Truancy: The Very Best of Pete Townshend

The latest and least accomplished (or awaited) of Pete Townshend's solo career compilations, this disc makes the minimum out of relatively mediocre material. No one was asking for a new retread of previously released cuts, and most of what is on this album is exactly what you've heard before, namely a few commercial hits (notably an unjustifiably truncated "Let My Love Open The Door"), Who reject tracks ("Pure And Easy," though this obesely overproduced version is inferior to the session castoff on the extended Who's next re-releases), and a surfeit of the inexplicable that he really, really wants to be meaningful. Highlights of that last include the openly homoerotic "Rough Boys" that would be playful if it weren't so obvious, the appealing if overly cute by half "Sheraton Gibson," several listenable cuts from the adventurous but impenetrable All The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes (in particular the dissonant yet lyric "The Sea Refuses No River"), and the surprisingly strong "English Boy" with Daltryesque vocals that could have come off a Who revival album from a parallel universe. The lowlights overwhelm them, though, in particular the lacklustre and uninspired ("Let's See Action," "My Baby Gives It Away," "Face the Face"), the cloyingly overnostalgic ("You Came Back," though it has its charms and twists), the incomprehensible ("Keep Me Turning") and the execrably pointless — as embodied by "A Heart To Hang On To," its warmed-over lyrics worsened by smarmy lukewarm rock. We end on an even lower note with two unreleased tracks ("Guantanamo" and "How Can I Help You") that, complete with their phlegmy old-rocker vocals, frankly should have stayed that way. Much like Roger Waters' career arc towards the end of and then post-Pink Floyd, Townshend's fatally overwrought artistic aspirations could not be contained by the Who, and during his solo outings could not be contained by anything. Despite praiseworthy studio effort we're left with a corpus of works that by their sheer level of autoindulgence mostly only appeal to their creator. Townshend's inveterately inscrutable songsmithing was certainly nowhere near as acrid as Waters' output, and that is a blessed relief, but as this limp collection demonstrates it was also no less tedious. (Content: some adult themes.)

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The Beatles, Abbey Road

There is no more perfect Beatles album than this one. Think of every high point of their previous output, and you'll find it's all here in one place: a rich George Martin production, Lennon-McCartney whimsy ("Maxwell's Silver Hammer"), some of George Harrison's best songwriting ("Something," "Here Comes The Sun") with even a Ringo cameo ("Octopus's Garden"), and not least a range of musical style from hippie idealism ("Come Together") to proto-metal ("I Want You (She's So Heavy)") to even progressive rock (the "suite" of almost the entire second half), all the way through to the magnificent conclusion of (what else?) "The End." It cannot be improved upon. It cannot be eclipsed. In a like manner it's fitting that this was actually their last recorded work chronologically, even as the (comparatively) weaker Let It Be followed it, because every single one of their albums before was just a stop on the road to greatness leading up to this. If there is no other Beatles album in your cabinet, then let it be this one (ahem). (Content: no concerns.)

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David Bowie, Black Tie White Noise

The new Bowie hit when I was in college. "Jump They Say," they hissed at him, his musical output dwindling, his artistic influence shriveled. "The Wedding" of him and Iman was the last shred of the old Bowie, they gossiped, and there was nothing left in him to pour forth. And they were very wrong, for the new Bowie was very very good. "Jump They Say" is the track that got the most airplay, and deservedly so from its smooth production and solid blend of ambient and dance; ostensibly it was his feelings for his schizophrenic half-brother who committed suicide, but it could just as easily be interpreted as reaction to the demons whispering "has-been" in his ear. A non-trivial amount of instrumental gives the album a symphonic texture ("The Wedding" leading off but also the ominous "Pallas Athena" and "Looking for Lester") as much as the loosened, liberated lyrics of "I Feel Free" and his marital joy in "Miracle Goodnight" provide it uplift. The title track is nothing special and there are possibly more covers than there ought to be, but they are handled as competently as the rest, especially the wonderfully schmaltzy rework of the Morrissey track "I Know It's Gonna Happen Someday" which was itself originally a homage to Bowie's Ziggy Stardust. Fresh, fearless and fascinating, this transformational album more than anything proved he could self-reinvent and reboot, thus setting the tone for the personal renaissance that followed. The original CD issue included three bonus tracks, two rather slight remixes of "Jump They Say" and "Pallas Athena," and the whimsical "Lucy Can't Dance" which truly deserved to be on the main album. The later 10th anniversary disc keeps that last but replaces the others with still other alternate remixes, including three different versions of "Jump They Say," two of "Black Tie White Noise" and even an Indonesian version of "Don't Let Me Down & Down." I suppose it's interesting for comparison but it's questionable how much it would be for listening. (Content: mild profanity.)

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Aerosmith, Done With Mirrors

This was supposed to be their comeback album, proving they could be clean and still rock, and yet it still sounds like they're smoking something. And it's not the good stuff. The flat, unoriginal and uncompelling riffs are matched inexpertly by similarly flat production and the dynamic range of a nursing home after the medication gets handed out. Standout tracks for the wrong reasons include the asymmetric beat in "Let The Music Do The Talking" which I think they believed would be innovative but just comes off as annoying, Steven Tyler's limp and anaemic delivery on "The Reason A Dog" something or other, and "The Hop" which just drags and drags and drags. This otherwise dumpster fire of an album is saved from complete failure only by the name of the track "My Fist Your Face" which makes an entertaining epithet for bar mitzvahs, church services and music critics. The CD and tape versions add the final track "Darkness" which has some rather interesting harmonic contrasts and an almost progressive rock throwback feel, a bafflingly high quality contrast against the overwhelming mediocrity of the rest of the album, and single-handedly prevents my first poop rating ever. (Content: mild profanity.)

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Kurtis Blow, The Breaks

Hip-hop owes a lot to God for letting it borrow Kurtis Blow a few years, giving us this album's title track and one of the most influential transitional tracks during the old school crossover days. Being a transitional album, however, it is neither fish nor fowl by its nature; the musical chops are solid but the sometimes impressively sumptuous R&B backings periodically clash with his otherwise competent rapping. There isn't as much stylistic variation as you might think, either: all three tracks on the first side are basically the same riff ("Rappin' Blow Part II," "The Breaks" and "Way Out West"), with the latter track in particular overstaying its twelve-inch-length welcome. On the other hand, the second side has the amazing "Throughout Your Years," an even better outing than "The Breaks" itself, which manages the unbelievable trick of making rap simultaneously meaty yet poignant and heartfelt. The briskly breezy piano and bass really help though, which brings me back to that point I made before about the musical backing. In fact, when he sings "All I Want In This World (Is To Find That Girl)" he actually puts his rapping to shame with vocals at least as melodically lyrical as the backing band even if the words themselves aren't really all that special. Not all of it comes off well (especially the incredibly ill-advised Bachman-Turner Overdrive cover "Takin' Care of Business," where not even the hot guitar licks can rescue it), but it's hard to fault him for being the pioneer (the superfunky "Hard Times" in particular accurately predicts where the genre was heading). In that sense, then, give God a shout-out for this album leading the way; perhaps the breaks are just part of His cosmic plan after all. The CD reissue includes an instrumental version of "The Breaks" and an unusual Christmas-themed rap that gets points for an original topic but loses them for another recycled beat. These are fine as far as they go, but I found it curious they omitted the B-side instrumental for "Rappin' Blow Part II" which, despite being good enough for the samplers, apparently wasn't good enough for Mercury. (Content: no concerns.)

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The Heavy, The House That Dirt Built

Mailed directly to you from 1975, or possibly 1979 if the lead-in cut from the rather grim film "Don't Go In The House" is to be believed, you'd swear this LP dropped into a time warp and came out in the present day a CD. The outcast's fantasy hit single "How You Like Me Now?" (set up by the highly competent if quizzically short "Oh No! Not You Again!") is a delightful and amusingly venomous jam as funky as anything James Brown ever churned out, while later the solemn yet equally solid "Short Change Hero" presents a pensive contrast that truly shows off their musical range. I also rather enjoyed the bluesy "Long Way From Home" and while "What You Want Me To Do?" didn't bowl me over lyrically, the acid guitar and heavy riffs certainly did. There are unfortunately low points: the cynical, almost contemptuous "Sixteen" was designed to leave a bad taste in your mouth, and it does; similarly, "No Time" is a little too raw and jarring to fit with the rest of the album's exuberant feel. But the closer, the expressive "Stuck," redeems much of this throwback-styled album with its gentle orchestration and heartfelt vocals. It's not the strongest album I've ever heard, but if dirt truly did build this musical house, they've certainly exceeded such ignominious origins. (Content: adult themes on "Sixteen," mild profanity in "Love Like That.")

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Magma, Attahk

If you're going to pull the lyrical stunt of singing in an incomprehensible bespoke conlang, and remember that my own undergraduate degree is in actual linguistics, man, then make it worth listening to. And this is! Holy crap, it is! The style of the nearly unanalyzable tracks lurches from hard rock to rock opera to art rock to acid jazz and even gospel (the wonderful "Spiritual"), but the jams are all exceptionally performed and arranged with a minimum of meandering, and while you won't understand a word they're singing their eye-widening vocal range powers the most incredibly emotive vocables I've heard this side of Clare Torry. Backed by full instrumentation and a choir that's just as crazy, you get trilling, bubbly high-notes, growly scatting (was that a belch I heard on "Maahnt"?), resonant kabuki and even a faux vocal kazoo, and the delightful musical surprises and sudden stylistic left turns just hold your listening attention like a vise. It's an exquisite effect: all that apparent gibberish means everyone must experience this album in some unfamiliar language not their own, leaving the listener to intuit and discover its meaning which by design is never made plain. I don't know what he's singing about on "Dondaï," but baby, with a solo like that sending chills down your spine, I sure can feel it. The first track ("The Last Seven Minutes") is a little tedious at times and the grotesque H. R. Giger cover art with monstrous safety pins through piggish noses creeps me out, but otherwise this entire album is an unalloyed breath of fresh air. I have no idea what on earth I just listened to, and this most approachable of their discography is still going to be too weird for some listeners, but I gotta say: I really liked it. (Content: your guess is as good as mine.)

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Black Sabbath

More notorious for its reputation than the actual music, and more influential for what it inspired than what it actually is. The band has always maintained their Satanistic trappings were a commercial hook and not a lifestyle, and I believe them, because there was probably a lot of weirdness in 1969 and why not capture those dark souls' dollars with some dramatic imagery, howling guitars and doomy sound effects? Throw in that bleak unsettling cover with the enigmatic woman in black and theoretically you're ready to rock eternal agony. Well, not quite: Tomy Iommi's guitars are skillful and the Geezer Butler bass is appropriately heavy, but Ozzy hadn't quite achieved the vocal prowess of later albums and the sparser metal feel gets monotonous in these long-form tracks. The self-titled first track on their self-titled first album is genuinely creepy and not for listeners of delicate constitution, but the rest of it feels a lot like Led Zeppelin's pasty white Antichrist love-child with Jethro Tull (no doubt the result of Iommi's brief professional association with Ian Anderson), bluesy jams and harmonica (!) intact, and just as noodly as such a description would imply. "Wicked World" gets points for relative brevity, but the interminably titled and interminably recorded third and fifth tracks just go on and on. Much metal followed the pattern this album established and the genre can trace itself back to this very record, but the album itself is a dreary slog and even the cultists would find it boring. (Content: occult themes.)

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Angels and Airwaves, Love / Love Part II

I'm not sure how to catalogue this, since it was not originally issued as a double album (indeed, both parts were released a year apart), but they're clearly intended retrospectively to be: the box set contains both discs with the same art and unified packaging, and frontman/Blink-182 alumnus Tom DeLonge treats them both as part of the same whole, first and foremost a soundtrack for the vanity Love movie project but also a unified stand-alone work in its own right. So that's how I'm going to write this review, as a double album in two halves. And the first half isn't too bad. It's a far more mature sound, as to be expected from his own personal musical evolution, but also an impressively prog-styled one with surprisingly strong degrees of formalism. There's the first track ("El Ducit Mundum Per Luce"), obviously intended as overture, the main theme ("The Flight of Apollo," textured and post-punk all at once), and then a descending array of variations upon that theme through to the closer ("Some Origins of Fire") with the finale alternating between sweeping sections both fast and slow in such precise cadence you can practically see the credits roll in your mind's eye. The rigid thematic structure of the first disc is both good and bad; it's bad in that the dependence on the core ambient feel makes few of the tracks truly stand out, and the couple of tracks that were thrown in presumably to stand out ("Epic Holiday" in particular) seem forced, but it's good in that the internal consistency of the music remains whole. That brings us to the second half. A year later, there are some mild subtle differences in his voice and the mix, but the overall structure is almost a carbon copy ("Saturday Love" serving as overture, "Surrender" as main theme) with melodic callbacks to the first disc (particularly noticeable in "Anxiety" and "The Revelator"). More so than the first, the second disc particularly feels as if the band wanted it to be more "soundtracky," its irregularity driven by an apparent dependency on some lost video track only the musicians are watching. This dooms "Moon as My Witness," for example, which might have been something with a couple more verses, and "Inertia," with its rapid swerves and stylistic swoops suggesting every jump cut and wipe the CD doesn't let you see. In the plus column "Behold A Pale Horse" certainly gets some points for its apocalyptic imagery and "All That We Are" is a moving conclusion, but you hear very little musically in the second part that you didn't hear in some prototyped form in the first (and lyrically it adds even less). "Love" in its final multipartite realization isn't irredeemable but its sprawling sound just isn't anywhere near as great or innovative as the band thinks it is, as is the case with nearly every double album ever released. The deluxe set includes the Love movie, a slight but intriguing indie sci-fi effort that delighted me as a big fan of Moon but will likely bore those not greatly inclined towards emotional pontification in space. If you're not interested in such things you lose little by just buying the first disc by itself, which makes me wonder if I should have reviewed it that way too. (Content: some profanity.)

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Lou Reed, Transformer

The problem with this album is it's not nearly as hip as it thinks it is and far more transgressive than it had a right to be. Now, in these permissive times, an album with direct references to transgender life, drug use and oral sex might seem de rigueur, but it wasn't in 1972, and it better be damn good music to justify dropping those kinds of pearl clutchers. Sometimes it is: the production, by glam man David Bowie himself, is far more than you would expect from Reed's roots in the underground music scene, and when it fires on all cylinders you get sly trilling rockers like "Vicious," a strong leadoff track you can imagine being played for attitude at Warhol revivals everywhere, and my personal favourite, "Perfect Day," simply arranged, simply written, richly played. But Reed's maddeningly laconic and almost tuneless delivery sinks most of the rest of the tracks no matter how good. The production and Bowie's own vocal backing largely rescues "Satellite of Love" (even if the space-race-relationship lyrics defy rational analysis), and the infamous "Walk on the Wild Side," exposing every blemished inch of flesh of its underbelly like a hooker past their prime, plays to his vocal style and throws enough musical curveballs to keep it interesting even if RCA had to cut it to get it on the radio. You can contrast that against the irritating "Make Up," though, a tale of drag queens that just drags, the flat "Wagon Wheel" and the inexplicable "New York Telephone Conversation" in which Reed drags his vocal cords like fingernails across the blackboard of your ears to an oblivious piano background. The man can sing, truly, and he does in "Perfect Day" particularly but also in "Andy's Chest" where he seems to forget he's supposed to be detachedly cool and belts it out a bit in the bridge, but I got really fed up with him holding back vocally when thematically he does anything but. (Thought question: why on earth does everyone think "Perfect Day" is about heroin? If it really was, don't you think he would have sung that? I mean, he was willing to sing about everything else.) I couldn't stand to listen to "Goodnight Ladies" one more time while writing this, he's almost off-key. The bottom line is you only get to be successfully outrageous in an album if you have the musical chops to match and if you actually use them. You can't expect people to put up with the rest of it if you deliver it all like a stoned tomcat. As proof, the CD reissue includes two acoustic demos (of "Hangin' 'Round" and "Perfect Day") stripped of the Bowie sugar and Mick Ronson arrangements, leaving you only with his unvarnished voice and a suffering guitar. Ye gods. (Content: adult themes.)

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The Stranglers, Rattus Norvegicus

When the band bills itself as a bunch of violent murderers, you're in for something ... different. Fast, frenetic and unapologetically unrefined, the overall feeling of this surprisingly complex proto-punk album is one of barely contained chaos. This works for it and sometimes against: the wacked-out keyboards in the lead track "Sometimes" feel like a thoroughbred champing at the reins, just one neurologic misfire away from galloping off a cliff, and the driving line in "Ugly" gives way to a mishmashed dissonant bridge that leaves you right back where you started. On the other hand, when it tightens up you have amazing stuff like the deserving if over-parenthesized single "(Get A) Grip (On Yourself)," its energetically interwoven instrumental lines ruined only by a bafflingly cacophonous conclusion, and the almost progressive rock (oh, the sacrilege!) stylings of the odd yet slyly compelling multi-part suite "Down in the Sewer" ("lots of diseasezzzzzzzzz"), bringing the album to a raucous climactic end. Their tongue is a bit too much in their cheek for the lecherous "Peaches" and the arguably misogynistic "Princess of the Streets," though to be fair, to call it simply a smear on women is to miss the joke entirely, but the sound is unmistakable, the high points are incredible, and even the low points are interesting. You'll never hear another album quite like it and while it's decidedly not for everybody, that's certainly worth three stars. The CD reissue adds the unremarkable but listenable "Choosey Susie" (allegedly the same girl as the Princess), the early prototype "Go Buddy Joe" which leavens the relatively straight rock and roll with a taste of their later style, and the noodly live jam "Peasant in the Big Sh*tty" whose infamously jittery 9/4 time signature is only part of why it makes you queasy to listen to. The first and last were apparently included with initial pressings, and the second backed the "Peaches" single; they're not incompetent, but there's good reason they're not on the main album. (Content: innuendo and adult references, some profanity.)

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Europe, The Final Countdown

No one ever accused hair metal of having artistic pretense, and then there's this. To be sure, no one can hate on the absolutely gonzo synthoid hot mess that is the title track; its place of honour in the glam pantheon was guaranteed from the beginning by Joey Tempest's iconic Roland riff and the insistent guitars as long as you don't listen too closely to the lyrics. But, other than a minor local maximum with the competent ballad "Carrie" which I remember liking on FM back in the day, the rest of the album goes downhill from there. It's not that the tracks are ineptly played or badly produced, it's just that they're bad: they all sound the same, the music doesn't have any hot hooks (maybe the guitar solo in "On The Loose," maybe), the lyrics are moronic and the overall feeling is one of self-cannibalization (e.g., the wan retread of "The Final Countdown" in "Love Chaser," nearly exactly the same song, thus making it the second best track on the album because it's also the last one). The absolute low point is probably "Cherokee," where a bunch of white guys lecture other white guys on cultural genocide. Buy the single of the title track for your next 80's party and save yourself from the rest — it's too late for me, kids. The CD reissue makes it worse with three flat live recordings sounding as if they'd been recorded off the gum on the bottom of the mixing board. (Content: no concerns.)

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