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The 100 Greatest Albums Of All Time, According To Kid Dynamite, nos. 75-51

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following on from 100-76, which you can find over here

1

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  1. 75. Genius / GZA – Liquid Swords

    I have a long running dispute with someone I work with over which is the best Wu solo album. He maintains it’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, whereas I (correctly) believe it’s this one. The production on both is excellent, as are the lyrics and flow. So why is Liquid Swords so clearly the winner? Because the Shogun Assassin vibes are waaaay more interesting and cool than the played out Mafia stuff. Obviously. They’re both great records of course, but I love this one for its darkness, it’s bundled up winter night vibe. If there’s such a thing as goth hip hop this might be it, thanks to the head nodding, hypnotic, haunting production. Of al the first wave Wu solo efforts, it’s true that this is the one that hews closest to 36 Chambers, sonically and lyrically. It maintains the chess and kung fu vibes of that classic, perhaps without the individual flowering that we got on some of the other solo albums. But I like chess and kung fu.

  2. 74. Siouxsie And The Banshees – Juju

    earlier this year I worked my way through the entire Banshees catalogue, which reinforced my opinion that they were a great singles band who never really made a decent album…apart from this one. It’s the second album that this lineup put out, and it’s a great leap forward from Kaleidoscope (which itself is maybe the second best Banshees record). The forever unsung John McGeoch’s scything guitars, Budgie’s tribal drumming and Siouxsie herself, not to forget the competent bass work of Steve Severin, push them onto new heights of mania and menace. Spellbound obviously the best known song, and it was still filling floors in alternative clubs a good ten years after release, but there isn’t a duffer in sight here. There’s such a cohesive mood throughout, such focus and intent. One of those times where everything goes right – they were never as good up to this, and never as good again.

    • Fantastic live band. I saw them 11 times between about 79 and 82, more times than I have seen anyone else. I agree that they were a great singles band too. I don’t think they made a great album. They were one of my favourite bands and I almost certainly own Kaleidoscope, however, I could not name a single track on it.

      • I really like the Peepshow album from ’88, which proved to be their last gasp creatively. I saw two dates on the Superstition tour in ’91. The least said about The Rapture, the better.

        That Sioux’s solo album, Mantaray, was good was a unexpected surprise. It’s just been re-released.

    • I think Scream is special. It’s a truly disturbing, out-there album. The McKay/Morris interplay is incredible. It has a unique sound, a lot to do with those two musicians and Lillywhite’s production, especially the ‘deep echo’ on the drums, recorded seperately from the cymbals.

      It’s a superb debut. What are you lot on about?

      I met Vivien Westwood at an early Banshees gig and ‘interviewed’ Robert Smith after another when he stepped in after McKay/Morris did a bunk. Siouxsie didn’t want to speak to anyone even though she’d just been brilliant. I also knew Budgie from a pub he frequented in St.Helens well before I found out he was a drummer.

      Small world.

    • I had a picture of Siouxsie from the NME on my wall. I found her compelling and every TOTP appearance was exciting to look forward to. I got 5 of their albums: the first two, Juju, Hyaena and Tinderbox. The debut is very impressive but hard to love. The second is patchy. The later three are more enjoyable. Swimming Horses is one of my favourite songs of theirs. I would say the singles are mostly the best tracks. They were singles for a reason. They knew how to be a bit more catchy, a bit more pop, when required, and it was needed I think to assuage the oppressive, more intense forces. Once Upon A Time would be my go to record and these days a playlist of hits and picks rather than one official collection.

  3. 73. One Dove – Morning Dove White

    Dot Allison’s second and final appearance in this list, Andrew Weatherall’s first, and definitely not his last. This is a genuine lost classic, one of those records that seems to have slipped out of history. Soaked in the bittersweet melancholy that comes from having had a fantastic time the night before, it’s post-rave (in every sense) dub pop. I first heard it at an afters, where it made perfect sense, but it carries a magic that persists into middle aged sobriety, thanks to the underlying strength of the songs. There’s something of the classic country heartbreak of Loretta Lynn or Dolly Parton here (they covered Jolene on a B-side), only force-fed a fistful of E’s and then squeezed through a massive dub box. The producer and the era obviously mean it’s easy to make comparisons to Screamadelica. There’s a lot of that record’s uplifting but broken wide eyed gospel here, but shorn of the classic rock trappings it feels more personal, more intimate. The key tracks for me are the Guitar Paradise mix of White Love, huge towers of dub assaulted by squalling guitar feedback, and the almost beatless mysterious aquatics of There Goes The Cure.
    It’s not been available physically for years, and it’s crying out for a reissue, preferably a nice double or triple set with the attendant remixes (pick of the bunch, Weatherall’s Squire Black Dove Rides Out mix of Breakdown is ten minutes of booming echoing dub heaven). Maybe one day…

    • Ooooh! squeals of delight. I once got very drunk indeed at a house party and left this playing on my cd player on repeat for a few hours. Nobody seemed to mind the sound wafting out of my room but they did wonder what the eighties sound was (there is a certain resemblance to the airy synths and gossamer vocals of Black – Wonderful Life. Occupies a similar space in my mind to some of the greater St Etienne remixes like Pale Movie and Like A Motorway.

      There really was an alchemy about it, because I could never get into the subsequent Dot Allison record anyway near as much.

      I share the love for the 2 tracks you mention, as well as Transient Truth, which may be the first I heard, though I have My Friend from a Peel Show which has big wodges of Dead Can Dance in its DNA

        • I listened to it once again only a few days ago after being drawn to do so by Dot Allison releasing her new album Consciousology at the tail end of July. I’d forgotten how much I liked it way back when and listening to it once more after so many years after first hearing it was most enjoyable.

          • Cos Consciousology made you wonder what all the fuss about her had been all about? As a fan of her old, I found Consciousology thin gruel, no tunes, cloying strings and less ethereal singing, more chloroformic.

            • Not really. I used to listen to her back in the day but had forgotten all about her until Consiousology reminded me and prompted me to get reacquainted. I agree with you her latest is not particularly enthralling. I’ve listened to it just the once and I’m in no hurry to listen to it again. Nice cover art though.

    • I have this album, along with Screamadelica and the first Propaganda album. What links them? For a track from each, White Love, Come Together and Dr Mabuse I once heard a mix that I can’t find anywhere, that is the definitive version for me. All are now over thirty years old, and so I am increasingly of the view that the mixes that I have that come up short are the best that I am going to get. The ‘perfect mix’ is my version of le domaines perdu. I can’t go back to the Festive Fifty, or nineties Radio One.

  4. 72. Boards Of Canada – Geogaddi

    I’ve picked this one over Music… mostly because there’s a big old dollop of darkness at its core which pleases my sinister goth ears. Let’s take all the usual BoC chat about smeared hazy sounds and childhood nostalgia for granted, and dig into why they appeal to a certain strand of serious young man, eg me.

    Yes, you can appreciate the sound on its own of course, but there’s also a scaffolding of esoteric knowledge around it (I blame the fact that I can happily lose an entire afternoon reading about numbers stations entirely on BoC), which when you dig into it lends another level to the experience of listening. It’s the same with the teases and clues that are part of the band’s mythology. Essentially, Boards Of Canada promise that the world can be solved, and that all those things that seem confusing and impenetrable can be revealed with the right bit of arcane knowledge and the intelligence to apply it. This is catnip for those of us who are pretty smart but rubbish at, you know, sport and talking to girls, a nice little intellectual power fantasy to indulge in.

    It’s a bit like the occult in that respect….which brings us back to the opening sentence, in a loop of echoes and resonances that any BoC fan worth their salt should be able to write ten paragraphs on, proving that the new album is due next week.

  6. 70. Winston Edwards & Blackbeard – Dub Conference At 10 Downing Street

    I know barely anything about this record. Blackbeard is British reggae legend Dennis Bovell, it’s one of the best British dub LPs I’ve heard, and that’s about it. The title and tracklist are a fine example of mischievous fun directed at the Establishment, and the songs themselves are some rock solid grooves. What more do you want?

    • I love this LP, it’s one of the few LPs I’ve bought twice on vinyl – my original copy suffered over the years from incessant play whilst the deck operator was in a somewhat refreshed condition. I bought a vinyl reissue while it was available and promptly did a needle drop, and then bought it a fourth time when it was included in volume 7 of the mighty Evolution Of Dub series. Did I mention that I love this album?

  7. 69. Dead Kennedys – Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables

    When I was in the fourth or fifth year at secondary school, a German exchange student came over for a few weeks. Can’t remember his name or anything, but I do remember that he had this album, and that his copy was the root of a frenzy of home taping that saw loads of us end up with our own copies (my C90 had REM’s Document on the other side). Talk about opening new horizons. The lyrics are funny and darkly scathing, a world away from the florid poetry of the Marillion I’d been listening to up to then, while the music has all the energy and attack of punk, but with extra theatricality and wit. Some days I might argue that Plastic Surgery Disasters is a better album, but this is the one that opened the door to the whole US underground for me, and my future music taste might have been very different without it. Probably also the first explicitly political music I’d ever listened to, which definitely set the tone for a lot of my later listening (and life).

  8. 68. Grateful Dead – American Beauty

    Ah, the Dead. I’ll be honest, quite a lot of their music is bad. But when it’s good, it’s good like nothing else. It’s a cliche that you have to listen to the live stuff to hear them at their best, but cliches become cliches for a reason, and this one is probably true, Every Dead fan will have their favourite era, and mine is the magic month of May 1977. There’s no shortage of live recordings from that time. The thing about a full Dead show is that there will be an hour of absolutely wonderful transcendent music that lifts you out of time and space and into another dimension altogether, a place of pure music where nothing else matters, indeed could ever matter, but there will also be at least as much noodly doodly that doesn’t go anywhere. So I haven’t picked a live recording for this prestigious list, but try listening to Help On The Way > Slipknot! > Franklins’ Tower from 22/5/77, Scarlet Begonias > Fire On The Mountain > Estimated Prophet from 8/5/77 or Eyes Of The World from 29/3/90. They’re all incredible, and if they click with you they will take you to places you’ve never been.

    Of the studio albums, the best and most consistent is American Beauty. There’s no lengthy acid inspired jams or psychedelic wonderment here. Instead it’s a rootsy, largely acoustic, set, tapping into their roots in American folk and bluegrass music. Like Jim Dodge’s excellent novel Stone Junction (I’d be amazed if Dodge isn’t a Deadhead) it’s set in a mythic America where the frontier still exists, Death is a trusted friend, and the most important part of being an outlaw is to be honourable. A lot of this vibe comes from non-performing lyricist Robert Hunter, on some of his best form here, but the music, all acoustic guitars, mandolins, pianos and three part harmonies, more than backs it up. There’s a contented warmth to the record, a sense of joys and griefs shared around a campfire, and burdens lifted. Basically Fleet Foxes nicked all their ideas from it. I could soak in the tired graceful beauty of Brokedown Palace for hours on end.

    • Been away over much of the Summer, so missed this originally, but looping back now.

      I have a really warm place in my heart for American Beauty. For a long time it sat right at the front of my Dad’s vinyl collection (generally alternating with Elvis Costello’s Spike), and I used to look at that beautiful cover art and wonder what it sounded like, long before I was ever really into music.

      I agree with everything you’ve written about it above, but particularly about the warmth. It’s an album that simply exudes the stuff, and when I listen to it I think about my old man, and his old record player and the table it used to sit on (inherited from my Nan, I took it to university with me because I couldn’t bear to see it thrown out). And the songs are frequently lovely, and none more so than Brokedown Palace. Great choice.

  9. 67. Hawkwind – Space Ritual

    Yes, more hippies. But this intense pounding paranoid riff-fest is the polar opposite of the Grateful Dead’s bucolic warmth. Hawkwind don’t get anything like the respect they deserve, probably because of attitudes like my first sentence there. Reducing them to comedy long hair stoners doesn’t do them justice, and if they’d been German, they’d be revered now.

    Fittingly for a bunch of sci-fi obsessives, you can literally hear the future in this album. It dates from 1972, but the primal urgency of the less than virtuosic playing prefigures punk, Del Dettmar’s outlandish synths and DiKMik’s analogue electronic noises wouldn’t sound anything like as strange a decade or two later, and the shape of the whole thing, the repetition, the builds and releases over long periods, is exactly what people meant when they spent the nineties talking about DJs taking you on a journey. This is properly ecstatic music, in the original sense of ekstasis, of being taken outside your body. Ritual is the perfect word for the title. Seeing the shows live at extreme volume with the full light show (and let’s face it, more than likely a brain full of psychedelics) would have been transporting in the way humanity has been trying to achieve ever since we were getting off our collective heads on mushrooms and incense in caves.

    But let’s not get too pretentious, because the other important thing about this record is that it is full on noise. The marketing of the time described it as “88 minutes of brain damage” (closer to two hours these days, as the extra space of CD reissues allowed truncated songs to be restored to their full lengths and some bonus numbers added). It’s an all out audio assault, a relentless hammering bombardment broken only by weird electronic doodles and Rob Calvert’s arch spoken word sci fi poetry, which, far from being a breather, actually increases the dread. If Hawkwind is a spaceship, it’s wildly out of control, the captain is dead, and it’s plunging headfirst into the heart of the sun. Obliteration will never sound so good.

    • I went to The Space Ritual by accident.
      I was sweet sixteen and I had just finished the first part of my foundation in the arts at my local tech college. It was late afternoon when a friend bustled through the door of our happy place Impact Records a fine emporium now sadly disappeared into the mists of time. After the usually greetings had been exchanged, a mug of execrable coffee poured and a joint sparked up Gez asked me if I would like his ticket for Hawkwind’s gig scheduled for that very night at another of our happy places The Stadium in that Liverpool. Gez explained that he was unable to attend and didn’t want it to go to waste. Needless to say I said thanks very much and duly attended. It was a quite extraordinary gig. The whole place was off it’s collective head. I’ve lost count of the gigs I’ve attended and forgotten a lot of them but The Space Ritual is one of the few that I distinctly remember. It was impactful.

      • Sure you already know this, but the Liverpool gig is one of the recordings that make up this album. What a claim to fame! I’m not jealous at all, nope, no way, not even a teensy weensy bit.

        The one and only time I saw Hawkwind was about twenty years later at Plymouth Academy (don’t bother looking for it, it’s not there anymore). Literally the first thing I saw upon going through the doors was someone falling down the stairs in front of me, and standing to reveal a T-shirt with the message SAY YES TO DRUGS.

        • They performed at the same venue a year later. I missed Pencil by twelve months and my voice cannot be picked out from the crowd on the LP. Stacia was there, though, an integral part of the live Hawkwind experience.

          • It was just before Christmas 1972. The album was released the following year. It’s kinda thanks to Stacia that I first clapped eyes on the fine fellow who later in life became my framer of many, many years. Unbeknownst to me at the time he was the lunatic who jumped up onto the stage to dance with her. He used to work at The Stadium during those far off days as a general dogsbody. If asked nicely he will recount many stories from those 70s gigs including the one in which he was mistaken for management and taken out for lunch in Liverpool by the members of hip rock n roll combo Can. I was in attendance for that gig too and as I remember it they were mighty entertaining.

            • If you Google Liverpool Stadium Rock Years you will find a site that apart from an assortment of bits and bobs including some (gulp) photographs that may or may not involve me ( I’m not saying and you can’t make me) and a gig list. I was in attendance at an embarrassingly large number of these gigs. No wonder I am so worn out nowadays. I wouldn’t change a thing.
              Edit:- Praise be the photographs of the great unwashed from days of yore seem to have been taken down. Phew!

        • I always preferred In Search of Space as Hawkwind’s peak moment, although the ones either side are good too, as is Ritual. Mainly because of the daily immersion I had to it, courtesy my study mate, Nigel Collins, who had. a£50 man habit aged 15, and more records than everyone else at school put together. I didn’t buy my own copy until decades later, finding, to my pleasure, I still knew every word and every riff. They headlined Friday at Reading in 1974. I can’t recall a second of it.

  10. 66. Dr Alimantado – The Best Dressed Chicken In Town

    Classic 70s reggae (the first ever album on the Greensleeves label!), with the good Doctor toasting over versions of tracks by Horace Andy, John Holt, Gregory Isaacs and more. It’s a deejay record rather than a dub one, but there’s still a heavy dub inflection there – although it’s self produced, the engineers included Lee Scratch Perry and King Tubby, so not altogether surprising. The Doctor is the star though, and there he is walking down a Kingston high street on the cover. His eccentric musings and bizarre stories make this album what it is, one of those special records that creates its own little word for the duration of the playing time. I promise you that after one listen you will be in no doubt as to who killed the barber.

      • kind of see where you’re coming from with that caveat, but if I rigorously enforced it, then most of the Jamaican music in this list would be gone!

        Plus you should see some of the fudging about what constitutes an album that’ll be coming up as we reach the top 20…

        • Unless Island was paying the bills, almost every Jamaican album in the 60s and 70s were singles collections. This one doesn’t include his greatest hit Born For A Purpose / Reason For Living.

          • I’m not sure that Born For A Purpose / Reason For Living, brilliant though it is, would really fit on “Best Dressed Chicken in Town”. On “Born For A Purpose”, Alimantado” is basically singing, while the material on “Best Dressed Chicken” is more deejay style.

  11. 65. Christy Moore – Live At The Point

    The best live album ever? Could be. Christy Moore is a genuine legend of Irish music, playing in Planxty and Moving Hearts as well as a long solo career. The Point in Dublin is an arena sized venue, but he makes it feel like your front room, performing entirely solo with just a guitar or bodhran. The song selection ranges from traditional laments to political stories to laugh out loud tales of misadventure. It’s massive hearted with an enormous joie de vivre at the core, and the sense of intimacy and connection with the audience is like no other live album I’ve heard. It’s a very special record.

  12. 64. Front 242 – Front By Front

    I suppose this EBM sound is a precursor of 90s industrial, but this album has as much in common with the simplicity of Kraftwerk as it does the later chaotic racket* of Skinny Puppy. The sonic palette is similar, as well as the sense that this is something outside of the rock tradition, but where Kraftwerk’s records drip with warm melodies, Front 242 prefer faceless cold austerity. Must be why all the goths loved them.

    Front By Front is a record which is absolutely dominated by one tune. If I ever do a top 100 songs list (I won’t) then Headhunter will be in the top ten. It opens with a huge probing bass synth like some vast undersea creature glimpsed through the waves, then the jittery topline and ultra precise drums, quantised to within a picosecond of their life, come in. Top it off with opaque lyrics that seem to equate free market capitalism with bounty hunting and you’ve got a monster. In my alternative clubbing days it would ram the floor, heads, hair and boots flailing all over the place. The other tracks lend decent support, especially Circling Overland, Im Rhythmus Bleiben, and the televangelist sampling Welcome To Paradise (which also appeared on the B-side of the Headhunter single, making it perhaps the greatest 12” of all time)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BFtvw2XlyA&t=2s

    *for the avoidance of doubt, I consider “chaotic racket” to be high praise

  13. 63. Richmond Fontaine – Post To Wire

    Willy Vlautin is maybe better known for his novels these days. They’re great books, slices of Americana where struggling but likeable characters usually make terrible decisions. The lyrics of his songs for Richmond Fontaine mine the same material, with the same generosity and compassion. Of necessity they’re not as in-depth as the books, but rather vignettes of people in trouble, unflinching but tender. Raymond Carver didn’t write songs, but if he did, I reckon he’d be pretty pleased with an opening line that set the scene as well as “put down the gun / looks like you’ve been up for days…”. Musically, it’s alt-country, with occasional excursions into power pop or Crazy Horse style crunch. The signature sound is Paul Brainerd’s pedal steel, which lends an eerie keening to these tales of people circling the bottom.

    If the lucky lady who gets to call herself Mrs Dynamite (tee-eee) and I have a song, it’s the title track here. Old enduring love doesn’t often feature in pop music, and this is a couple determined to last, despite the knocks and bruises of life. A whole relationship sketched out in around a dozen lines. When Deborah Kelly’s duet vocal comes in, it’s a goosebumps moment.

  14. if I can’t get any of you to bite with Willy Vlautin and the most Uncut album in the history of Uncut then I fear for this classic, but here we go…

    62. TLC – CrazySexyCool

    90s girl group R&B is my secret weakness, and this pretty much defined the template – no TLC, no Destiny’s Child. It sounds great, with delicious harmonies, new jack swing beats, and some bang on production and arrangement tricks. The lyrics avoid cliché platitudes, and can be unusually frank – far from being a standard ‘my man’s cheating on me’ vibe, Creep somehow wraps humiliation, anger, revenge, self-justification and pride together (it’s no wonder the Afghan Whigs covered it). In a genre notorious for banging together two singles plus a load of filler and calling it an album this is an astonishingly consistent record. Sure, you know Waterfalls and Creep, and with good reason, but there are some cracking non-hit tracks here as well. Sumthin’ Wicked This Way Comes is a dark and stormy invocation of coming disaster (featuring a very early appearance from Andre 3000), gender flipping Prince’s If I Was Your Girlfriend maintains the song’s offcentre approach, and I always need a good lie down after Red Light Special.

    Occasionally crazy, often sexy, always cool.

  15. 61. Keith Hudson – Pick A Dub

    Another lost classic discovered courtesy of Blood And Fire. Honestly Mick, I don’t care about that soul covers album, you’re still one of the good guys in my books. This is a very early dub LP, recorded in 1974. There are few FX or sonic interjections (very much unlike the next dub record that’s going to feature here), just an unrelenting focus on bass and drums. The odd ghostly vocal snippet is kept it, but it’s the bass you’re going to notice. I say notice, I mean feel it smashing right through your ribcage. Chestplate music. If you have fillings prepare to have them rattled.

  16. 60. Sparklehorse – Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot

    ….and it’s only through typing that out that I’ve realised, after all these years, that the last word in that portmanteau is plot and not pilot. If I get nothing else out of this exercise, at least I’ve got that.

    Mark Linkous, the only permanent member of Sparklehorse, led a troubled life, culminating in his suicide in 2010. Knowing what happened to him, it’s easy to find signs and omens in this record, but even without that foreknowledge the tenor of the album is clear. It’s a fragile thing, creaky and wheezing, full of dust and spiders.The songs are warped country ballads, embroidered with found sounds, the odd squall of angry guitar feedback, and abstract lyrics from childhood nightmares and fever dreams. Sometimes they are barely-there wisps of guitar and hushed vocals, other times more muscular and confident, notably album highlight the Neil Young-ish (very -ish) “Cow”. It’s eerie and ramshackle, but also catchy and melodic. Basically it sounds like going into an attic alone as a child, watching dust motes dance in shafts of sunlight spearing the holes in the roof, brushing cobwebs out of your hair and waiting for the arguing to stop downstairs, like a little private oasis.

    • Never been another band quite like them, never been another album quite like this one. I’m not generally given to hyperbole: but I love this album more than I can actually express.

      …and God bless Mark Linkous.

      • Yes to all the above. I’ve been playing Sparklehorse a lot this month. Every now and again I feel compelled to re-visit and every single time without exception Mark Linkous hooks me in and for those moments spent in his company my life is immeasurably improved.

  17. 59. Grant Green – Alive!

    As the 60s turned into the 70s, so Grant Green’s music turned from hard bop to funk and soul jazz. This live set catches him at his absolute funkiest, with a beast of a rhythm section (Idris Muhammed on drums and Joseph Armstrong on congas). The uptempo tracks go like a train, barreling along unstoppably, and the ballads are slow and tender, highlighting Green’s exquisite guitar playing. I first heard the version of Sookie Sookie here on a Blue Note compilation, and to this day it’s one of my favourite jazz tunes, a fabulous rolling groove that doesn’t let you get off the ride. Eleven minutes long and still too short. Somewhere in an infinite universe, these six performers are still playing this, linked in telepathic unison.

  18. 58. Banco De Gaia – Last Train To Lhasa

    Electronic beats and world music textures combine to create a peak in the mid-90s ambient house genre. (I did consider an Orb album for this slot, but, face it, they’re just not as good). The tunes here range from the locomotive techno of the title track to the trancier beats of Kuos and the ambient washes of 887(Structure) and the forty minute Kinkajou (Duck! Asteroid). It’s an immersive, blissed out listen, full of unusual samples and instrumentation. The question with something like this is always around exploitation and appropriation of course, and everyone is going find their own place on that scale. My own take is that Toby Marks (BDG) seems to be a good egg. The use of samples and sounds is integrated and avoids the crass – there’s certainly no badly CGI’d Indian statues like you’d find on the sleeve of some psytrance records. In as much as an instrumental record can be political, this one seems to be on the right side. Last Train itself is an oblique commentary on the destruction of Tibetan culture, inspired by the Chinese decision to build a railway into Lhasa, and BDG has been a vocal supporter of Free Tibet and other pro-indigenous people movements.

    Also, it sounds really good.

    (I find it interesting that when it comes to guitar music the noisier and more aggressive the better, but I like my electronica floaty and mellow. What does that mean? Dunno. )

    • I associate this album more with, and as a continuation of the travelogue of KLF’s Chill Out. I was a real sucker for extended tracks like this, see also Real Life – Journey of the Carcharadon, Full Moon Scientist – Old Man River’s Crying. Often to be discovered listening to Peel of an evening.

      I question the thought that The Orb aren’t as good (your choice of course) – the segue from O.O.B.E to No Fun on one of their Peel Sessions showed their inventiveness and willingness to disrupt genre.

  19. 57. Blyth Power – Out From Under The King

    Blyth Power are the very definition of a cult band. They have been plying their trade for forty odd years now, without once troubling the mainstream, or even any of its larger tributaries. Their roots are in the London anarchopunk squatting scene, but the music also has a strong folk influence. It all sounds a bit like what might happen if Steeleye Span had put out their catalogue on Crass Records, with a bit of E Street piano thrown in. Their glory for me, though, is in the lyrics. Songwriter, drummer, frontman and only permanent presence Joseph Porter draws on all manner of historical and mythical tragedies, betrayals, and downfalls to populate his songs, using them to reflect on universal stories and emotions. The determination to endure of a woman trapped in an abusive marriage is mapped onto Catherine Parr and Henry VIII, and while plenty of musicians have got pissed off with their bandmates, and some have even written songs about it, very few have done so in the guise of a 13th century warrior stuck in a Crusader station in North Africa, hating his fellow troops and thinking the whole thing has been a mistake. Most bands don’t have one song about the Wooden Horse of Troy, Blyth Power have three (might be more by now). A truly unique act. And they’re bang into trains as well.

    They came into my life via a hunt sab benefit tape in the early 90s, which featured the song Vane Tempest, a berserk whirlwind of guitars, keyboards and harmony vocals. I hadn’t heard anything like it before, and picked up the then current album (Pastor Skull) on spec, and completely flipped for it. Part of the price of being a DIY bunch of punks, though, is that your recording budget doesn’t alway stretch to the best, and so I’ve picked Out From Under The King for this list on the grounds that it’s probably their best recorded and best sounding album. It’s not on Spotify though, so on the off chance these ramblings have tempted you to check them out give Alnwick & Tyne a go, which sounds the closest to this one (no keyboards though).

    • Nice one. I saw them play The Gloucester pub in Brighton around the time of that album (IIRC) and it seemed like 30 years of counter cultures were in the same room. “Strange Band” as Family sang.

  20. 56. Calexico – Feast Of Wire

    How many albums actually sound like where the artist is from? Calexico are from Tucson, Arizona, and this album is redolent of the American southwest (or what I imagine it to be like anyway). It’s arid and dusty, sparse yet lush and full of flavour. They’re an act much concerned with borders – crossing them is a theme running through this album – and the porous places where one thing melts into another. So it’s not surprising that the music is a beautiful melange, Tex-mex, alt country, mariachi, jazz and a dusting of electronica all coming together to make a distinctive sound world. Some of the tracks are just short impressionistic sketches but they contribute to the overall vibe of the album, and the fully fleshed out songs are without exception beautiful and / or so groovy. Guero Canelo is a flamenco strut, Across The Wire an accordion and trumpet led tale of crossing the border with a lyrical darkness that belies the breezy tune, Crumble a duel between guitar and trumpet over a monster jazz groove, and Black Heart a vengeful noir soundtrack.
    I saw them tour this album, at Vicar St in Dublin. I went along on spec, out of curiosity more than anything else, and walked away a true believer. They were incredible that night, one of my top ten ever gigs I reckon.

  21. 55. Iron Maiden – Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son

    …as bought on cassette with my birthday money when I was twelve or so. My introduction to metal, and enough to seal the deal for life. Yes, with hindsight you could argue that it was already dated, in the light of the thrash revolution that had happened a couple of years earlier, but I was barely pubescent, stuck in the arse end of Devon, and just not that cool. Iron Maiden were plenty enough for me, thanks.

    The record is a concept album about a seventh son of a seventh son, born with powers of clairvoyance but ultimately doomed by his gift. As you might suspect from that description, the lyrics are largely guff, but it doesn’t matter because Bruce Dickinson sells every word, and you’re totally into it for the duration. Never knowingly understated, this is grandiose and over the top on every level. And that’s kind of the point. Drums are pounded, basses gallop and twin guitars are forever soloing or harmonizing over it all. Up to now, Maiden records had all had some brilliant tunes and varying amounts of filler (no one picks up Powerslave to listen to Losfer Words or Back In The Village, do they), but Seventh Son is a winner from start to finish. It’s their best record by miles

    • Interesting choice of best Maiden album. I dip my leather in them from time to time and Beast probably deserves top spot for me, but my Maiden aficionado comrades point at their Di’Anno days as their real peak. But what do they know.

  22. 54. Mikey Dread – African Anthem

    Dread at the controls! Mikey Dread had a radio programme on Jamaican airwaves for years, and this LP is an attempt to immortalise the show on vinyl, with a heavy dubwise slant. There’s plenty of chat and vocal samples between tracks (some of which will sound very familiar after being sampled again in turn) and a never ending array of dub effects, farmyard animals, police sirens, cuckoo clocks etc. The dubs are rock solid, and played by an amazing array of JA talent, including Sly & Robbie, Augustus Pablo and Horseman. But the overriding thing here is fun. If dub is a giant sonic playground where King Tubby et al are all doing serious experiments then Mikey Dread is spinning the roundabout faster and faster until we all get dizzy and fall over laughing

  23. 53. Kraftwerk – Trans Europe Express

    What to say about this that hasn’t already been said? Those rising chords that kick off the title track, the languid elegiac synths on Europa Endless, the way the rhythms through the whole thing mirror the sway and rock of the titular train, the effortless command of melody and atmosphere…I’ve been trying to work up something on the nostalgia of Europa Endless and how its evocation of the past was performed on instruments that were ultra modern then yet which now sound kind of dated themselves, but not really nailing it. But that’s okay, the world doesn’t need any more half baked analysis when something this lovely exists in it. As influential and important as The Beatles, and probably more fun to listen to.

    • Half baked analysis? I was going to post a Feature on this album but I may as well put it here.

      Kraftwerk – Trans Europa Express (1977)

      Kraftwerk began as experimental Krautrock group, flirting with atonality and repetitive motorik rhythms. By the time of Autobahn in 1974, they had found their niche. Impressed by an exhibition by Gilbert and George, two similarly suited men with narrow ties influenced by the Bauhaus aesthetic in wanting to make their lives into a work of art, Hütter and Schneider decided to look for art in everyday life. They lived in a post war Germany at the cutting edge of an industrial revolution whose roads and railways were the envy of the world. Inspired by Pierre Schaeffer who made the first piece of musique concrète by only using the sound of trains, they discovered they could hear poetry and rhythms in the engines and machinery all around them. It seemed inevitable to their logical minds to set the music they heard to a backing of machine-like instruments. In addition, they were familiar with Stravinsky’s description of a Germanic Thread, a lineage that can be traced from Bach, Händel, Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, Wagner, Mahler, through to Schoenberg. However, all this wonderful classical music and a luxuriant folk tradition belonged to Germany’s past, a past that was forever tainted by fascism. Germany was a divided country, no longer in control of its own destiny, effectively governed by two, diametrically opposed regimes. At a time when many young people were turning to the UK and America for cultural icons, Kraftwerk set about creating their own uniquely European music, wedded to an ideal of the unification of different nations and cultures living in peace and prosperity. A formula began to gel. From a broken country in a broken continent on the cusp of a resurgence, Kraftwerk found a new sound, a new musical language, one based on simple tunes, straightforward rhythms, minimal lyrics and electronic instruments.

      Kraftwerk’s vocals are famously disembodied, using a vocoder, samples and computer generated voices, but they are true romantics at heart. Human beings rarely make an appearance in their songs, however. Their songs are not about personal relationships but they are love songs, in rapture of the wonders of modern endeavour. They are carefree, untroubled by worries concerning the climate or the dangers of nuclear power. There is also a nostalgia, wistfully longing for a vision of the future before fascism overwhelmed Europe. The machines they adore are strangely old-fashioned, mostly analogue. Kraftwerk are fascinated by pocket calculators, vehicles and telephones with a dial. The technology gets better as each album ticks by but they continue to radiate warmth, to have their own heart beat. The beats become more powerful and complex. The bassline counter-melodies are increasingly supple. For Trans Europa Express, they acquired a customised Synthanorma Sequenza, invented by Matten and Weichers, which allowed for greater accuracy and precision with fewer notes, giving the impression of more space. As a result, the tunes are almost spiritual and meditative, seemingly suspended in mid-air, and the rhythms pound along relentlessly.

      The album opens with a hymn to a Europe without borders, Europa Endlos, celebrating its parks, palaces and postcard views. A stately organ sound, playing a sequence of arpeggiated chords, sets the mood for a nine minute rhapsody that finds wonder in every city it visits, a wordless chorus of mechanical voices carrying the musical theme. The key lyric is ‘elegance and decadence’, alongside ‘life is timeless’, evoking the ancient and modern, the young and the old. The music glides along without friction, inducing a sense of trance-like euphoria, the repetition of ‘endless’ seemingly realised in the music. As it fades, it continues on for ever, returning as a brief tranquil coda at the end of the album.

      Spiegelsaal (Hall Of Mirrors) is Kraftwerk’s most disturbing song. The music is minimal and austere, consisting of eerily meticulous footsteps and electronic flutters that shiver the spine. A great star loses himself as he stares into the mirror, in a song of truth, a struggle with identity. The ennui of the tune exquisitely reflects a mind becoming unsound.

      A dry, Teutonic “Eins, zwei, drei, vier”, a tribute to The Ramones, counts in Schaufensterpuppen (Showroom Dummies), a self-deprecating manifesto triggered by a critic’s scathing description of their stagecraft. If anyone claims that Germans lack a sense of humour, play them this track and its deadpan first line, “We are standing here/Exposing ourselves.” As showroom dummies, Kraftwerk soon stop posing, break out from their display, explore the city and find their purpose in a nightclub where they start to dance. Thus, they successfully predict the future. Up to this point, their sixth album, Kraftwerk were not associated with filling dance floors but, soon, their music would drive New York electro, synthpop, Detroit techno, hip-hop and, by extension, much of the musical world of today.

      In 1976, Paul Allessandrini took his friends, Ralf Hütter and Florien Schneider, to lunch at Le Train Bleu at Gare de Lyon in Paris. He knew they loved a busy transport hub and, from their table, they could watch the trains setting off for destinations across the whole of Europe. The state-of-the-art Trans Europe Express made Europe smaller, yet, at the same time it breached borders and expanded its geography. He suggested their music would be ideally suited to a song about the Trans Europe Express, connecting many different countries speaking different languages but all within easy reach. He couldn’t possibly have imagined it would be so successful. Trans Europa Express fits perfectly into Kraftwerk’s world view, its dynamic motorik beat, capturing the remorseless, percussive sway of a locomotive, making the earth tremble as it progresses through the industrial soundscape of Metall Auf Metall and into the hypnotic groove of Abzug. Trans Europa Express is a colossal and grandiose statement by a band brimming with confidence, so confident they nod to David Bowie and Iggy Pop in passing as they go from ‘station to station’ on their return home to Düsseldorf.

      Perhaps Kraftwerk’s favourite composer is Franz Schubert, whose melodies float ethereally. It’s no wonder they pay tribute to him at the end of Trans Europa Express with an instrumental of their most beautiful tune, an oasis of calm, after the toil of a long train journey. However, there is also a train named EC Franz Schubert that travelled to Vienna ‘straight connection’. Maybe, Kraftwerk had that in mind as the song slides gently into the closing reprise, Endlos Endlos.

      Both English and German versions are widely available. For Kraftwerk purists, the German versions are the definitive ones. In their native German, there is a greater range of expression, but they retain their trademark robotic detachment and the music remains as wunderbar as ever. There is certainly a fierce defiance to the chant “Wir sind Schaufensterpuppen” that isn’t quite there in English.

      The sleeve for the original German pressing is a black and white picture taken by New Yorker Maurice Seymour. The four group members, Florian Schneider, Ralf Hütter, Karl Bartos and Wolfgang Flür, are dressed in suits and slim ties to resemble mannequins. Jacques Stara touched it up with colour, giving their skin a waxy appearance, and rearranged them in a collage. They look more like mundane accountants than exciting Pop stars. It is an iconic image capturing the notions of modernity and prosperity as much as it highlights the tension between conformity and individuality, a tension that is also at the centre of the European ideal. Early releases included a poster designed by Emil Schult, who gets a writing credit for Spiegelsaal and the title track. It depicts the group sitting around a cafe table, with a beige check tablecloth, in front of a mural of a tree lush with Spring under a bright blue sky. It’s hardly aimed at getting teenage girls’ pulses racing but, at least, they look human.

      Trans Europa Express is the best encapsulation of Kraftwerk, philosophically, lyrically, musically and visually. Hot blood and fierce intelligence are inextricably entwined with all the beautiful machinery. It is their best album, featuring their most gorgeous melodies and some of their most powerful beats. It is a masterpiece, effectively a symphony more than worthy of inclusion in the Germanic Thread. Trans Europa Express set the bar for all electronic music ever since.

      • In passing, Tiggs: I agreed with everything up until you described it as their “best album”. Certainly their most influential album, possibly their most popular. Notwithstanding the view that one could take the eight main albums as a body of work which can’t / shouldn’t be separated, I’d suggest that their “best album” is Radioactivity.

        I’d write an essay on why – but I need to go and cook my scran.

      • oh gosh Tiggs, sorry for stealing for your thunder. That is a far better writeup than my slapdash effort, and not half baked at all, more like a lovely golden crust. Nice one!

  24. 52. Orbital – II

    Orbital’s second album (the brown one) opens with a playful Steve Reich influenced gag harking back to the debut, then it’s into Planet Of The Shapes. A relatively mellow first track proper, it’s priming the pump for what follows…and what follows is one of the best half hours of electronic music ever. The next four tracks are grouped together on the sleeve art, reflecting how they run seamlessly into each other, a little techno symphony if you will. The section opens with Lush 3-1, which is unfortunate for those of us trying to write about it, as ‘lush’ is pretty much the perfect word to describe this confection of warm pads and wordless coos, and they’ve gone and put it in the title. Lush 3-2 takes this pastoral beauty and sticks it in the middle of a sweaty warehouse rave, where we stay for the ecological disaster warning of Impact (The Earth Is Burning), where the lead descending melody line is the hook, with acid synths burbling away underneath. never quite playing the same phrase twice and turning darker towards the end as the atonal horns take over and the drums become ever more threatening, only to be wiped away by a delightful futuristic synth line like sun breaking through clouds…and then that same synth takes centre stage, playing solo for a delicious minute before the urgency of Remind, maybe the most straight ahead techno banger on the record, comes crashing in.

    It’d be easy for this segment to be the highlight of the album, indeed of many artists’ careers, but Orbital aren’t done yet. The next couple of tracks are vey decent, if a bit of a step down from the preceding thirty minutes, but then we hit Halcyon + On + On. A classic euphoric sundown anthem, it sees the pads and glossolalia (largely built on a sample of Opus III’s It’s A Fine Day, for those of us with long memories) from Lush 3-1 return, turned up to eleven and strapped to a thunderously sleek beat with a nagging descending bassline. The ten minutes it takes to listen are gone in the blink of an eye. It’s hypnotic, beautiful and timeless, the sound of lying in a field with your eyes closed and the sun on your face.

    A very close race between this one and In Sides, but the Brown album shades it for the memories of listening to it with my brother in our shared bedroom, playing Lush 3-1 over and over again before going out for the night.

  25. been slacking off a bit, let’s close this one down with

    51. The Sabres Of Paradise – Haunted Dancehall

    Just a few years after the blissed out euphoria of Screamadelica, Andrew Weatherall was working in altogether darker territory. This album soundtracks a noir wander around the seedier side of London, a gritty, grimy, clanging journey through claustrophobia and dread, wrapped in a familiar smelling smoke. If you’re a fan of classic songwriting this probably isn’t going to do it for you. It’s a record that prioritises rhythm and texture over melody, and there’s nothing like a chorus anywhere in earshot, but if you like the rattling low end of dub, the ambient washes of Brian Eno or the rhythmic experimentation and precision of Jaki Liebezeit, there’s loads to love here. It’s low slung and moody, a bit techno, a bit dub, a bit trip hop. It’s a record that is incredibly atmospheric and evocative in a very specific way. If you put it on when you’re not in the mood you can easily bounce straight off it, but when you play it at the right time it hits like an arrow.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FnRpdliMuI

    continues over here

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