming Dictionary
A supergroup of sorts, JTB featured Blake Swarzenbach, late of Jawbreaker, Chris Daly from Texas Is The Reason and Jeremy Chatelain of Handsome, all big or biggish names in the post hardcore scene. This was their debut, and their masterpiece (the second album is decent, the third is unlistenable). It’s not a word I’d often use in a positive sense, but this is one of the most adult alt rock records I know, in all the right ways. It just sounds good, you know? You can tell time and care has been taken over the production, instead of the banging it out in twenty four hours option a younger band might be forced to take. Don’t worry, that doesn’t mean it’s a polished piece of tasteful boredom – there is still plenty of distortion and crunch in the guitars, and a muscular rhythm section, played off against quieter introspective ballads. And, yes, it’s emo but it’s years on from the slamming the bedroom door and shouting I hate you approach. It’s about cynicism and depression, about finding yourself a fair chunk of the way through your life and realising it hasn’t turned out like you thought it might. Broken marriages and motel bedrooms, bad thoughts on sleepless nights.
Swarzenbach’s lyrics have a literary flair unusual in the genre (he was an English major and it shows). The heartbreaking Conrad in particular could be a modern classic short story, and every song has some snappy couplet or arresting image at its heart. It’s a record that paints pictures in your head, vibrant and vivid. It even manages the difficult trick of making a love song sound like something fresh and new, as the closer Sweet Avenue ends on a note of beauty and the hope of a nascent relationship.
There’s a reason why there’s only going to be one or two alt-rock, indie rock, call it what you like records higher than this on my list. I’ve loved it ever since it came into my life sometime in the late 90s, and it gave me one of my most High Fidelity moments when I was blasting it over the speakers in a Portsmouth record shop and two or three people came up to ask what it was.
20. Donny Hathaway – Live
(KD looks up what’s still to come).
Yeah, turns out this is the greatest live album of all time. If the holy grail of a live recording is to make you feel like you were there, then my word does this deliver. That old cliche of ‘you can hear the room’ is for once actually appropriate and not hyperbolic embellishment. This is an astonishingly warm and intimate album, driven by Hathaway’s soulful electric piano and Steve Wonder-esque vocals. It’s a soul record – it couldn’t be anything else when you feel this close to the raw heart of the performer – but the sense of talented musicians coming together and creating in the moment is also very jazz, especially in the lengthy ten minute plus jams of The Ghetto and Voice Inside (Everything Is Everything). It’s not just the musicians that make this the record it is, though. The audience is such a vital part of the recording, clapping and hollering ecstatically throughout. The give and take between them and the band is incredible, a huge positive vibration of love, never more so than in their almost gospel choir singing along on You’ve Got a Friend.
So much groove, so much atmosphere, so much joy, so much fun.
Brilliant album! Two of its contempories are as good, if not better: Don’t Fight the Feeling: The Complete Aretha Franklin & King Curtis Live at Fillmore West and Curtis/Live! and Bill Withers Live At Carnegie Hall, especially Don’t Fight The Feeling, which is best Complete, rather than two separate albums.
As for feeling as if you are there, you can’t beat Sam Cooke – Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963, James Brown – Live at the Apollo, Bob Marley And The Wailers Live!! and The Buena Vista Club Live. You can almost touch the sweat at the Harlem Square Club, the female shrieks on Lost Someone are perfectly timed, the audience participation on Lively Up Yourself are thrilling and there is absolute adoration for the band from Cuba.
It’s rather astonishing that you can buy this album in a little Original Album Series boxed set with four other of Donny’s releases for the price of a couple of cardiac threatening pastries. One of the best of all time.
That’s how I obtained it! And improved my cardiac health as a useful side effect!
magnifique!
Just going through some of these and this album has made a dull, cold & drizzly Suffolk day much brighter! Joyous!
19. Studio – West Coast
West Coast by Studio celebrated it’s fifteenth anniversary a couple of years ago. There weren’t any deluxe remasters or box sets. It’s an album that never troubled the charts or the arbiters of cool. I can’t even remember how I came across it. There’s no origin story, no great rock n roll myth, to Studio. They were just two guys from Sweden who thought it’d be a good idea to make an album that sounded like Can, Neu, Happy Mondays and The Cure dancing together in the rays of the rising sun somewhere in the Balearics. Somehow they pulled it off and gave us this gem, effortlessly pretty disco, krautrock, dub, and indie pop replayed through a sun kissed filter without falling into generic Cafe Del Mar blandness. Perhaps that makes it sound like Record Collection Rock, a faithful ticking off of the approved influences, but to think that would be to miss just how invitingly lush and lazy, blissful and beautiful, this music is. These are long hypnotic tracks that somehow stay the same while shifting and reinventing themselves like old Underworld records used to do, all delay and echo, off kilter afrodub rhythms, synth washes and trebly guitars. Music to get lost in.
It’s an obscure record, but not one without influence. It could well have kickstarted the Scandinavian disco scene, a signpost to the stuff Diskjokke, Lindstrøm, Prins Thomas and others would start doing a little later. Studio themselves never made another record (there’s a collection of their remixes of other artists called Yearbook 2* that is worth tracking down, if only for their unutterably gorgeous take on The Rubies’ Room Without A key), but this one assured their place in my heart. One of the great lost albums. There’ll be magazine features about in twenty years.
*Studio’s discography, though tiny, is rather confused. As best I can piece it together, most of the tracks on West Coast were originally 12″ singles that were compiled on a vinyl LP that was subsequently reissued on CD. Then there is another CD, Yearbook 1 that repeats several of the tracks from West Coast in slightly different versions along with some odd tracks from compilation albums and samplers. None of it is rubbish.
I dug this out from an external drive for a re-listen. Yebbut … not keen on the drumming. Love”Indo”.
18. Cassandra Jenkins – An Overview On Phenomenal Nature
The most recent record on this list by some distance. The third song here was my introduction to her, found in the early 2021 lockdowns. “Hard Drive” is a tour de force, a spoken word account of meetings with various people – a security guard, a bookmaker, a driving instructor – that builds and builds on waves of glittering guitar, piano and drum loops. It’s a stunning song, one that will have you playing it again as soon as it finishes. And the good news is the rest of the album is pretty special too. The sound takes in traditional singer songwriter, folk, jazz, even some ambient. The palette throughout is restrained with hushed saxophone, gently rolling drums, keys for melody and atmosphere, and some lovely fluid, occasionally fuzzy, guitar, alongside strings and woodwind where they are needed. Across the record they coalesce into terrific arrangements, ornate yet direct, intimate but outward looking. The whole thing sounds luminous and honeyed, a triumph of production. The lyrics are snapshots and stories from everyday lives, part narrative, part poetry. It makes sense that Jenkins has supported Craig Finn from the Hold Steady, although the sound here couldn’t be more different from his main band. The words are held together with a sense of awe, a recognition of the extraordinary wonder and range of life, from the glories of nature to deep grief (Jenkins was in David Berman’s band for his Purple Mountains tour, which was derailed by his suicide on its eve – “Ambiguous Norway” here is about that “Farewell, Purple Mountains / I see a range of cumulus / the majesties transmutation / distant, ambiguous / The skies replace the land with air / no matter where I go / you’re gone, you’re everywhere.”). It all comes together on the closing The Ramble, seven minutes of shimmering keyboards, throaty sax and field recordings of birds and insects. There are no words, but it doesn’t need them to reach the transcendence the record has been building towards for the past half hour. Close your eyes and you can see bullrushes against a golden late summer sky, and feel a lover’s head on your shoulder and the sun on your face.
I saw her at the end of 2021, one of my first gigs after things started happening again, and it was a perfect capstone to that strange year, with none of the intricacies of the album lost. Maybe it’s a bit odd to describe a record that’s barely out of nappies as an all time favourite, but. it’s hard to imagine there’ll be a better ambient indie folk-jazz set released in the coming years.
Seriously great album, Mr Dynamite…
17. Panopticon – Roads To The North
Panopticon is a long running project that seeks to take the Norwegian black metal template of music intimately linked to that land and apply it to US landscapes and traditional sounds. Maybe you didn’t realise you needed a metal / bluegrass fusion in your life, but they are here to prove you wrong. Vicious riffing allied to Appalachian folk might sound like a stretch, but it sounds perfectly natural here, fluid and integrated. Just listen to how the plaintive Americana opening of Where Mountains Pierce The Sky gives way to some absolutely skyscraping riffs, the way the Long Road triptych (see? There’s even something here for prog fans!) moves from pure acoustic whimsy to raging metal to a spaced out Floydesque section and back again. The music is drenched in emotion, unafraid to wear its heart on its sleeve, and sorrowful and uplifting by turns.
It’s a careful assembly of moving parts that makes it all the more impressive that Panopticon is a one man band – Austin Lunn plays everything here. It’s an insanely ambitious record, and one he pulls it off in fine style. It could be an indigestible wad of genres, but it works brilliantly. Absolutely soaring music, possibly my favourite metal album. It also sports one of my favourite pieces of artwork, a tremendous photo of a low sun in a snowy forest
oh go on, have a few videos, for all of The Long Road, to give you an idea of the scope
I have been sent a Panopticon album to experience just this week. I wonder if it is this one?
Probably the new Rime Of Memory I expect? IIRC you quite like Saor, so you might get along with it! Or it might just give you the horse staggers.
For the benefit of the other three viewers of this thread, I’ve been a bit derailed by an insane couple of weeks at work. I was hoping to have it done by the end of the year but probably won’t now. Still, it’ll brighten up those dull January days when you all lose your collective rag over the blatant cheat I have at number one…
Keep going, Kid! I mean, when convenient, obviously. Just wanted to reassure you there are more than three other readers of this thread. Or maybe I’m simply one of the other three. But in any case, I’m loving these posts, and even when I don’t enjoy the recommendations I enjoy the writing. (And I often enjoy the recommendations. How did Fu Manchu pass me by???)
That’s a good point: am I one of the three? Am I? Could I be?
I’m a fourth still paying attention and looking forward to the final instalments. 👍👍
Fifth – and waiting for the obligatory Sisters placing (though I’d be impressed if it doesn’t appear).
Looking forward to these: keep them coming!
I think this makes me number seven.
I think The Kid may be rethinking his “other three viewers” statement!
You can’t stop at 17. Haven’t seen the 999 album yet
Don’t you dare stop now; this has been an excellent project and we all want to see the remaining picks.
did you miss me? I’ve had a busy few weeks, with some insane times at work, and then having the entire ground floor of our house relaid, which turned out to be the very definition of domestic chaos. Who would ever have thought that there would turn out to be a drain there? Anyway, thanks for the kind words and encouragement. Let’s get back into it…
16. Wu- Tang Clan – Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)
A great part of the appeal of pop music is the idea of a band as a gang, a tight knit group that’s impenetrable to outsiders, yet also makes the listener feel part of the team, in on the secret, The Clash understood this, and a decade plus later the Wu-Tang Clan took that stance and ran with it. With the core group running to nine members, they’re almost certainly going to be the largest band in this list, and they’re all distinct individual personalities, with a special chemistry between them. There’s the larger than life brashness of Method Man, the cool and calm cerebral technique of the Genius, and the sheer unhinged mania of Ol’ Dirty Bastard. Everyone brings their A-game. It’s the Hollywood story of the no hoper kid from the wrong side of the tracks seizing their chance and stepping up. The MCs leave hooks and memorable lines all over the album – “up from the 36 chambers!”, “when I get up and move my body…”, “who’s your A&R? A mountain climber with an electric guitar?”
Then RZA’s production is astonishing. It’’s dusty, scratchy and eerie, but also rugged and chunky, strewn with little minor key piano riffs that stick in your brain like a fishhook digging into the soft meat of your cerebellum. The final stroke of genius was incorporating the kung fu vibes of the films RZA loved throughout the record. I’m a suburban white kid from small town England who knew nothing of Staten Island or the projects, but years of late night television watching had primed me for this, getting me all excited when a piece of dialogue from Five Deadly Venoms or Shaolin Vs Wu Tang dropped. It was quirky and different enough to make the record stand out, and lent it a unique flavour that set it apart from a sea of identikit gangsta rap and G-Funk.
It’s a chaotic record, but it’s also funny, dark, angry, inventive, realistic and absurd. It all comes together on Da Mystery Of Chessboxin’, which is still one my favourite hip hop tracks ever. An opening snatch of dialogue that evokes mysticism, violence, careful thought and discipline, (almost) the whole crew taking verses with none of them dropping the ball, and a relentless beat adorned with a spooky off kilter piano lick.
As an autobiographical aside, this is almost certainly the last album I received via the medium of a mate taping it for me on one side of a C90 (cheers, Del). I can’t remember what was on the other side now, but this electrifying classic will never be forgotten.
What a calling card this was:
I love the barking mad philosophy behind it. From Wikipaedia:
Part of the album’s title originates from the Five Percent philosophy, known to adherents as the Supreme Mathematics, which attaches the number 9 with the meaning “to bring into existence”. Because the Wu-Tang Clan was made of nine members, each of whom has four chambers of the heart, the album was subtitled “36 Chambers”, being the total of the nine hearts of the members.
In reference to the 1978 kung fu film The 36th Chamber of Shaolin that the group enjoyed watching, the Clan considered themselves as lyrical masters of the 36 chambers, and arrived onto the rap scene while appearing to be ahead, and more advanced over others, with “knowledge of 36 chambers of hip hop music when everyone else in hip hop was striving to attain the knowledge of 35 lessons”. Also, while the human body has 108 pressure points (1 + 0 + 8 = 9), only the Wu-Tang martial artists learned and understood that 36 of those pressure points are deadly (9 + 36 = 45) (4 + 5 = 9). The lyrics and rhymes of the 9 members are to be considered as 36 deadly lyrical techniques for pressure points. All of this is the basis for the album title, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), being that 9 members x 4 chambers = 36.
There’s a lot of interesting stuff about the Five-Percent Nation in RZA’s excellent book, The Tao Of Wu.
It’s a book so good that when a friend discovered I hadn’t read it, he somehow managed to have it couriered to me for the following day, despite the fact I was on a beach holiday thousands of miles from home. It’s a short but sweet recounting of RZA’s life to date, incorporating Hip Hop koans, , arguments for vegetarianism and chess tips. Great pool read.
a magnificent thing – here’s a favourite ODB moment https://youtu.be/B2F_HiGaI7k?feature=shared
there is also a kickstarter for a comic book about ODB – https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/onipress/ol-dirty-bastard
A worthy entry.
I think there’s a universality to this album that you don’t find in a lot of Hip Hop. It’s a bunch of kids letting you into their weird little world, knowing that you have your own weird little world too.
It also birthed several of the greatest music videos ever made. I still covet one of those hoodies; I’m not sure they were ever released as Wu Wear.
I have a Wu hoodie. It’s from an etsy seller so I very much doubt it’s licensed product, but the quality is superb: black with da big Batman “W” on the front and a smaller one on the hood in bright yellow. It goes a bit OTT on the transfers with “Wu Tang” running down one arm (I’d prefer it if that wasn’t there – if you know, you know) so I dont wear it outside the house. That and I’m a middle class white bloke in my 7th decade.
Love this record to bits.
15. The Weakerthans – Left And Leaving
I’m sorry to break it to you like this, but this isn’t the first online music community I’ve been part of. Around 2000 -2005 I was very active on the forums of Punk Planet magazine (don’t bother looking for them, they’re not there anymore). One of the buzz bands there was The Weakerthans, a Canadian quartet with their roots in spitting punk (one of them was in Propagandhi!), but who were now playing a more elegant, literary music that owed as least as much to indie pop, folk and country as it did punk. The fervour was so great that in those pre-streaming, pre You Tube days, I took a punt and ordered this CD all the way from America, and, yeah, it turned out to be just as good as my online friends were saying. I had it on constant rotation for a year, always finding some connection in it every time I listened.
Singer and lyricist John K Samson’s voice may be frail but it’s the perfect carrier for his words of melancholy introspection, with all their beautiful simplicity and directness, their tales of breakups, loneliness, and the perils of small towns, their tenderly detailed observations of the minutiae of a life. It’s an album which had, and still has, a direct line to my heart. It’s so clear, so true, so affecting.
Twenty years ago they toured Europe off the back of this record. No Irish date of course, but I was so desperate to see them that my wife & I flew over to catch the show at the Garage in London, where I met someone from the PP boards, one of my first real life meetings with someone I knew off the internet (not the very first, that honour must go to my dear friend Etain, also from PP, who took us under her wing when we moved to Dublin. It’s been far too long since I’ve seen her, I’m going to sit down and wrote her an email after I’ve done this). I had one of my favourite gig moments there, when the band started playing None Of The Above (a song which is, er, not on this particular album). The entire room sang the opening lines, and I had this sudden epiphany that this little band, whose music had come to mean so much to me but to no one else I knew in real life, had had the same impact on at least several hundred other people, and they were right there with me right then, feeling like I did. It’s still a crystal sharp memory a couple of decades later, and I still love this album.
Great to have you back, Kid. I’m sure you’re really going to brighten up January.
Your description of your feelings at that Weakerthans gig must ring bells with so many people here.
14. The Congos – Heart Of The Congos
Despite being produced at the legendary Black Ark by the even more legendary Lee Scratch Perry, this album was ignored on release. Rejected by Island, a few hundred domestic Jamaican copies crept out, to no impact at all. I’d never even heard of it until the mid-90s reissue on Blood And Fire, which reestablished it in the reggae pantheon.
Being recorded in 1977 as the two sevens clashed, it’s right in the heart of the classic roots era. It’s not a typical roots sound though, apart from a few flashes. Rather, this is swirling, dense and murky, the springy percussion riding on a wave of bass that is not so much fat as obese. It’s hypnotic and otherworldly, but always devotional and righteous. There are also dubbed up moos on at least two songs. While Scratch provides that marvellous production job, the heart of the album is in the brilliantly emotive vocal performances, tenor and falsetto winding around each other and anchored by a deep baritone. The lyrics are full of biblical tribulation, but they sound like soothing contentment. Like taking your soul for a really good bath, nice and deep and hot.
Magic album. Scratch at his alchemic best.
Yep
It completely passed me by as well until the Blood and Fire reissue. The extra CD with the dubs is excellent. It was actually released in the UK on the Beat’s Go Feet label in 1980. I’d like to see any reviews of that if any appeared in the weeklies.
13. Mercury Rev – Deserters Songs
Mercury Rev were essentially dead when this came out in 1998. Disintegrating lineups and disastrously selling albums saw them slip out of as much of the public eye as they were ever in, and very few people were interested in what they were going to do next. Turned out that their plan was to ditch the fuzz and distortion and take a right turn into orchestral whimsy. Deserter’s Songs is a cracked Disney fantasia, woozy, romantic and earnest, played on eccentric instrumentation, piccolos and bowed saws, harpsichords and clarinets.
It’s completely out of time, but very firmly in a place, rooted in the beauties of upper New York State. When I saw them on this tour, the backdrop was a painting of the Catskils, and at a particular point in the set, a whole host of fairy lights came on in the sky above them. Simple, yes, but oh so effective, capturing the album’s whole vibe of a child falling asleep in a log cabin as stars come out over the mountains in one lovely moment. That gig, at Portsmouth Wedgewood Rooms is a strong contender for the best show I ever saw, a band that knew they’d been given a second chance grasping it for all they were worth. They’s played most of DS through the main set, alongside catalogue favourites like Chasing A Bee, Frittering, and Car Wash Hair, to the point where I was wondering what they could do for an encore. What they did was Cortez The Killer. I believe I heard those opening notes and spontaneously levitated.
This is a terrific otherworldly fairy tale of an album. There’s an instrumental version of this album as well, available in all the usual places. Sometimes I think it might be even more magical, if that’s possible.
I rated this highly at the time and haven’t listened to it for a long while. I’m off to do that right now.
I saw them on this tour, at the Garage in Glasgow. A wonderful show, dreamy, with a dark power. I am going to dig myCD of this out now!
Nice choice! The band were always a little out of step with the times, and although I still prefer the stoner-poetry of “Yerself is Steam” , I will re-listen to this.
I remember loving it. Played it last week, in a does it stay or does it go space saving exercise. It went. Awful bedwank.
12. Isaac Hayes – Hot Buttered Soul
I’m talking about the power of love now, I’m telling you what love can do. This snippet from the last song here is the story of this record in a nutshell. It’s Isaac Hayes’ testament to the tortures of love. Utterly drenched in strings, it’s opulent and melodramatic, overblown and heightened in every respect. And also, let’s not forget, so damn funky. There’s just four tracks here, but the album runs to forty five minutes. It’s soul alright, but it’s a long long way from Motown Chartbusters.
The opening seconds set the scene, as two quick drumbeats give way to a huge swathe of syrupy strings and psychedelic fuzz guitar. It’s Walk On By, but not as we know it, Jim. The quiet poise and self restraint of Dionne Warwick’s version is blown out of the window here in a great twelve minute roar of symphonic soul, the last half of which sees Hayes on his knees, ripping the words out of his shattered heart, while massed strings, dirty guitar and Hammond organ rise to a frenzied climax around him. And that’s only track one.
Next up, Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymystic is a huge funk jam, revolving around an insistent bassline adorned with crystalline echoing piano runs. The relentless pulse is hypnotising and the forward momentum undeniable, almost an (infinitely funkier) precursor to the motorik sound that Neu! would develop in the coming decade. Afterwards, One Woman is the most straight ahead track here, and clocks in at a frankly weedy five minutes. Even at a relatively concise length, the dynamics and the build here are fabulous, as impassioned wails and swooning strings come together in the final minute, only to fade out. I certainly would not have grumbled if this one had run to seven minutes or so.
If it’s build you’re after, then the last track here is what it’s all about. The take on Jimmy Webb’s By The Time I Get To Phoenix is just short of nineteen minutes. The opening half is minimal, just a simple repeated bass pulse, organ drone and ride cymbal. Hayes spools out a monologue over the top, his spoken word telling of a young man who falls foul of love and infidelity, diving into detail (you want to know what model and year of car the subject of the song is driving? Ike’s got you covered). He is spellbinding, a master of oratory in the manner of a preacher. And then, round about 8:40, he starts to sing, and the unerring repetition of the music gives way to a simple drumbeat and the strings begin to sing. The remaining ten minutes of the song are a gradual ratcheting up of a dial, as Hayes’s singing becomes ever more impassioned, the horn riff ever more piercing, the emotion ever more explosive.
It’s a stunning record, a perfect example of where vision and ambition can take you.
Stunning record worthy of a place in anyone’s top twenty. And, as @John-Walters once said, “surely the best photo of a perfect, shiny, baldy bonce there has ever been.”
And I always want to smear it with hot butter ….
🚔 Euphemism Police they say “you’re nicked, sunshine” 👮🏽♂️
Magnificent album
A fabulous record – nobody is in a hurry, everyone is settled in the pocket.
A few years ago, there was an RSD release of the full 33 minute session of “Do Your Thing”, from Shaft – and here it is – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iYvAUNECCM
11. Neil Young & Crazy Horse – Ragged Glory
That stupid one album per artist rule I set myself at the beginning of this makes this a very difficult decision. If I pick this one, then I can’t have Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, On The Beach, Mirrorball, Sleeps With Angels, After The Goldrush, or any of half a dozen other great NY records. So why Ragged Glory? Mainly because of all his great albums, this is the first one I came to as a contemporary new release, and also because when the mood catches you right there is no finer sound in rock music than Neil and the Horse at full gallop.
It’s long and loose, full of arching guitar solos, informal and spontaneous. Volume and distortion are the watchwords here, but there’s room for melodies and catchy choruses as well. There are many great individual moments – the relentless pounding at the end of Fuckin’ Up, the lyrical looping guitar lines of Over And Over (this album has some of Neil’s best electric playing ever on it) – but the triumph of the album is the vibe, the atmosphere. If you didn’t already know it was born out of four guys jamming in a barn you wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out. There’s something essentially good natured about it. You can hear the friendship and camaraderie between these musicians coming out in the playing and the lyrics, which are largely concerned with hippie nostalgia and looking back, without much anguish or introspection, but a wry satisfaction. Satisfaction allied to a massive great slab of feedback, mind you.“Dinosaur” is usually a bad word when writing about rock music (sorry J!), but this record was born to roam prehistoric swamps. The earth shakes when it approaches. It’s maybe the most appropriately named of all Neil’s records. It’s ramshackle, primitive, and – yeah – glorious.
It is great – I am glad there’s a Neil Young album on your list
It was my first Neil purchase – (though Freedom, along with Decades was my prior introduction to his canon). Mansion on The Hill, Days that Used To Be, Farmer John, etc – there isn’t a duff track on it and I can hear them all in my head still without putting it on.
My only problem with it is the sameness of it all – the mood stays the same throughout, and it’s soaked in feedback. Sleeps With Angels has great slabs of Neil solo – Trans Am, Safeway Cart – but they are interspersed with quieter, gentler tracks like Train of Love.
I’m not sure whether F*!#in’ up or Piece of Crap is the better joke song, though.
Sleeps With Angels is a brilliant record, and Change Your Mind is one of my favourite ling Neil jams. The one and only time I ever saw NY&CH, Piece Of Crap was the second song, which was…unexpected.
https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/neil-young-and-crazy-horse/2001/sheffield-arena-sheffield-england-73d052ad.html
I took a similar path (although I did buy Freedom, having read great things (“NY is back”) about the Japan-only release Eldorado EP).
To be honest, I could happily stop at Ragged Glory. I bought a few after in hope, but nothing since gets repeat plays. I know, it’s me not him. I’m pleased Shakey is still around to release records 34 years later, I just don’t want to buy them.
I feel much the same. The first two of his I bought were Freedom and Ragged Glory, and everything since just feels like diminishing returns – to the extent that I often don’t bother to check.
As stated above Sleeps With Angels is a great album, I also liked Harvest Moon and Silver and Gold. With The Horse there’s Greendale and Psychedelic Pill that are very listenable this century. Is it as good as his 60s/70s stuff? Probably not, but I am glad he put them out.
The last I bought was Are You Passionate? with Booker T from 2002 but I rarely, if ever, play them.
I stopped listening to his new albums after downloading a copy of recorded-in-a-phone-box A Letter Home. My loss, etc.
The only contemporary NY album I have bought as I had been so impressed by what I heard on the John Peel show. His live appearance on SNL from this time (which I didn’t know about) is legendary.
10. R.E.M. – Document
Another act where it is very hard to pick just one album. Any of the Bill Berry era albums could have been on this list. I’m not sure any band has ever had such a sustained run of brilliance. From Murmur to New Adventures, R.E.M. released ten albums in thirteen years, and every one of them is fantastic (okay, if you put a gun to my head I might admit that Fables and Monster are slightly less fabulous than the others, but it’s a very fine margin).
So why Document? Because it was my first, another album I fell in love with via the medium of hometaped C90s. I borrowed it off Matthew Bowden in the first year of sixth form, made a copy in the twin deck cassette player that was part of my midi stack (oh, the 80s) and listened to it over and over on the school bus in those days when my entire record collection ran to maybe twenty tapes. It was probably a good place to start with R.E.M. It had the hit single The One I Love, and it was direct enough to appeal to my adolescent taste (think Fables might have left me cold at that age), but also weird enough to make me realise that there was more to this lot than a radio anthem with catchy chorus and that investigating them would pay off. And indeed, I was there buying Green on release, and I didn’t get off the bus again for a very long time.
The album pivots on the two big singles. On either side of them, the opening run is angry politically engaged rock music (and doesn’t Disturbance At The Heron House seem all the more prescient in the light of the Jan 6th riots?), steely and somehow cryptic yet unambiguous, which is a very REM dichotomy, whereas side two is starker and more experimental. It turns its back on the political engagement of the first half, in favour of something almost post apocalyptic as we move from the Shaker rituals of Fireplace through repeated mentions of birds and departure to the eerie groove of Oddfellows Local 151’s visions of immolation.
Everybody here is brilliant. I love Stipe’s voice, Buck’s jangle and crunch and Berry pretty much being the entire rhythm section, but I have to make special mention of Mike Mills, R.E.M.’s secret weapon. Those lovely melodic high basslines and glorious backing vocals (his singing “time I had some time alone” in It’s The End Of The World will never not make me smile) are such a key part of their sound. The best band that ever came out of the USA and it’s not even close.
You mean your favourite US band I think 😉 It is a magnificent career though. Also my first R.E.M. album. I think it is a little patchy, probably not making my top 5 by them. The highs are very high though, Welcome to the Occupation also being my favourite track I think
Great record, great write up.
I went to have an overdue listen this morning and was surprised to discover that, on Spotify at least, It’s The End Of The World… has twice as many listens as The One I Love. Would not have guessed that, although I guess the former better befits our current mise en scene.
Out of interest, who are the other contenders for best band to come out of the US?
That’s a big question! Needs its own thread, really…
…or not…
The crucial test for me is “who was as good for as long” and I don’t know that I can think of very many credible contenders. There is still an American band to come very high in this countdown, so in theory that’s at least one album I like more than any R.E.M. record (which only highlights the essential daftness of assigning numerical values to things, but hey it’s too late to stop now), but that band’s entire discography isn’t up there with R.E.M.’s.
The Dead? Lasted longer, hit some awesome heights but also loads of useless noodling. Fugazi? Similar lifespan to R.E.M.’s imperial period, but released less albums and some of them were Red Medicine. Nirvana? A firework that burned very brightly but very briefly. The Beach Boys? Mike Love. Public Enemy? Couldn’t keep their relevancy up and were wrong footed by cultural shifts. The Band? Suspect at least some of them were Canadian, and they’re not that great anyway. Maaaaaybe Parliament / Funkadelic but probably not.
“Who was as good for as long” is a fair benchmark, and it certainly leaves them well placed. It also immediately disapplies the likes of Pixies, the Velvets, Nirvana, etc.
We’re looking at an imperial period of about 15 years, including 10 great albums. That’s going to be tough to beat.
Fugazi gets you 12 years and 7 albums (including – as you rightly note – Red Medicine). Maybe you can roll Minor Threat in there for a little extra edge, but that’s probably cheating.
You can make an argument for Pearl Jam, who have certainly kept on going, but I’m not convinced their actual imperial period was all that long, and it certainly isn’t 10 albums.
The Band would also be a contender, but you’d probably need to count he Dylan stuff.
Talking Heads, maybe? There’s a decade worth of great stuff there, and 8 at minimum very good records. Fleetwood Mac?
The obvious other heavyweight in the division is probably Metallica. They’ve been absolutely enormous for 4 decades, so they have REM beat on that front, but then you could argue that only the first 5 albums are really essential.
I dunno, it probably is REM, isn’t it.
The Band were 80% Canadian
True, but when the 20% is Levon Helm you qualify as American.
Then I claim the Velvet Underground for Wales.
Mentioned elsewhere but Wilco have been incredibly great for nearly 30 years, a couple of very relative duds but extraordinary consistency
And, for me, a better live band, saw them blow R.E.M. off stage when they were supporting them late 90s
As well you should!
Pearl Jam lol
Pearl Jam’s imperial period – Ten through Yield – is as good as anything and it’s remarkable how the NME / Nirvana sneering has stuck to them even after the thick end of 35 years. Their crime was to not be grunge, and to be earnest musos. And that’s it, really. And the Guys Who Know have kinda never forgiven them, while giving a critical pass to all kinds of terrible crud.
Btw – I really like the Brendan O’Brien remaster of Ten. But my PJ album of choice will always be Vs – an absolutely savage belter of a record which comes right out of the gate snarling and frothing and doesn’t let up for much of side one. And then gets going again, still covered in foam and phlegm. And contains a musical quotation from Ben by Michael Jackson, so doubleplusgood 👍👍
However, Ten through to Yield is only five albums, and one of them is No Code which is a bit patchy (but has Hail Hail and Off He Goes on it, so come on, it’s still great).
The right band at the wrong moment. Mis-sold as part of Grunge and never really forgiven for it.
Agree about Vs. Love Animal, what a tune.
Let’s also not forget, they sold 75 million records, which is REM numbers (albeit nowhere near Metallica).
Liked Ten a lot, Vs less, and I didn’t like most grunge, but diminishing returns from then, I felt.
The Ramones?
Maybe in terms of influence, but maybe not appeal to a broad audience (despite the T-Shirt sales), and some of their later albums are (to put it kindly” and acquired taste
ZZ Top?
No question on longevity, but consistently great?
Foo Fighters?
Longevity, but may be not the invention or growth of REM
Green Day?
Just me then …
The Supremes, The Temptations, The Miracles, The Four Tops, Booker T & The MGs, The Byrds….????
Beach Boys
Byrds
Velvet Underground
Talking Heads
Wilco
Would all be candidates in my book (along with R.E.M.)
ZZ Top have never been *great*. Entertaining and very good, sure. Great, never.
If Foo Fighters had released their debut followed by The Color and the Shape 10 times, we could talk. What actually happened is that they released the debut, The Color and the Shape, then 10 albums of “hey, is this Dave Matthews but with screaming?” Were it not for rock’s least elusive Lawrence Llewelyn Bowen impersonator and their commitment to being genuinely adorable live, they’d be a footnote.
Green Day used to be *great*, and then stopped being, and their not-great era encompasses their entire period of success except for Dookie. I’m glad they exist though.
Hmm … very much my thoughts about “greatness” of the above. Very good (with obvious flaws) but not truly great.
At least it inspired a response (as I expected it to)
Re: Green Day (apart from Dookie) – as it is the 20th Anniversary, I listened again to American Idiot. I maintain that is still a great album
American Idiot is indeed a great album.
The main problem with any argument for the Foos is that they’re not even in the top two greatest American bands Dave Grohl has played in.
Quite right. Probot *were* awesome
Great album: in contrast to dai, this one is definitely in my top 5 REM albums.
Having said that – in contrast to the Kid, my number one REM album has been and remains Fables. I was hooked from the first time that I heard the opening notes of Feeling Gravity’s Pull and that feeling of weird excitement has never let up in nearly 40 years (1985 was it?).
1. Automatic for the People
2. Murmur
3. Life’s Rich Pageant
4. Green
5. Hmmmm it could make it or maybe Reckoning or Fables or New Adventures or Out of Time
Pretty close
Ah this is the one where the Byrdsian magic is lost and the words emerge from the mist among less subtle, more mainstream rock. Still great stuff therein, as would be the case for years to come, but…
9. The Sisters Of Mercy – Floodland
Floodland is the second Sisters album, but only frontman Andrew Eldritch remained from the earlier incarnations, alongside his trusty drum machine Doktor Avalanche.It’s a solo album in all but name (Patricia Morrison was nominally a member of the band at this point, but her exact level of contribution has always been shrouded in mystery), and a transformation from the earlier sound. The drum machine bedrock is still there but the music on top is all synths and sequencers, with barely an electric guitar to be heard (the most memorable riff on the whole thing is played on the bass). It owes as much to John Carpenter as it does Motorhead. It’s an epic record, one that sounds so huge it should be no surprise that Jim Steinman was involved on a few tracks, of which This Corrosion is maybe the one they are still best known for. Eldritch called it a disco party run by the Borgias, which to be honest is pretty hard to beat as a description of a ten minute dance floor thumper packed with venom. Corrosion and other big songs like Dominion are gloriously bombastic and over the top, but offset by quieter moments, like the entirely (sequenced) piano driven 1959 or the ghostly bass pulse of Driven Like The Snow.
Eldritch’s lyrics come to the fore throughout, an intoxicating mix of pun and allusion, stealing from TS Eliot and riffing off Dylan and Shelley. Throughout the record, the words are dense and multi-layered, rewarding careful consideration. They are much concerned with apocalypse, armageddon, floods and love gone bad, but there’s a knowingness and a half glimpsed smirk that stops it becoming an entirely po-faced affair. Eldritch is acknowledging that we’re all doomed, but inviting you to pull up a chair and enjoy it with him.
A theme I’ve returned to throughout this list has been the idea of band as gang, and the Sisters fit right into that, no matter how many of them there actually were at this point. There was a totality of package to them. All the records have a common design template which means they stand together, but not with anything else. It’s part of their appeal, the gang mentality that had served the likes of The Clash so well. You either get it or you don’t, and if you get it, you *really* get it. There’s a constant tension between simplicity and complexity in their music, monotonous and relentless beats paired with clever lyrics and complex instrumentation. They can construct epic melancholic grandeur and at the same time revel in big stupid rock music. They’re intellectual and also gloriously dumb, and one of the finest British bands of my lifetime.
without a doubt the best band to ever come out of the LS2 postcode
And probably the best thing to come out of Ely, too. Well, since 1039 or something.
Oliver Cromwell came out of Ely, didn’t he? Make of that what you will.
The Crom was from Hinchingbrooke, near Huntingdon, about 20 miles away from Ely. I got married in his house. I had two live bands and a free bar at the reception, no wonder he didn’t send us a card, the miserable sod.
He inherited his mother’s house in Ely, and lived there for a decade, when he was MP for Cambridge. After which he started chopping off heads.
Crom and Mitra.
I was about 10 at this time and seeing his name a lot in the NME I didn’t realise Andrew Eldritch is an assumed name. I hadn’t heard it in any other context. So a few years later seeing the word “eldritch” used as an adjective I thought, “Great description, but how many people are really going to get that reference?”
Yes, “thick bastard” indeed….
It’s a better fit than Taylor, and prevents the confusion with Duran Duran
Nine while Nein.
I tuned into the Sisters in 85 after ‘Wake’, spent the next couple of years mainlining the back catalogue and soaking in bootleg live recordings, anticipating Floodland with Pavlovian saliva at the cryptic adverts in the inkies. When it came, This Corrosion was bombastic, but it was the white-suited dissolute diplomat in Petra that turned me on, keeping me feeling there was still juice in the bottle. Lucretia was exciting, promising much, and I tuned into TOTP to see each single mimed live. But in the end I felt burned out.
“They were never quite as good after Gary Marx left” said somebody once, and that’s my opinion now. Although much better produced than FALAA, Floodland is for me a tripod of songs, one of which fades when it should flourish. Harsh maybe, but listening to it tonight, it’s only Dominion/Mother Russia, Driven Like The Snow and Never Land (full version please) that carry any of the weight of the earlier catalogue. A gang in spirit, TSOM may be, but this album is effectively a solo album, missing the collaboration with his first cohort – Marx, Hussey with his 12 string and Adams with his mighty mighty bass.
Like TSOM mk1, TSOM mk2 fell apart acrimoniously, and this time without any live shows, or any sense of Patricia Morrison having any role than cosmetic, which just adds to the sad sense of what might have been if they could have genuinely built on her history with The Bags/Fur Bible/Gun Club and weakens the legacy of Floodland further.
Sorry Kid, but it’s FALAA all the way for me.
I think FALAA is definitely weaker than Floodland. I came very close to picking the Some Girls comp instead, as I think those 82-84 EPs are their undisputed high point, but the inclusion of the Damage Done 7” and the weaker Body Electric put me off….
Fair enough – it is after all your list. I’m intrigued, if you want to say, as to what the weaknesses are. Side 1? Murky production? I’m not sure there’s a better opener than Black Planet – but then those piano chords were the first thing I ever heard by the band, so I am somewhat biased.
Mentioning Some Girls, I’d put The Reptile House ep joint first if it qualified.
Side one is definitely not as good as side two. I believe Hussey wrote the music for that side and Gary Marx did side two? The only track I would go out of my way to save from that first side is Marian. The others aren’t bad, but they’re not Temple Of Love or Burn, are they? I am however baffled by your assertion re Black Planet. I think it’s one of their weakest songs and a really poor opener, especially when the title track was right there. Still you know what they say about opinions…
Indeed, we’ve all got one. I’m quite enjoying this disagreement – I hope you are too.
Yes, FALAA is a Hussey/Adams split with the exception of No Time To Cry and Possession which were both collaborations. I prefer the second side too – just get expectant goose bumps from the opener.
Temple of Love and Burn, eh? Both are the worst songs on their eps for me, bombastic and banal respectively. It would be boring if we all thought the same. Gimme Gimme Shelter and Fix instead. I love Fix.
I’m with the Kid, I think Floodland is the best of the three albums, though like him I think the run of EPs from 82 – 84 is their high point. Funnily enough, I think the recent radio sessions album that covers that period may be the best Sisters “album” as it were.
Thought this or FALAA was going to finish a bit higher. Intrigued to see what’s next.
Mind you, it has by far the worst sleeve in the Sisters discography. What were they thinking of?
8. Levellers – A Weapon Called The Word
We go back a long way, the Levellers and me.
It all started in Nottingham in autumn 1990. I saw a cassette of this album in HMV, and I recognised the name from knowing that they’d supported my beloved New Model Army on their most recent tour. I took a shot in the dark and bought it. When I got back to my little room in a hall of residence and stuck it in the little tape player that was all I could fit on the train when I moved, it was love at first listen. It absolutely clicked with me right away, and it’s still my favourite album of theirs to this day (I’ve been playing it as I write this, and I know every word of every song). My mate Steve flipped for it as well, and we finally got to see them a few months later when they played at a free festival nearby. At the time, it was probably the best gig I’d ever seen in my life (you have to remember I’d come from the deep southwest where no bands ever venture), just walking on air afterwards, complete euphoric bliss.
And then after that summer they put out the One Way single and Levelling The Land album, and they weren’t mine and Steve’s little secret anymore. No moaning or looking for indie points from me though, I was still most definitely on the bus. The gigs on the LTL tour were the first time I’d ever properly followed a band, and Steve and I did plenty of consecutive shows, sleeping in train stations or on strangers’ floors (fond memories of a house in Birmingham where the housemate of the girl who had put us up seemed awfully confused as to why two lads with long hair and army surplus boots had been to see Level 42). Those gigs were so much fun, a group clearly on the up with a real buzz around them, and every night felt like a victory lap for our little band.
After that, real life and gainful employment came knocking, and the enthusiasm had to be tempered. I still went to see them when they were playing anywhere I was living or working. I kept up with the albums as well, which stayed strong up till the fifth, Mouth To Mouth. I didn’t like the next one much though, and I started to drift away, not helped by living abroad for a fair chunk of the 00s and missing the live shows. That separation was helped by the next few records being pretty forgettable (not joking, I literally forgot Truth & Lies existed until I went to dig out AWCTW just now). In the late 00s, back on these shores, I finally gave up pretending I was anything other than a hippy and started going to likeminded festivals again. Inevitably I saw the Levellers a few more times, and really enjoyed them. They didn’t really do a lot of new, and it was certainly a little bit of a nostalgia trip, but it was also a lot of fun. Their own festival, Beautiful Days, is a great experience with good vibes throughout. They play twice each year, kicking off with an acoustic set in the tent, and then closing the main stage on Sunday. I have some really fond memories of my daughter jumping up and down waving a glow stick and absolutely losing her shit to them there when she was nine or so (she would now completely deny that this ever happened). Yeah, the setlists didn’t have a lot of material later than 1994 or so, and perhaps they were creatively spent, but the gigs were always fun. But then they put out the Peace album in 2020 and somehow it is an absolute stormer, the best thing they’d done for twenty five years or more, sounding like a revitalised band.
They were also a massive gateway band for me. I found them at exactly the right time, and from them I branched out deeper into folk music, deeper into anarchopunk. Maybe if it wasn’t for the Levellers I would still be into Christy Moore and Culture Shock, but maybe not (and it says a lot that I can hold one band largely responsible for pushing me in two such separate directions). I don’t think I would have discovered the free festival scene without them either, which led to some of the best weekends of my life circa 1992 (you haven’t lived until you’ve seen someone breathing fire off the roof of Wango Riley’s Travelling Stage while Poisoned Electrick Head are rearranging your DNA live onstage). There’s something else about them I love, which I’m finding quite hard to articulate, which is that they celebrate Englishness, without all the shit that goes with that idea. Not the England of the Daily Mail or the Conservative Party of course, but a strand of outsider creativity, not doing what you’re told and loving the land that chimes very strongly with me. And the Steve that I went to the gigs with all those years ago is still a really good mate, and we went out for a few drinks just a couple of weeks ago. It’s been a thirty year friendship largely soundtracked by the Levellers.
Fundamentally, they’re a part of my life. We have been entwined for three decades and more, sometimes at a distance, sometimes right up close, and I can’t see that ever changing.
tl;dr: I bloody love the Levellers.
Kid, this is such a wonderful post and I loved reading it.
I had a massive Levellers moment as a 13 year old when Levelling The Land came out. Listened to that album endlessly. Bought the long sleeve red T-shirt with the logo on and wore it everywhere. Mocked incessantly by my siblings for the crusty folksiness of the band – at the time their favourite music was being produced by a bloke off pirate ratio named (I shit you not) “Steve The Nutter”. It was the last hurrah for proper style tribes before Britpop sort of varnished everything over.
I agree with everything you say about Englishness. You’ve really put your finger on something there, because that was exactly what I loved about them too.
The love affair was short lived and I haven’t listened to them in over 30 years. May well give them a spin over the weekend on the strength of the above. Cheers.
I remember when the Levellers played the university SU in late ’90 or early ’91 (I was on the crew). I pressured my pal Vicky to go, and visited her the following lunchtime, to see what she thought. She had, along with the 1,000 or so audience, somehow gone crusty overnight.
Vicky played her tape of AWCTW for the duration of my visit – “when you said they were great live, I had no idea how great”. She spent the rest of her time at university with dreads, much to the horror of her middle-class Epsom parents, and joined up as a traveller after she graduated.
I last saw her at Glastonbury in the mid-’90s, up in the green fields, doing something with a travelling circus.
That’s a great anecdote. With the added bonus of making me glad I never saw them live.
Chapeau 😃
Another great write up. The Levellers were a definite presence in Brighton in the 90s when the there was still (just about) an actual counter culture based on the large number of squats, the “crusty” scene, and the Stanmer Park festivals. The group also existed despite general hostility from the music weeklies. That said, I can’t say I was the greatest fan of the music but I respected them and would still put them alongside Blyth Power as a type of modern folk music.
ah, I love Blyth Power. There really is no one else like them.
7. Massive Attack – Blue Lines
This often gets lumped in with the “Bristol Scene” or trip hop, but I don’t think it’s really either of those things. It might well be a foundational text in those genres, but to my ears it’s a UK hip hop record, albeit one with huge dollops of reggae and soul in the mix. We’ll get to the headliners in a minute but my own favourite songs here are the ones in the line of the title track and Five Man Army, hushed intimate whispers right in your ears, sparse low key production that pulls up loads of samples and puts them in just the right place. They’re skeletal but never cold, playgrounds for the voices on the mics. It’s a great ensemble effort, with so many different voices floating in and out, playing off each other, picking up lyrics, responding to and finishing lines. So many of those couplets are memorable and quotable – it’s a rare week where I don’t sing to myself “hip hop you don’t stop cos I’m not sloppy, I like the beat so we need another copy” (which doesn’t even really mean anything, but nonetheless has been stuck in my head for thirty years). Likewise Daddy G’s Fiddler On The Roof interpolation from the same song never fails to make me smile. And as for rhyming Subbuteo and Studio One…
It’s not all mellow hip hop vibes though. Blue Lines features two bona fide modern soul classics, powered by Shara Nelson’s terrific vocals. Safe From Harm opens the record, riding that huge Billy Cobham sample, and you all know the towering Unfinished Sympathy. Those strings, that piano, that nagging little glockenspiel (?) riff…it’s such a powerful and influential track that people even ripped off the video. The album closes with the gospel reggae of Hymn Of The Big Wheel, Horace Andy’s sweet falsetto promising hope and renewal in the face of struggle and ecological disaster.
Blue Lines is the album as comfort food, something to put on and lose yourself in, another one of those records that brings you into its own world, a stoned late night ramble through a fantastic record collection, a melange of genres and influences bought together by wit and weed. It’s one of the best and most British albums ever made.
Isn’t it a fabulous record? Some days Five Man Army is the best track on there, just because of that bassline.
And to think that the same group came out with Mezzanine, a record with an almost diametrically opposed feel to it (although arguably within the same genre) and some days I think it’s the better record.
By happy coincidence I’ve been listening to Blue Lines loads this week, for the first time in ages.
It’s definitely not a Trip Hop record (whatever that label is worth when all is said and done), but I’m not sure it’s a Hip Hop record either. Rather, it seems to occupy its own personal genre of Black British Music – it takes a little of everything and throws it in the pot without bending itself too far in the direction of any particular sound.
“A stoned late night ramble through a fantastic record collection” is the perfect description, and I agree that it’s certainly one of the most British albums ever to have been made.
Oh, and just to counterbalance some of the below: Unfinished Sympathy rules. What a vocal.
There’s an argument that it couldn’t have happened without Soul II Soul, who bestrode the world like a large-trousered colossus at the top of the 90s. Who’s listening to SIIS now?
A quick look at Spotify reveals that a lot of people are still listening to the singles from Club Classics Vol 1 (27m for Keep On Movin’, 118m for Back To Life). Very similar numbers to the singles from Blue Lines.
The Club Classics album tracks, much less so. Shame, as it’s a great record – just maybe a little of its moment.
There are three stone cold top tunes on Club Classics. keep On Movin’ would make my top 100 songs for sure The rest of the album is a bit meh.
Wow, I turned out to be wrong, fuckin ell, surprise surprise
The album tracks might have got more plays if Jazzie had put the proper versions on the album in the first place.
I sometimes think I’m the only person on this planet that doesn’t get Unfinished Sympathy. The rest is great though. I agree re: Mezzanine.
Me neither, that makes two
Where do I sign? That’s three.
Muso ponce alert, but the thing about Unfinished Sympathy is the tune is unresolved, so it never quite hits the, um, climax and leaves me wanting a bit more. Insert your own joke about seven and twelve inches here.
It’s a bit like a tantric bonk, according to Sting, anyway.
6. The Pogues – If I Should Fall From Grace With God
A wonderful cocktail of excitement, adrenalin, romance and grimy beauty. This was one of, if not the first, “proper” albums I bought, on cassette when I was fifteen or so. I vividly remember sitting in my bedroom listening to it on my little mono tape player and turning the volume down really low with my finger hovering over the pause button in case my mum heard the swearing. I was a sheltered lad from a quiet part of the country, and my word, did I learn things from this record. There is so much in it, berserk punk bursts, sweeping epic melancholia, weird hybrids of Irish music with Spanish and Middle Eastern sounds, ragged romance, republican politics, gothic horror, and an all consuming lust for life. This is the Pogues at their height, building on the (also excellent) Rum, Sodomy And The Lash and before the wobbles of the next couple of albums, Shane not yet tipped over the edge, still writing sharp and beautiful lyrics and delivering them in that rich lived in voice. And it wasn’t just Shane of course – Philip Chevron’s Thousands Are Sailing would be the best song written by almost any other band, a brilliant account of the immigrant’s life and it’s triumphs and sorrows.
I never got to see them at this time, probably just as well as I suspect frail young me might well have died at a Pogues show in their prime. I did catch them a couple of times on the reunion tours, notably a Cardiff show where Cerys Matthews sang the Kirsty parts in Fairytale, and a midsummer gig in Tokyo where, calendar notwithstanding, they played Fairytale anyway and my Japanese friend got so excited he lost pretty much all his English and just bounced up and down shouting “Christmas song! Christmas song!”
Ultimately, it’s a really exciting record from the minute it starts to the moment it ends, and what more can you ask for?
I bought this when it came out in the January of 1988, and when I went off to university in the September I took it with me. The first coursemate I met there was Irish, and we went to a house party with three second-year Irish friends who had beards (well, two did – Sally didn’t), Guinness, and tapes of the first two Pogues albums. I had a lovely time, but had to have a little rest in a hedge on the way back as my legs had stopped working.
Totally agree that this was their peak moment (even if Rum Sodomy & The Lash is my preference).
But, I think this is the most consistent too, and hangs together better than RS&TL.
Shane’s passing last year had me going back and listening again (like many others I’m sure) and this album is an absolute treat from soup to nuts, and despite it’s seasonal appeal Fairytale sits just right in the flow of the album.
And Fiesta may well be the barmiest track committed to record (can anyone actually decipher the lyrics without the printed sheet?)
I prefer Rum too. I bought If I Should Fall first though when it was released and I was so blown away I picked up the other 2 albums within days. Then became really obsessive about seeing them live.
Also bought this when it came out, one of the first ‘cool’ albums I bought. That Christmas I’d been doing a paper round while listening to Red Roses for Me and Rum… on a C90 over and over on my walkman and also fallen hard for the Fairytale single. So I was hugely excited by the idea of this and it didn’t, and still doesn’t, disappoint. In fact it’s as good as you say it is. My eldest is hugely impressed that I own the original Fairytale on vinyl. Or so she says.
Like others I went back to the Pogues after Shane’s death. This is definitely their high point but both Peace and Love and in particular Hell’s Ditch are much better than their reputations would have it. They’re just not quite If I should Fall…
5. Emmylou Harris – Wrecking Ball
If 80s 4AD had put out country albums they might sound a little like this. With Daniel Lanois at the controls, the trad Nashville sound of Emmylou’s previous album, the underwhelming Cowgirl’s Prayer, is swapped for spooky and rattly late night ambience as country twang gives way to endless reverb and delay. It sounds fantastic, a deep warm shimmering cocoon of sound to lose yourself in. It’s a perfect marriage of a beautiful ethereal voice, a distinctively atmospheric sound and some impeccable song selection (songwriters here include Neil Young, Steve Earle, Bob Dylan (the beauty and tenderness of this Every Grain Of Sand is enough to make you think for a moment that perhaps his Christian rock period is perhaps unfairly maligned), Lucinda Williams, Gillian Welch, and Kate and Anna McGarrigle as well as Harris and Lanois themselves). An awful lot of these songs deal with grief and loss, but they are not raw or painful, more filled with a gentle balm that soothes and offers hope, a promise that’s realised in the vision of old and lasting romance across the final two tracks.
It’s an astonishing record, a melancholy, haunting masterpiece, one that exists in its own time and space, the sound of gossamer and gauze, with just enough grit to keep it from cloying.
Fantastic pick. It’s an album I often go back to, and it really works best taken as a whole.
Where Will I Be is such a fabulous signal of intent with which to start a record, but my favourite, taken on balance, is May This Be Love. You can really feel the fingerprints of Lanois – that “gossamer and gauze” sound you so well describe.
Looking forward to the last 4. My money is on Chocolate Starfish and the Hotdog Flavored Water for number 1.
Excellent album. I have the 3LP version which is very nice indeed
https://www.discogs.com/release/8394964-Emmylou-Harris-Wrecking-Ball
Thanks! A stupendous review of a magnificent record. A real game-changer for Emmylou as it appealed to a far broader audience.
I must put in a word of praise for Spyboy, the backing band with which she then toured.
“Buddy Miller on guitar and New Orleans musicians Daryl Johnson on bass and Brady Blade on drums.”
They did a magnificent job of recreating the album live. Her next album was a live album with them (as I’m sure you know, Kid!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spyboy_(album)
Those two NOLA guys gave the music a drive and funkiness that was something quite new for Emmylou.
And Buddy Miller’s guitar playing is superbly atmospheric. Her they are with one of the Daniel Lanois’s finest songs.
I am now listening to Wrecking Ball for the first time in a few years. They really cherry-picked the songs. I did a little googling about the dates.
Sweet Old World (an instant classic) was the title track of Lucinda Williams’s 1992 album.
But Gillian Welch had not released her first album, Revival, (1996) when Emmylou covered her exquisite Orphan Girl.
https://americansongwriter.com/gillian-welch-orphan-girl/
The song had also been covered rather decently in 1994 by bluegrass duo Tim & Mollie O’Brien.
So Gillian was already known in the music business.
A quirky detail. “Gillian Welch” has always been the duo Gillian and Dave Rawlings. But record companies were only interested in signing female artists.
4. The Afghan Whigs – Black Love
This is an album I missed at the time. It came out in 1996, but I didn’t hear it until the early 2000s, thanks to someone I worked with championing the band in the pub one long night. Big thanks to Ryan, wherever you are now, because it’s become an all time favourite of mine, and the Whigs have turned out to be one of my favourite bands.
The one line pitch is 90s alt rock, but made by men who were really into vintage soul and funk. It’s influenced by Norman Whitfield as much as it is the usual rock canon suspects, giving us a blend of caustic rock and lush soul. Frontman Greg Dulli wrote the whole record, and his constant subject matter is those entwined perennials, love and crime. His vision of love isn’t all hearts and roses, but a twisted destructive thing, powered by jealousy and revenge. It’s a great vocal performance throughout, a tortured howl of vengeance, self loathing and remorse. The sleeve notes are all couched as if this were a film (“Shot on location at…” instead of “recorded at”, etc) and fittingly so, for this is classic noir, drawing on the same vein of crime movie iconography that inspired so much hip hop around this time (lyrically at least this could be a hip hop record, full as it is of street level storytelling around the grimier seams of life).
It kicks off with the absolutely perfect opening 1-2 of the scene setting slow burn of “Crime Scene, Part One”, which is a strong contender for best track one side one ever, into the howling rage of “My Enemy”, but in truth there isn’t one bad song here. The music deepens the straight ahead rock band format of the Whigs’ previous albums with keyboards and strings, allowing Dulli to indulge his symphonic soul leanings – check the intro to “Blame, Etc”. It’s all powerful, punchy and emotive, culminating in the epic “Faded”, which is a song that to this day should be closing stadium gigs in front of a lighter waving crowd, half of whom weren’t even born when it came out.
But that was not to be. ‘Black Love’ is an fantastic record but one that wasn’t the hit it should have been (to be fair, when your lead single opens with the line “got you where I want you, motherfucker” you can’t really expect a whole heap of radio play). The band broke up after one more album (the also excellent ‘1965’). Dulli has reactivated the name in recent years and put out some records that are really good on their own terms, but not reaching these heights. I fear this album is now largely forgotten, but if you know, you know.
and here’s a bonus clip of a live Faded from their first reunion tour (where to be fair they do seem to be playing to a pretty big crowd). The musical quote at the end is typical behaviour – I have recordings where they’ve incorporated bits of Papa Was A Rolling Stone, Housequake, Superstition, even songs from Jesus Christ Superstar into their own material. Fantastic band.
Brilliant choice – absolutely love this band.
1965 was the album that got me into the Whigs, but I worked backwards and found this one to be even better. Love the unusual reference points.
I struggle with this record, largely due to the Bobby-Gillespie-on-a-bad-day level of flatness in the singing. My bad.
Not really your bad – let’s face it: it’s not you that’s singing flat…
3. Culture Shock – Onwards And Upwards
Another band that I discovered through the alternative clubs of Plymouth in the very early 90s. On those nights out, I was always hearing this one brief track, full of punky energy but with a bouncy danceable vibe. I loved it, and somehow discovered it was Civilization Street by a band called Culture Shock. And so Rival Records wanders once more into this story, where I bought a copy of this album, complete with “pay no more than £4.50” branding on the sleeve, so I could get hold of that song, and found so much more.
Let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way. This is ska-punk. There’s no avoiding it, but please be assured it couldn’t be further from preppy Yanks with trombones. It’s altogether more ramshackle and ground level take on those ideas, and predates that US sound by a decade or so. Frontman Dick Lucas had previously been in Wessex anarcho legends Subhumans, and the other members had been in various Wiltshire punk outfits. Culture Shock had a brief life, only three years or so, and they’d already split up by the time I discovered them, but in that time they played hundreds of gigs, became stalwarts of the free festival and DIY scenes and recorded this full length plus a couple of mini-LPs.
So much anarchopunk, and protest music in general, is just pointing at things and saying they’re shit. Culture Shock were the antithesis of that, relentlessly upbeat and positive, celebrating the joy that can come from swimming against the tide. Dick’s lyrics have a level of observation and creativity that is miles ahead of simplistic sloganeering. They’re never preachy, but prefer to make you ask questions and join dots, forever striving for inclusivity and peace. The words are thought provoking, and the music is pure fun, full of playful bouncing reggae basslines, punchy phased guitars, even some dubwise experiments. It’ll make you dance and put a smile on your face at the same time.
I’m reluctant to say a record changed my life. We’re all the sum of our experiences, and so many different things go into shaping an individual human…but this album and its underlying philosophy have been a colossal influence on my outlook. Perhaps I would have got there anyway, but discovering this at an impressionable age pushed me towards vegetarianism, the idea of constructive protest, an affinity with subcultures and alternative lifestyles, and did more to make me ask questions than my teachers ever did.
As I said above, they’d broken up before I even discovered them, and so for decades I only experienced them as an artefact, three records and some lyric sheets. Then out of the blue they got back together about ten years ago. Being from Wiltshire they’d always had a decent following in Bristol, and I finally got to see them with 700 other people in a disused church. A gig I’d been waiting literally twenty years for. They came out and opened with the song that’s track one side one here. I would have been crying happy tears if I hadn’t been jumping around like a lunatic. I wrecked a perfectly good pair of trainers that night and I have no regrets.
It’s not something I expect loads of other people to like. Something that has such an impact almost by definition has to be so keyed into to you that most other listeners won’t make that connection. It’s not in any way a credible album, or probably one that will be making anyone else’s lists, but it means the world to me.
2. New Model Army – Thunder And Consolation
Another walkman on the school bus classic. New Model Army have been my favourite band for years, and this is where the love affair started. It’s their masterpiece, a perfect collision of folk, punk and rock. Four albums into their career, this is the sound of a band making a quantum leap forwards in sound and songwriting. The breadth of material here is tremendous, from the half-terrified, half welcoming invocation of apocalypse in opener I Love The World to the spitting fury and anger at Britain in the 80s of the final track Archway Towers. In between there’s compassion for broken homes and broken lives, anger at those who left a small town for the big city, ruminations on family and bloodline, and celebrations of getting away and living a better kind of life.
Justin Sullivan’s lyrics could easily fall into dogmatic preaching, but he leavens them with enough poetry and sensitivity to avoid stereotyped punk ranting. The music is urgent driving post punk, that also knows when to take the throttle off and indulge in some folky reflection. It’s not difficult or challenging music, there are strong melodies and catchy choruses throughout (the backing vocals on Stupid Questions are a masterclass). It’s an album where the rhythm section shines, fitting for a band who always claimed to be influenced by Northern Soul as much as the Ramones, with excellent melodic bass throughout, and one the best drummers around in the late Rob Heaton.
This may be the high point of 80s alternative and post-punk. It’s a fabulous articulation of the discomfort some people felt with the Thatcherite ethos of the time, told with fire and passion, and enough hope and optimism to soften the darkness.
Like I said at the beginning, they’re my favourite band. I’ve seen them north of a hundred times now, if you count Justin solo shows and other permutations of the main band. (That is over a thirty plus year period though, so only averages out at about three gigs a year. That’s not mad, is it?). They’re a brilliant live experience but a difficult band to pigeonhole – I’ve seen them at a metal festival, a goth festival, a folk festival and a hippy festival and they haven’t seemed out of place at any of them – and they’ve never been fashionable (but then neither have I), but they have continued making great records. Love them.
And there’s even a sleeve note to the effect that the album title was taken from the works of prominent Northern revolutionary Quaker, who I can only imagine is our own @salwarpe
Thanks for the tag, Kid. I had a feeling NMA would be right up at the top of your list. A bit too rough and ‘cloggy’ for my prejudiced tastes, I had ‘No Rest’, whose eponymous single I really enjoyed, but have never really dived further into their catalogue. In my mind they’re like a more folky Saxon, and I do mix up Slade and Biff Byford in my mind somewhat – lots of northern down-to-earth macho imagery in my mind. Probably sacrilege to hear.
About the Quaker thing, I did know Slade (or Justin as his parents presumably would have called him) had connections with the Society of Friends – born in Jordans, Bucks, where the Meeting House was made with timbers from the Mayflower ship that carried the Pilgrim Fathers (and presumably Mothers) to America, and growing up in Bradford. I knew Quakers from both places, but never came across the Sullivans. It’s a small world, but obviously not that small.
Likewise for Edward Burrough, the source of the album quote. Dying in prison at the age of 29, having spent a life as one of the first generation of Quakers, he petitioned the King and got him to stop the hanging and flogging of Quakers in Massachussets. It must have been an extraordinary time – a very young church, full of passion and conviction with members constantly in and out of prison. In some ways, that radicalism is with us to this day, though many Quakers now come to it late in life.
Anyway, I think I’d better listen to this album. I’m much more familiar with songs from your top choice. The River is my first and favorite Springsteen album, and just reading the song titles sets them off playing in my mind. I love it. An album that I always pair with London Calling for its ambition and strength.
Thanks for doing the whole list – some very interesting and diverse choices!
1. Bruce Springsteen – the orange tape that a guy my dad worked with made me
Home taping is killing music, eh?
It’s 1984. I’m a young kid, still a year or two away from being a teenager. I like pop music. I listen to the top 40 countdown on a Sunday night and watch Top Of The Pops every Thursday. There’s a song by someone named Bruce Springsteen I’m really into. It’s called Dancing In The Dark, and I keep playing back my taped off the radio recording of it. My dad takes note of this, and has a word with a big Springsteen fan he works with, and a day or two later comes home with a tape his workmate has recorded me. It’s all of Born In The USA on one side, and a selection of songs from Born To Run, Darkness, and The River on the other.
On one level it was a simple act of kindness, which is greatly appreciated to this day, but I also suspect that it was born from the same urge I have in myself, a need to evangelise, to share this great thing that you love and hope that other people get it too (case in point: this thread). And boy did it work. This tape was my first exposure to the idea that an artist could have a catalogue and a body of work, that there was a narrative to artistic careers. It put me on a path of being really into music, of it becoming my main hobby and interest, even my career. It was also banger after banger after banger, twenty five songs that were all fantastic.
I’m not going to dwell on the albums themselves here. We all know them, and saying that Thunder Road or My Hometown are great songs is not really accomplishing anything that hasn’t been done fifty thousand times before. The important thing is the effect on my life. It’s not the only factor in my love of music of course, but it was an ignition point, a Big Bang that has led pretty much directly to eg spending much more effort and time than is rational talking about my favourite albums on an internet backwater for other likeminded souls (may god bless you all).
The artifact itself is long gone, lost somewhere in the detritus of a life, but the impact has reverberated down the years since. I can still easily recall it to memory, the orange BASF logo, the handwriting on the J-card, the way he’d written the year of release next to each album heading (catnip for a nascent trainspotter like me). I just need to hear the intro to any of these songs, and it’s all there in my head, my very own madeleine.
Great work overall and a fascinating top five. Well done. 👏👏👏
I’d love to know what the selections were from Born To Run, Darkness and The River to fill up side two of the tape.
of course!
Badlands
The Promised Land
Darkness
Thunder Road
Tenth Avenue Freeze Out
Born To Run
Sherry Darling
Independence Day
Hungry Heart
I Wanna Marry You
The River
Cadillac Ranch
and then a fragment of Meeting Across The River that gets cut off after a minute or so when the tape runs out
Interesting. I’m not a great fan of The Boss but I regard Darkness as his best album and Racing In The Street as his most outstanding song.
I love Racing In The Street now, I’m not sure what my twelve year old self would have made of it though. It’s also one of Bruce’s longer songs, so you could fit two in it’s place instead (which I have to imagine is why Jungleland wasn’t there either)
Your dad’s friend obviously thought things through.
Great work, Kid and an unexpected number one with a lovely rationale…
Brilliant final pick, lovely way to round it out. Sounds like your Dad did some absolutely top fathering here.
There’s something really special about being able to pick out these moments where flame met kindling, and the above made me wistful for the days of home taping. Not the world’s greatest format, the cassette, but probably the best for sharing. Can’t say fairer than a carefully selected mix (with all the ball-ache of getting it taped), accompanied by a handwritten track listing, ideally with typographic flourish.
Have loved reading this list. Do films next!
And that’s that monkey off my back. Thanks to everyone that has humoured me with this, commented and argued. It’s been a long old journey, bit of a slog at times, but overall a lot of fun and it’s given me some good times revisiting some great music. There are records that I feel daft for leaving out, and others that on reflection are too high or too low, but this is how it worked out. Maybe some of the injustices will be remedied in the inevitable deluxe box set tenth anniversary expanded reissue of this thread. Cheers!
Top work Mr Dynamite. Fascinating to read through your selections and reasoning.
Thank goodness for that, the suspenders were killing me.
That was an unexpected turn for number 1: nice tribute to the power of home taping and indeed of pop music as a gift.
I have enjoyed this trip a lot, Kid Dynamite: thanks!
Props to you Kid for going with an obvious rock superstar ( who of course is a superstar for a reason). I was anticipating another album I have never heard from an artist I had never heard of.