Led Zeppelin, Coda

Not even Led Zeppelin can make an album of castoffs work. I'm inclined to cut this one some slack as its very existence is due to the band's unwillingness to continue compromised after John Bonham's untimely death, and for that I salute their integrity, but there's a reason they never used these songs: they're just not very good. Whether it's because they were basically soundchecks elevated to track status ("We're Gonna Groove," "I Can't Quit You Baby"), session castoffs ("Poor Tom," "Wearing and Tearing") or jams without a home ("Bonzo's Montreux"), almost none of these tracks really get off the ground and nearly all suffer technical or compositional flaws of some sort. After all, that's why they weren't ever used before, right? The best ones are probably the leftovers from In Through The Out Door ("Wearing and Tearing," "Darlene" and to a lesser extent "Ozone Baby") because they're the most developed and the most technically polished, but other than the interesting percussion solos of "Bonzo's Montreux" the rest of the album is predictable and predictably forgettable. Throughout Coda I had the distinct feeling that the good stuff was right around the corner, that we were just a bridge away from something marvelous, but nothing ever gelled or shook loose. Sadly, that feeling of unmet expectation is not a good note to end on even though it was the only one they were willing to play. (Content: adult themes on "Poor Tom" and "Darlene.")

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Funkadelic, America Eats Its Young

An interesting but deeply flawed double outing from the P-Funk collective's early days, with its acid and funk roots plainly exposed. The album is certainly at least as literate as its predecessors while boasting substantially higher production values; the best example of this would probably be the second track, "If You Don't Like The Effects, Don't Produce The Cause," which is part enjoyable groove, part black Greek chorus condemning inaction and hypocrisy towards collective social advancement. If that was the tone for what I can only imagine Geo. Clinton considered a unifying concept, and the album stuck to that, I think the effect would probably have been much better (or at least coherent). But, presumably for commercial appeal, he also throws in the obliquely explicit (and not so obliquely: "I Call My Baby Pussycat" wasn't its original name), the sophomoric (the high-concept "Loose Booty," though the backbeat is good) and the obnoxiously saccharine ("We Hurt Too," y'know, ladies), and ends up sullying the overall unity. Bright spots, besides the second track, are an extremely competent Hendrix impersonation ("Philmore"), the Motowny and philosophically complex "Biological Speculation" ("y'all see my point?"), and a silly interpolation of "Jesus Loves Me" in "A Joyful Process," though this otherwise entertaining piece further gives the impression he doesn't actually take his central message seriously (whatever it is). Don't just take my word for it: the CD reissue, in bold capital letters on page three of the liner notes, calls it "disparate, sprawling and in no ways unified." And indeed listening to the title track, sort of a juxtaposition of "Maggot Brain" (complete with stentorian musings) and the slinky stylings of a porno flick, while the ending female obbligato moans, grunts and gasps as if more young were being made for consumption I couldn't make sense of what he was communicating or why I should care. And neither, apparently, did he. The CD reissue adds the 45rpm mono singles of "Loose Booty" and "A Joyful Process," which being two of the better tracks, are not improved by their abridgment. (Content: adult themes, sexual and drug references.)

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Depeche Mode, Spirit

I have to confess I don't understand this album. I know why they made it, and it's at least somewhat listenable, to the extent that it sounds a bit like their earlier output and puts on the same post-New Wave artistic pretenses. (And I'm favourably disposed to their earlier output, mind you. Violator was excellent, one of the best albums in my vault, and "Somebody" was the song that I swooned to my high-school crush over.) But like so many comeback attempts it feels more like a band vainly trying to remember how they played, and they spend too much time on technique than music. Dave Gahan mercifully still has his vocal chops (contrast with, e.g., Roger Daltrey), and the group gets it together in a few places like the insistent and refreshingly creepy "So Much Love," plus the more typically styled "No More (This Is The Last Time)," with enough get-up-and-go to carry the second half until its sudden flatten-out at the end. But there are too many low points along the way like the wan and crufty "Scum" with its obnoxious distortion and insipid beat, "Eternal" in which we lower our standards for love and passion, and the end's strangely appropriate "Fail." It's slickly produced by half with the possible exception of the weak cover art and that smudged logo, but by the end I felt like nothing ever really shook loose, and nothing really stood out. "We have not evolved," sings Dave solemnly in the first track. "We're going backwards." And I certainly concur this album didn't move them forwards. (Content: a couple F-bombs.)

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Bastille, Bad Blood

There are mercifully a very few albums that try so very hard, are so well constructed, are so incredibly artful in their intention, but yet for whatever severe flaw they have you can only bear to listen to them once. And here's one of them. I enjoy the art and the nuance, which by and large avoid descent into pretense thanks to the (generally) textured lyrics and slick production. Quite possibly the literary peak is "Things We Lost In The Fire;" you really do feel the despair and loss, not least from Dan Smith's earnest vocals, but also from the literate and deliberately subtle wordplay. Another standout is "Icarus," blending the hubris and self-disregard of the Greek myth with modern ungroundedness' appetite for self-destruction, and "Oblivion," its refrain echoing from time outside of time: "Are you going to age with grace? Are you going to leave a path to trace?" I ought to love this album for not dumbing its themes down, and some tracks I do, like the deservedly popular single "Pompeii" — just close your eyes and pretend as the world ends around you — and the exuberant "Weight of Living, Pt II" with its sympathy for the great burden of just existing over rollicking arpeggios and an infectious beat. But that last part is the fatal flaw: this album just exhausted the merde out of me. The pacing is almost untenable. Even its more sedate moments are merciless, veering between irregular contemplation and unexpected percussive assaults, while the rest is relentless beats per minute. How can I enjoy the pleasures of the album's thematic complexities between track after track that won't let me breathe? Worse, the three bonus tracks don't add anything but more of the same abuse, though at least they're new (sadly "Weight of Living, Pt I" is not a patch on its follow-on, however). Eventually it got to the point where I felt there was something wrong with me to find this album so arduous and so terribly draining that I dreaded another run-through to write this review, that I really needed to be on amphetamines or something to truly plumb its depths. And by golly, no matter how incredible its literary value, that is not a compliment. (Content: no concerns.)

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Parliament, Motor Booty Affair

This was a hard one to snub, but even as a long time P-Funker I just can't bring myself to like it. There's some legitimately funky tracks on this, the third and final album of Parliament's late 1970s peak, but it just as notably portrays the decline of a band no longer able to flourish under George Clinton's contemporary thematic and (more relevantly) management excesses. The singles off this disc are uninspired and derivative, especially the perplexingly beloved "Aqua Boogie," a cynical retread of the core groove from last album's "Flash Light" backed with an extended acid jazz coda and a cameo from Sir Nose d'Voidoffunk. Worse, by this point Clinton's idea of high art had devolved into 12-year-old mentality pictures of ample female backends in various suggestive poses in the album title (literally putting the Booty in Motor Booty, doncherknow), a flimsy attempt at a concept album by literally submerging it such that several of the vocalists sound like they were gargling in the bathroom, and one of the stupidest metaphors for the male organ in the otherwise entertaining "Mr. Wiggles." And "Rumpofsteelskin"? Really? High points come from the album's lesser known tracks, particularly "One of Those Funky Things" and "Liquid Sunshine," both solid grooves with good beats performed competently, and to a lesser extent the album's title track, which mercifully doesn't dwell on its rapidly annoying "Howard Codsell" monologue. Unfortunately, he then sells it short by closing with the unoriginal "Deep" whose nine minutes of phoned-in riffs could have come from any number of bands around that time and boasts the lyrical complexity of a kindergarten textbook. Despite the first track's insistence, this most certainly is your "average 50-yard dash of funk" by a self-described "slithering idiot"; Clinton could have, and has, done better than this, and you'd do better to look for his brighter spots instead. (Content: relentless use of 'funk' as a euphemism; puerile references and imagery.)

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Pink Floyd, The Endless River

When Richard Wright died in 2008, the introspective and unique musical fabric of the group personified (see, for example, his work during the band's early days such as on Saucerful of Secrets and Atom Heart Mother), the eulogies of his bandmates and ex-bandmate poured forth as if the heart and soul of the band had passed on and that would be the end of Pink Floyd. Of course, unreleased performances and session recordings have ways of raising the departed, and on modern equipment even noodling and idle jams can gain full flesh after the fact. I'm not sure if another album was needed after 1994's The Division Bell, particularly given the David Gilmour-led incarnation's tendency to unfocused auditory textures and vapid lyrics, but I'm pretty sure it's not this one. It's competent, there's no doubt; we would have expected no less from the inveterate musical aesthete he is, notable in its technical excellence and scrupulous internal consistency. However, it's also in some ways an unimaginative summary document of every Floyd album that's gone before, popped into a computer given orders to incorporate this material from this session and that to make it appropriately "Floydian," which is why you hear bits of "Run Like Hell" in "Allons-y (1)" and snatches of "The Grand Vizier's Garden Party" in "Skins" (snicker) and "Terminal Frost" in "Anisina" (a particularly nice piece, I must admit, especially with those crazy wind instruments howling along on their separate melodic threads) and "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" throughout almost all of the lead tracks on the various "sides." In fact, the whole album is a great big "Wish You Were Here" for Wright just as the original was for Syd Barrett, but compared to its spiritual ancestor it suffers for being derivative and forced, and long on elegy and short on meat. Wright's solo credited works are slight, being limited to two short tracks remarkable only for their painful brevity and one being named "Autumn '68" (see Atom Heart Mother again), and if the songwriting credits are to be believed he barely features on half the tracks at all. Given his limited output, then, why constrain the entire album to merely post-production odds and ends? The especial low point is an obvious castoff from the "Bell" sessions recycling Stephen Hawking's electronic oration ("Talkin' Hawkin'", egad); he may literally have phoned that in. Gilmour closes the album on its sole vocal track (the decent "Louder Than Words"), a sort of gentle ballad that could have at least broken up the monotony of what preceded it if he'd only written one or two more. Currently, he's on record as saying this will be the final Pink Floyd album but as a long-time fan of the band I kind of doubt it and I certainly hope against it. This is not the note I'd go out on, nor do I believe Richard Wright would have wanted to either. The deluxe box adds a few more tracks on Blu-ray, including some additional Wright compositions, but is mostly intended as a video source; the high fidelity and additional material still don't counter the main album's fundamental imbalances. (Content: a single mild expletive.)

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Kraftwerk, Computer World

I think I like the idea of Computer World more than I like the music in it. Trans Europe Express worked well because it had a grand theme layered on top, and if the music was a little impenetrable at times the subject matter managed to transcend that overall because of its overarching human element. By contrast that isn't at all the case here, because a technologically driven theme layered on top of a technologically driven album doesn't add anything to the experience. Hasn't every Kraftwerk album after they shed their krautrock trappings been, at its most essential level, a computer album? You can see loops and constructs and control flow in the rhythm lines, feel the CPU registers tick with every beat, which makes a song about "Numbers" (with what sounds like a Speak and Spell sharing lead vocals) just seem like a song endlessly repeating digits, like someone typed 10 A=A+1:PRINT A:GOTO 10 into their Commodore 64 and ran it. But in German, verstehst du. Their strongest track is probably the title track, which leads to their awkward overreliance on its comparatively sumptuous theme later on, and "Computer Love" has a nice texture to it (and probably, at least at intervals, the most original lyrics, "I call this number / for a data date"), but their improved production techniques remove the slight and charming imperfections in their earlier works leaving a result that is of simultaneously higher quality and lower emotive value. If that's what they intended, they succeeded, but they ended up losing their soul in the process. On "Home Computer" they sing about our home computers bringing us into the future, but the computer world I remember from the 1980s was a lot more fun than this album is. (Content: no concerns.)

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Pink Floyd, A Collection Of Great Dance Songs

This ill-conceived compilation gets its two stars entirely from the amusingly facetious title and another inspired Hipgnosis album cover with the dancers guyed to the ground so tautly their tango is frozen for all eternity. Otherwise, the album itself is nearly completely forgettable. If Pink Floyd made singles (that didn't suck), this kind of shovel instant-The-Nice-Price album might work, but instead it's an exercise in "sounded like a good idea at the time" and "let's get another dollar from the punters" by hacking out, like a rusty machete to an orchid, ragged slices from their grander albums that lack the context and structure essential to their proper appreciation. "Sheep," by itself, is just Roger Waters screaming about a hapless flock of Merinos, not obviously an exhortation to the fearful proletariat to rise up, and why was "Another Brick In The Wall (Part II)" a single when, without the harrowing childhood of young Pink to draw on, the song can only be interpreted as a blunt smear against intellectualism? In fairness, this is not totally true for the other tracks, per se, but they suffer for different reasons: "One of These Days'" snarling brutality is naked without contrasting against the other intriguing tracks on the underappreciated Meddle, and "Money" becomes a victim of an interlabel dispute where Capitol would permit Columbia to use the original recording of "One of These Days" but not "Money," meaning its reincarnation as an underwhelming David Gilmour solo track (see also About Face), though Dick Parry's saxophone is expertly recreated. Only "Wish You Were Here" can truly stand alone, and the edited "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" is much more cohesive, ironically by taking segments off four of the seven sprawling original parts. Worth it to Floyd completists like myself if only for that last, but at least the band recognized the obvious with the title, because on this collection these songs lose their greatness in isolation and you really can't dance to them. (Content: S-bomb, stylized violence.)

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The Alan Parsons Project, Pyramid

Pyramid is really the first time where Alan Parsons and Eric Woolfson learned how to make a pop-friendly album; I Robot and Tales of Mystery and Imagination were interesting to the right fan but completely incomprehensible to everyone else. Unfortunately, their application of this skill is incomplete on this concept album that's apparently completely without a concept. While I enjoy the well-developed introspective pieces, especially the couplet of "What Goes Up..." with the almost religious overtones of "The Eagle Will Rise Again," as well as the closing "Shadow Of A Lonely Man" where guest vocalist John Miles wisely pulls his punches for a beautifully understated effect, the three instrumental tracks are as inscrutable as they were on "I Robot," and "One More River" and "Can't Take It With You" are not only boring to listen to but sport the clichéd lyrical intelligence of a second-string political speechwriter. The high point is the sparkling "Pyramania," which starts with the obvious pun and adds a witty commentary on the foolishness of trendy beliefs and faddish fascinations (with pyramid power), but only serves to throw the album's deficiencies into sharp relief. Overall, best treated as a transitional album with some high points worth picking up on a compilation instead. The reissue adds the usual tiresome and underdeveloped early mix versions. (Content: no concerns.)

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Steely Dan, Katy Lied

Being the glittering cosmopolitan and erudite jerk that I am, I foolishly believed that Fagenbecker might have been trying to make a German pun or something with the title ("Katy Lied" = "Katy Song," get it? nein? well, ich kann dich nicht riechen, so there), but I suppose I expect too much from a band that continues to bill itself as an exceptionally durable object of the bedroom. (In the reissue liner notes, instead of a studious retrospective study of its production or interesting notes about the tour, Beckerfagen instead leads off with a complaint about the propensity of the backup singers to boink the roadies instead of them. So there.) In spite of all their frustrated lechery, "Katy Lied" at least begins in top jazz-rock fusion form, starting off strong with the hep and rhythmic "Black Friday" and then the layered smooth contrast of "Bad Sneakers." Around about "Daddy Don't Live In That New York City No More," though, the jazz starts to interfere with the rock, making compulsively produced but somewhat inaccessible tracks like "Doctor Wu" (on which Katy does not tell the truth), and then sneaking in more furtive R-rated references with "Everyone's Gone To The Movies," but you know, those movies, wink wink nudge nudge, so ready to make their unseen companion come of age that I could swear the jacket got slobbered on in the studio. I'm also not sure what to do with an album that not only has a song about gold teeth, but continues it from a song two albums prior. "Chain Lightning"'s dead-on blues and the pensive "Any World" somewhat rescue the second half, but it ends on the baffling "Throw Back The Little Ones," another exercise in wondering what socially unacceptable subtext Fabeckgener is sneaking in ("throw back the little ones"? "pan fry the big ones"? "gently squeeze them"??), made more disordered by their suspect choices of time signature and the Zappa-esque bridge. I'm not sure if I just have too large a stick in my butt to really enjoy this album, and if so isn't the band name a terrible coincidence, but must their work always make me weather the conflict of the puerile and the sophisticated when I listen to it? (Content: drug and sexual references.)

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Aerosmith

While the Aerosmith of the 1980s competed with incredible sources of musical depth and innovation such as, you know, hair metal, the Aerosmith of the 1970s existed between prog, blues and art rock, and sometimes incorporated all three. I wish it were so on their debut album, but it's only a glimmer of the greatness that came to them later. Steven Tyler admitted he was deliberately underplaying his singing and it shows, worsened by uninspired production and drab dynamics which do them no favours; some of these half-baked tracks still show up in their live sets such as "One Way Street," which is seven minutes of trying to find the "skip" button. But there are two tracks in particular that tell us this band is capable of more, and those are "Mama Kin" (the Guns N Roses cover is good, but the original is better), which mixes bluesy rock with a good riff and a fun sax solo, and of course the classic ballad "Dream On," full of echo, verve and splendour on which it appears all of their production budget was blown based on the other tracks. Worth picking up for fans, but the casual interest will want to wait until Toys In The Attic, against which all Aerosmith and hard rock albums in general are measured. (Content: S-bomb, some drug references.)

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Talking Heads: 77

After "Love → Building On Fire" bounced onto the singles charts we expected great things from Talking Heads' first full effort, and the first half of "77" uncompromisingly fails to achieve them. David Byrne, if you're as smart as the lead track alleges you are, then where did you come up with such patent gibblegabble like "love is simple as 1-2-3"? Did you crib notes off the Jackson 5? By "No Compassion" I'm ready to break the disc into pieces except the local shop won't take fragments on trade-in. And then, just after that nadir, just when I've started thinking about how stupid this album is sounding and how they fooled us all, then the good stuff starts. "The Book I Read" is still a little lyrically imbecilic, but I'll give him points for humour (if this was meant for a real author, then I'd love to see the restraining order) and the band for some actual musical feeling and complexity. When he talks about the laws in this country that are his favourites and the civil servants that are his loved ones ("Don't Worry About The Government") this right-wing capitalist bastard wonders if he's really serious, but if it's snark it's witty and if it's earnestness it's certainly original. And then there's "Psycho Killer," which teaches all of us the finer points of being a homicidal maniac au français. The two stars isn't (just) because half the songs are bad; it's because this should have been an EP, and given what they've demonstrated they're capable of they have no excuse. The reissue adds "Love → Building On Fire," which, being programmed onto the second half, means you can go right on skipping the first. (Content: no concerns.)

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REM, Up

It may be too much to say that bands who lose drummers lose their souls, but they certainly lose something. The Who was never the same after Keith Moon died, even with the very able and terminally underappreciated Kenney Jones filling in for two albums (three if you count his collabouration on the 1975 Tommy movie soundtrack retrofit); how much worse, then, when REM filled in for Bill Berry with session mercenaries and drum machines? I have conflicting feelings about this album, and I know the band definitely did while they were making it. It has some of my favourite REM tracks, including the incomparably rich "At My Most Beautiful" and "Daysleeper," and the unexpected pleasures of "Why Not Smile" and "Parakeet." But these are the slow tracks, with no beat by definition; by contrast, the supersynthetic lead-off "Airportman" is one of their worst efforts, aimless and monotonous, setting up the album for failure. "Lotus" comes off like Lenny Kravitz on Thorazine. "Suspicion"'s rhythm section sounds like my old Casiotone, and not in a nostalgic way, and on, and on, and on. The musical direction Berry's departure forced them into was not a total loss because it did gradually evolve (Reveal in particular), but they proved replacement was impossible, only succession. (Content: mild innuendo.)

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Tangerine Dream, Rubycon

Another ostensible masterwork of the 1970s synthesizer craze, I have always had the sense that there was a greater picture here, that the album's palpable formalism was artfully obscuring some greater musical basis my ears and soul were yet to discover. Technically, it is daring and rich, and I suppose with appropriate chemical support one might dig it in the abstract. But this album, every bit the foamy river of myth its name descends from, has one flaw, and it's a big one: its appalling tracking. If the group could have made it a single 35 minute composition, pinning you to your chair, forcing themselves upon your auditory canals, chaining you to the hi-fi so that you couldn't get away, they would have; only the realities of the LP caused them to relent, if only a little. Seventeen indivisible minutes a side of music so experimental it would weird out Philip Glass is not an album to be enjoyed — it is an album to be endured. (Content: pure instrumental.)

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Jean-Michel Jarre, Oxygène

A painful product of its time when monstrous carnivorous synthesizers walked the earth, Oxygène proves that Jarre did not understand the idea of trop d'une bonne chose. (He did learn it a bit later in life; witness the much more enjoyable Magnetic Fields/Les Chants Magnétiques.) Ponderous, meandering and utterly devoid of soul or feeling, Jarre drags the listener by the ear through complex yet meaningless soundscapes he is convinced are textured and subtle but mostly come off as monotonous. The technical construction is admittedly skillful, and the layering is evident, but layers can only amplify; they do not constitute substance. There are moments and flashes of brilliance (especially "V") but they're not generally worth the amount of listening required to find them, and the quasi-single ("IV") only avoids the same drudgery of the rest of the album by being ostensibly danceable, at least if your right leg is slightly longer than your left and you've taken a substantial quantity of Xanax. Yet here I sit, symmetric and sober, trying to find a "there" there, trying to find a musical thread to hold onto to carry me through, as the Moogasaurus that once roamed his studio looms behind me moaning and slavering. (Content: pure instrumental.)

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