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naraburns nihil supernum
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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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111 Flamin’ Groovies – Teenage Head (1971)
The Groovies were an unusual band. They’re best described as a sort of an American counterpart to the Rolling Stones, except the Groovies didn’t enter the scene until 1968 and played the cover-heavy R&B of the early Stones albums years after that kind of thing had become unfashionable, but with a contemporary twist. With this album, they compressed the entire Stones classic 1968–1971 period onto one album, but without the slickness that characterized Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main St. In addition to the rockers and ballads, they show they can still play pre-rock styles like blues punk, country blues, rockabilly, and jump blues, while the album closing “Whiskey Woman” seems like such an obvious classic rock song it’s surprising it wasn’t done by a more well-known band.
110 Steve Miller Band – Fly Like an Eagle (1976)
By the mid-‘70s, blues rock had become somewhat of an anachronism. As a foundational element of rock, blues-based music had been omnipresent throughout the ‘60s, and saw somewhat of a renaissance at the end of the decade, but as the ‘70s progressed, the music was swallowed up by hard rock, southern rock, and all the other subgenres that proliferated during the first half of the decade, while those who stuck true to their roots were drawn more towards the straight blues scene and were relatively minor figures in rock. Though Steve Miller tried to hang on longer, he was ultimately no exception to this trend. But unlike, say, Fleetwood Mac, he was able to retain a distinct blues sensibility while adapting to the new glossy, spaced-out style. This is most evident on stuff like “Mercury Blues” and “Sweet Maree”, but it’s omnipresent throughout the album, particularly on the title cut, where Miller shows that he’ll always be the only true Space Cowboy.
109 Premiata Forneria Marconi – Per un amico (1972)
When most people think of progressive rock’s attempts to marry rock and classical music, the first thing that comes to mind is probably any of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer’s ham-fisted attempts at rocking the classics. Or maybe King Crimson’s avant-garde adventures. If nothing else, the spirit of most prog is Romantic; maximalist, emotional, daring. But PFM take a different tack, settling on the Baroque instead; intricate, complicated, sensitive. This is most apparent on the fugue that opens the album, but the Baroque spirit persists, even in the harder rocking sections. Much care was taken to ensure that nothing was out of place—even in the busiest sections the instruments weave among each other in such a way that nothing overpowers anything else, unless that’s clearly the intention. And there’s no shortage of the kind of ostentation that made Baroque what it was.
108 Michael Jackson – Thriller (1982)
Another case where one may wonder why I have this ranked so low, but I’ll let you in on a secret: No one actually likes this album as much as they say they do. “The Girl Is Mine” is the most obvious culprit for the fatal flaw that gets this docked a half star and thus relegated to also-ran status, as it’s easily the weakest thing here, but its lighthearted silliness brings a levity to the album that helps more than it hurts, and people seem to like it. No, when I say that most people don’t really like this album, it’s because of the closing “Lady in My Life”, which most casual listeners dismiss as a generic piece of lite R&B that was typical for the era. And it is that at first glance, but it’s also the best example of the style. Everything about the production is on-point—the brief flugelhorn flourishes, the restrained use of synthesizers, the jazz guitar, the rhythmic jump in the bridge, the breakdown at the end—everything. The rest of the album is self-explanatory.
107 Rod Stewart – Every Picture Tells a Story (1971)
Rod Stewart may have sullied his image by becoming an adult contemporary icon and butchering the Great American Songbook, but in an objective sense, he has a great rock voice. He came up singing proto-metal with the Jeff Beck Group and later joined the Faces, where he sang bloozy barroom rock and roll. The calculus for this record is simple: It’s a Faces album in spirit but with mostly acoustic instruments and a more roughshod production. It’s hard rock with a ramshackle feel, like it was recorded in an attic or something. Songs like “Maggie Mae” need no introduction and are representative of the style, but it’s the exception that stands out, and electrifying rendition of the Temptations’ “I Know I’m Losing You”. If you’re still convinced Rod Stewart is a soft rock hack after hearing this, I don’t know what to tell you.
106 Genesis – Foxtrot (1972)
One of the reasons why progressive rock plays so heavily in this list is that every major group (and most minor groups) from the first wave had one major strength they played to. For Emerson Lake and Palmer it was recreating the bombast of classical music in a rock format. For Yes it was their Eastern mysticism. For Jethro Tull it was their folk leanings. For King Crimson, their avant-garde leanings. And for Genesis, it was their theatricality. Writer Bill Martin called their songs “acid fairy tales”, but “acid nursery rhymes” is probably a more accurate term, as it accentuates an inherent Anglocentrism that’s inherent in the spirit of their early work if not necessarily the subject matter. And the subject matter here is surprisingly apocalyptic. It opens with “Watcher of the Skies”, a story about finding the remnants of human civilization on earth but no actual humans, and it continues with “Time Table” a British take on Ozymandias. But the real centerpiece of the album is the 20+ minute “Supper’s Ready”, and epic that begins with a vision in a living room on an ordinary day and ends with the founding of the New Jerusalem.
105 Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young – Déjà vu (1970)
CSNY is often derided by critics today as the stereotypical “old fart” hippie band, playing mellow music for mellow people. After all, they were the progenitors of the whole mellow rock sound that came out of Laurel Canyon in the late ‘60s and would dominate the ‘70s. But what these critics miss was that the original Crosby, Stills and Nash was an attempt for the respective members to break out of the constraints of their previous bands. The reason this album works so well is that there are only three real “band” cuts on it while the rest are virtual solo efforts. David Crosby is the hippie mystic, Stephen Stills is the ambitious leader (he wrote 2 of the band cuts, and the other was penned by Joni Mitchell), Graham Nash is the pop tunesmith, and Neil Young, he’s the wild card. And we can’t forget that when the harmonies cook, particularly on the opening “Carry On”, they cook.
104 Jeff Beck – Blow By Blow (1975)
Jeff Beck first achieved guitar hero status as a member of the Yardbirds, and with his own band he cut one of the seminal albums in the history of hard rock. But his talent couldn’t be constrained by a conventional rock band writing for a conventional rock audience. Thus, we reach a pivotal moment in the history of guitar heroes—he said “fuck it” and recorded an instrumental jazz-funk album. These days, there’s a sort of guitar hero par excellence subgenre that ignores contemporary trends to allow people who are entirely too good at their instruments to allow their talents to fully blossom, and this is where it all started. It’s no coincidence that Beck would more or less never look back.
103 The Allman Brothers – At Fillmore East (1971)
Gregg Allman once said that the term “Southern Rock” was a redundancy because all the great styles and musicians at the center of rock music originated in the South, so you might as well call what he was doing “Rock Rock”. But there was something different about the Allmans. That difference lay in the fact that, while rock was based on the blues, and the blues originated in the South, the styles that had primarily influenced rock up to this point had not. Sure, there had been some gestures at acoustic Delta blues by some groups, but rock’s roots more directly lay in big band jump blues, electric Chicago blues, and R&B. Duane Allman took the slide guitar out of the swamp and electrified it, while the rest of the band added hints of all the other southern styles—jazz, country, gospel, etc.—and turned the whole thing into a glorious amalgam. The original aesthetic of the band was cut tragically short by Duane’s untimely death at age 23, but this live performance presents them as an early jam band, stretching every song to its glorious limit.
102 Pavement – Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain (1994)
When alternative rock went mainstream in the early ‘90s, it seemed like every band, no matter how unconventional, had a shot at making it. The consequence of this was that the new underground would revolve around bands that, even given the relaxed standards of grunge, were still too out there for mass consumption. Pavement was the first of these new bands. While their debut was more or less a wall of noise, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain cuts through the fuzz and feedback to reveal the surprisingly thoughtful songwriting behind it all. The singing and playing, while not technically deficient, was still to angular and ragged to ever have wide appeal. Indie rock doesn’t exactly start here, but it becomes good here.
Per un Amico is okay, but the real standout album in this subgenre is il Rovescio della Medaglia's Contaminazione (1973).
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