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naraburns nihil supernum
1yr ago
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Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Notes -
It's Friday again, so we'll continue with the series.
150 The Beach Boys – Pet Sounds (1966)
Hot take time. Most lists like this will rank Pet Sounds in the top 10, and some will give it the top spot. Here it manages to barely crack the top 150. This isn’t to say that the record has been immune from criticism, but the criticism it does receive tends to denigrate it beyond what is really deserved. This album has been hailed as the birth of art pop; while Rubber Soul may have pointed in a more sophisticated direction, it was this album that showed the music’s full promise and set the stage for the creative explosion of 1967. And while the album’s concept of integrating sophisticated arrangements with pop music is executed nearly flawlessly, the concept itself is relatively narrow in scope—the album is just too similar to deserve a higher ranking. All the songs evoke the exact same atmosphere and use the exact same techniques; there’s no diversity of feel let alone style. It’s still a 5 star album, it’s still the best the Beach Boys ever got, and it’s still an essential part of any serious music collection. But there are a lot of better records out there.
149 Traffic – John Barleycorn Must Die (1970)
Traffic was a progressive band that lacked the ambition of other progressive bands, never doing anything too off the wall musically or going for the big statement. They are certainly jazzy, but no one is going to confuse them with a fusion band; they simply play a jazzed-up version of typical early ‘70s classic rock. And on this album, from the instrumental “Glad” to the extended folk lament of the title track, everything simply works, and they never get too far out over their skis.
148 Cat Stevens – Mona Bone Jakon (1970)
Given contemporary impressions of the decade, it’s hard for anyone these days to view the ‘70s as a breath of fresh air aesthetically, but that’s exactly what this album is. Cat Stevens had a sort of prehistory in the late ‘60s on Deram, releasing records that were very late ‘60s in feel—the songs were either fashioned into harpsichord-laden chamber pop or fuzz guitar-laden ersatz psychedelia. They also just weren’t quite there yet. With the dawn of a new decade and a switch to Island, Stevens’s songwriting would improve greatly and those songs would finally get the production they deserved. This album sets the stage for the following three, and to this date those together remain the only Cat Stevens albums anyone seems to care about.
147 Dungen – Tio Bitar (2007)
Psychedelia may have seemed like a fad during its brief heyday in the late 1960s, but it was a fad that would have significant impacts on rock music going forward. It’s not surprise, then, that no matter how far the music fell out of fashion, there would always be occasional revivals and a steady stream of underground artists keeping the flame alive. Dungen is among the most uncompromising of these keepers of the flame. The music is straight-up psychedelic rock (not merely psychedelic influenced), and the lyrics are defiantly sung in the band’s native Swedish. This is probably their heaviest release musically, but it still retains a strong dose of the Swedish folk influence that is a hallmark of the band’s sound that it keeps the music interesting.
146 The Orb – The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld (1991)
The first of the great electronic chill-out albums, this album is a beast of a listen. Aside from the opening cut “Little Fluffy Clouds”, there’s little on this album that can be excised from the whole without its impact being greatly diminished; in other words, you have to listen to the whole thing. And the whole thing is nearly 2 hours long, and requires the correct mindset. But don’t fret! Grab a book and a beer and put this on in the background at midnight on a Saturday, and you too can be transported to the Ultraworld.
145 Yes – Tales from Topographic Oceans (1974)
Common consensus says this was the point when progressive rock died of its own bloat—a double album consisting of four sidelong pieces based on a lengthy footnote from Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi. These criticisms ignore the important thing, however, that these pieces all remain captivating from beginning to end, and that’s all that really matters.
144 Beck – Odelay (1996)
Our culture has always had a fraught relationship with white rappers. The personal nature of the music almost requires one’s membership in a certain community to prevent it from sounding inauthentic; even the much-lauded Eminem always sounded more white trash than anything. Success as a white rapper requires significant deviation from mainstream expectations; the Beastie Boys had a tongue and cheek punk attitude, Aesop Rock was abstract, and a lot of others were simply from different countries. Beck gets around all this by not really being a rapper but being willing to get as close to the line as he can without crossing it. The lyrics are somewhat spoken, but there’s more singing than on a standard rap album; the beats are there, but they’re more rooted in pop than funk; and he also makes more conventional rock albums where he plays the guitar and sings everything.
143 Neutral Milk Hotel – In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (1998)
Anne Frank’s diary is one of those books that is forced down everyone’s throat at an age where anything forced down one’s throat by a teacher is by definition lame and devoid of any interest whatsoever, which makes it interesting to see the emotional connection that can happen when someone comes to this book as an adult and sees all the pubescent psychosexual stuff that your teacher didn’t mention. The lyrics may be a bit too oblique at times, but the songs are infused with the emotional resonance that can only come with the realization that Frank’s story isn’t exceptional but must be multiplied millions of times over to account for the true devastation caused by the Nazis.
142 Fleetwood Mac – Fleetwood Mac (1975)
Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks had already shown that they could write and arrange a killer batch of songs on the inexplicably out of print Buckingham Nicks; put them in an established band on the verge of doing something special and an unstoppable force was created. While this album isn’t as well-regarded as its successor, it’s the origin of the classic Fleetwood Mac sound and would shape pop music for years to come.
141 Wilco – Sky Blue Sky (2007)
Wilco had spent the prior decade expanding the definition of alt-country to the point of unrecognizablility. Here, they scale back their ambitions considerably, sand off the rough edges, and make a more conventional country rock album. But there’s nothing wrong with being conventional; the indie press would pejoratively refer to this as dad rock, but it contained possibly the finest set of songs the band would ever record.
140 Pure Prairie League – Bustin’ Out (1972)
Country rock had been a growing force since 1968 and it reached its zenith with this album. Music from hybrid genres usually falls more on one side of the equation than the other. Before this album, there was a strong tendency for bands to hew closer to the country side of things; after this album, things would gradually become slicker and slicker until bands like the Eagles dropped most of their country influences and bands like Firefall were putting out sentimental schlock. This album manages to strike the prefect balance, and “Aimee” is still an avowed classic, even if the album it comes from isn’t as widely heard as it should be.
139 Jade Warrior – Way of the Sun (1978)
Jade Warrior’s first three albums were standard second-rate prog rock in the mode of King Crimson. Following their reformation at the behest of Steve Winwood, they would switch to making dreamy, instrumental soundscapes with strong Asian themes. Way of the Sun is in much the same vein, though the source of inspiration shifts from Asia to Meso-America. This album is here simply because it is the best among a series of albums that are like nothing else in rock music. Over the course of four albums, the band gradually stripped out all of the traditional rock elements and left us with a series of orchestrated, written-through instrumentals.
138 The Black Crowes – Amorica (1994)
The Black Crowes had their initial success at the tail end of the hair metal era and managed to get through the grunge revolution without incident. This is primarily because they had nothing to do with hair metal or grunge, and were one of the few mainstream acts who hadn’t forgotten rock music’s roots in blues and soul. It’s telling that when I was growing up in the ‘90s, they were the only contemporary acts played on my local classic rock station. Nevertheless, this is their best effort. While it wouldn’t rival their debut for the sheer number of hits (“A Conspiracy” is the only real radio classic), they would branch out into jammier territory that was later occupied by the likes of Gov’t Mule and Blue Traveler.
137 Hot Tuna – Burgers (1972)
Hot Tuna began as a Jefferson Airplane side project for Jack Casady and Jorma Kaukonen to open the band’s shows with acoustic sets featuring classic blues. Upon Jefferson Airplane’s demise in 1972, Hot Tuna added electric instruments and became a band in its own right. While it would soon become a power trio that would jam hard and play loud, this album shows them slowly integrating this jam band approach with their acoustic roots, resulting in an Americana record that still hints at what was to come.
I gotta say this amused me a little bit. It's a Swedish band, there's a lot of Swedish bands singing in Swedish! It's not a particularly defiant act! There's a wealth of Finnish bands singing in Finnish, likewise, that I listen - foreigners, of course, don't know about them, and nobody would expect them to.
Well, that says it all right there. Most Americans would give you a look like they had to ingest cod liver oil if you put on music at a party or something that wasn't sung in English, or, in certain rare circumstances, Spanish. Hence, every band from Sweden or elsewhere that has ever had a chance to capture an international market has sung mostly, if not exclusively, in English. After Dungen found cult success in the States, I imagine there was pressure to expand the audience by singing in English. Dungen side project The Amazing sings in English, and while they aren't exactly well-known, I have heard their music played in grocery stores and on the radio, even if the grocery store in question was Trader Joe's and the radio station was public, it's still not nothing. Dungen was never going to be a huge commercial force, but they could've been at least as well known as their countrymen, Peter Bjorn and John, and joined the indie A-list. Instead they remained a cult band that made great albums that no one wanted to listen to because of some weird allergy about music sung in foreign languages. I'd call such a decision at least a bit defiant.
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As someone who has listened to Beck for 27 years, but mostly just like, 8 songs, I have never once thought of him as a rapper, nor have I seen anyone even lightly hint at the possibility.
Is that how you view him? Are there more that view him this way!?
No, I don't view him as a rapper, and I don't know anyone who does, but that was kind of my point. But let's look at this album objectively—most of the vocals are more spoken than sung, the Dust Brothers are producing, there's liberal use of turntables and drum machines, and the live instruments are often recorded in a repetitive way meant to mimic sampling. "Where It's At", the best known song on the album, is literally about rap battles, and most professional reviews of the album at least mention the copious hip-hop influence. If we were to make a list of the unique defining characteristics of rap, Beck certainly hits a lot of them here. But no one considers him a rapper. Whether that's because there are enough other criteria that he doesn't meet or simply because he never presented himself as one (and his more conventional albums bolster that argument), I'm not sure. But what I do know is that Beck certainly seems interested in exploring where the line is, and that's what makes this album interesting.
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Thanks for your analysis, any insight on if ItAOtS album cover is a yam or a drum?
Totally a potato
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Surprised how low you rank Pet Sounds and In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Both would make top 5 for me. You explained the ranking for Pet Sounds, but I'm curious what it is about ITAOTS that keeps it out of the top echelons for you.
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