Rush, Moving Pictures

Quite possibly one of the finest progressive rock albums ever recorded, and certainly the best work by the Toronto trio of their discography. Part of it is the level of restraint: compared to their prior output Neil Peart didn't go too crazy with the lyrics or nuts with the themes, Geddy Lee didn't shriek too loud and Alex Lifeson just kept on doing what he does. But most of it is the level of skill: from the very first note of the dazzling synthesizers on "Tom Sawyer" all the way to the reggae-esque "Vital Signs," the recording is flawless, the music is fascinating and the depth of production is enthralling. I rank "Tom Sawyer" highest because of its unmistakable mix of pounding synth and crashing guitars, and the band thoughtfully picked that highest of high points to lead off with, but "Red Barchetta" positively wraps you up in the lyrics with its breathless storybook denouement, and the amazing long instrumental intro of "The Camera Eye" sets you right in the middle of the thematic action. There are relative low points — "Witch Hunt" gets a little tedious, even if its political overtones are a timeless warning to any generation, and both "Limelight" and "Vital Signs" are technically accomplished but noticeably more ordinary than the rest — but they are indeed just relative and don't really drag the album down any. Combine that with an amazing triple visual pun from the art department and you have something Canada can be rightfully prouder of than Kraft Dinner. And I really like Kraft Dinner. Probably Tom Sawyer would too. (Content: no concerns.)

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Supertramp

Supertramp's artistic peak was incontrovertibly the late 1970s (see Crime of the Century and particularly Breakfast In America). The year of their debut self-titled album was 1970, however, and it wasn't part of it. I picked this up as a special item in Singapore and as a fan of the band I tried very hard to like it, but this aimless album is overwrought hippie drudgery, clearly an obvious overindulgence at the permissive hands of their Dutch sugar daddy. The bookending two-part "Surely" is blunt, honest and forthright despite a poor recording, and the willowy frailty of "Aubade/And I Am Not Like Other Birds of Prey" and "Shadow Song" hinted at what they were actually capable of, but other than flashes of a groove in "Words Unspoken" the rest of the album (especially the amorphous 12-minute "Try Again") is dreary, slow and sometimes even utterly artless. I'm told that for reasons of superstition the band recorded in the studio at unsociable hours; I can well believe it from the quality of the product. It took the failure of this album, the even less accomplished Indelibly Stamped (complete with topless cover) and the departure of their patron to get the band's collective head screwed on straight, but this album does have that same disastrous appeal to fans as road accidents and muggings to rubberneckers, so I guess there's that. (Content: no concerns.)

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Boards of Canada, Music Has The Right To Children

In my United States the National Film Board of Canada was that weird governmental agency that came up with strange yet inspired pieces you saw in animation festivals and avant-garde movie theatres. They'd find someone to come up with anything and everything, and then they'd run with it (see also The Big Snit, The Cat Came Back, etc.). I'm not sure if this Scottish group had the same cultural context but they certainly embraced the same industrious variety with cryptic titles, dreamy, nostalgia-suffused affection ("The Color of the Fire"), aspirational textures ("Open The Light"), gauzy vocalizations ("An Eagle In Your Mind," "Turquoise Hexagon Sun," "One Very Important Thought"), triphop beats ("Telephonic Workshop," "Sixtyten," "Happy Cycling") and even a touch of noodly funk ("Aquarius" -- "yeah, that's right!"). All of these features probably best come together in the strident synthesizer, cheery child vocals and the confident, almost sauntering backbeat of "Roygbiv," but it's painfully short, and one of the many tracks on this album (like the ominous "Smokes Quantity") that leaves you wanting to stay in the moment just a little bit longer. Conversely, there are just as many tracks that, like all ambient music, needs you to imagine more of a "there" there than there is (such as "Rue The Whirl" with its accidentally recorded chirping birds, the reductive minimalism of "Olson" or the scratchy vocal sample and meandering melody of "Pete Standing Alone"). Don't get me wrong: there's nothing intrinsically wrong with this competent album — in fact, much like the Film Board was, it's sometimes absolutely brilliant — but overly studious musical diversity is often indistinguishable from formlessness and so is this. This album's best moments will only reward the devotedly attentive listener, and while I thought it was well worth it, not everyone is going to want to make that investment. (Content: no concerns.)

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Oingo Boingo, Only A Lad

I conned my mother into letting me buy this cassette purely on the basis of the poorly-reproduced halftone Boy Scout on the cover. Fortunate, since she didn't see the lobster claw or actually hear the infamous intro track "Little Girls," a rather arresting satire just this side of jailbait that was banned in Canada. That should be the hint that Boingo was anything other than your typical new wave act; Danny Elfman's intricate musical sensibilities achieved their fullest throating here, rushing madly from dystopian visions ("A Perfect System") to economic critique ("Capitalism") and social anxiety ("On The Outside") with a brass section, quicksand-like shifting time signatures and irrepressible glee. Of particular note is their remarkable cover of the Kinks' "You Really Got Me" which so successfully takes the song almost 180 degrees away from its original roots it might as well be another song entirely. The second half is less accomplished, particularly the tedious "What You See" and "Controller," but then there's that venomously barbed title track of youth gone terribly wrong and my personal favourite "Nasty Habits," their taunting and ponderously inexorable ode to suburban hypocrisy. A fair bit of Boingo's next couple albums was merely trying to equal the punch of this one, and some of the time they didn't, so you're better off with the original. It's tart and twisted and not for every taste, but Mom said it was okay. (Content: adult themes, a couple mild expletives.)

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Phish, Junta

The best summation of Phish's early days is clearly this kinda-sorta-double album, first as a shorter cassette and then as the more common expanded CD issue, largely because it mixes their incredible capacity for artistically complex jams with quality studio production. "Fee," the lead-in track, is kind of a throwaway, but the magic starts in earnest with the stupendously expanded and almost 10 minute instrumental "You Enjoy Myself" with its multipart movements and textured, radiant melodies. In fact, the instrumentals are the dominant feature, at least for the first disc: other than a couple shouted accent lines, the snarky "David Bowie" (UB40) and my favourite "The Divided Sky" make up most of the runtime and well worth it. "Dinner and a Movie" is a fun novelty with its sole repeated line over multiple themes and variations, but of the other vocal tracks (the amusingly nonsensical "Golgi Apparatus" and the uninteresting "Foam") the standout is the surreal and haunting "Esther," a beautifully performed and fully realized story of a girl, a doll and avarice. I wasn't as enamoured of "Fluff's Travels," which comes off as disorganized rather than daring, though its introductory vocal libretto (of sorts) "Fluffhead" is an amusing lead-in; what rescues the second disc is the earworm "Contact" and its whimsical merger of the open road, American car fascination and basic automotive repair. An amazing surfeit of musical plenty, there's pretty much something in this album for every preference, and while it's never afraid to be weird it's never less than good. The CD issue unfortunately adds three live tracks of somewhat questionable quality, including the egregious 25-minute "Union Federal," less a jam session than a root canal, "Sanity," allegedly some sort of Jimmy Buffett pastiche that seemed funnier to the audience than me, and the (at least amusing) shaggy dog nutball closer "Icculus" ("if only our children were old enough to read Icculus"). "Go home," shouts Trey Anastasio(?) at the audience at one point, and that sounds like advice they should have taken. (Content: a single F-bomb in "Icculus.")

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Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band, Trout Mask Replica

I have listened to all 78 minutes and umpteen seconds of this ... this thing. I have done so twice, at the exhortations of friends who claimed it just hadn't sunk in yet; I refused to do so a third time, and threatened them with grievous bodily harm if they made any further insistence. Abstract art at least can be appreciated in the abstract: you can step back from a Jackson Pollock and get some angle or gestalt impression, but while this album may be the musical equivalent of drip painting (at least in the sense of Chinese water torture) there is no way to step back except to hide in another room. I partially blame producer Frank Zappa for not reining him in, especially since some of the barely contained indulgences of Safe As Milk should have tipped him off; at one point I thought my chair needed oil, but it was actually coming from the speakers. Between its childishly intransigent atonality, intentionally unsynchronized vocals and occasionally repulsive production quality, this album's substantial number of fans demonstrates the need for better mental health treatment options in America. For an album that supposedly inspired a generation to follow, in my case it merely inspired nausea. Despite brief tantalizing flashes of clever blues, noteworthy tape effects and intermittently interesting wordplay, exhibiting a nascent collective talent clearly gone to hell, at no point do Van Vliet and his sunken-eyed thralls ever coalesce into a recording that consistently resembles music. (Content: a couple muffled expletives in the interstitials, drug, scatological and sexual references, ????)

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The Best of the Art of Noise

This is a mildly challenging review to write not because of the music but because of the sheer number of editions that exist. In broad strokes, however, you've got a Blue and you've got a Pink (and at least one release has both), and one is clearly better than the other. As with many proto-ambient acts sometimes the quantity is just as important as the quality, and the 12" mixes on Blue — particularly the CD release — frankly deliver. While the lead-in "Opus 4" is a little underdeveloped, the big hits are mostly here, including the classic "Beat Box" (especially glittering on the long-play CD as "Beatbox (Diversion One)"), the slightly ominous "Close (To The Edit)," "Dragnet '88" (I liked it, but the music is clearly better than the movie), and my personal two favourites: the extended Max Headroom feature "Paranoimia," Matt Frewer gabble intact, and the so sumptuous it brought tears to my wife's eyes "Moments in Love," this 7 minute form eclipsed only by the 10 minute ecstasy on the vinyl of Into Battle (which you can find on the CD of Daft). Low points, but only by comparison, are eight minutes of Tom Jones trying to get in your pants ("Kiss," although I appreciate the smarmyness as contrast) and the harsh and lugubrious "Legacy;" this, plus the peculiar omission of "The Army Now" from their first EP, loses that fifth star but is still a must-have for any collector of synthopop. Pink, however, is almost atavistic in its choices, reverting to 7" mixes for virtually all the tracks. There are also some appallingly suspect substitutions, such as the complete absence of "Beat Box" (replaced by "Yebo," its world beat fusion being fun to listen to, but hardly revolutionary) and "Moments" (replaced by "Instruments of Darkness" which is just trite in its message); only the replacement of "Close (To The Edit)" with "Robinson Crusoe" is anything close to an even swap. There is still "Peter Gunn" with the wacky Duane Eddy twang, but less of it, and another version of "Paranoimia" with a slightly different script that Edison Carter fans will want to find. The rest is the same but in abridgment, and abridgment is pretty much the entire theme of Pink: a meagre compilation that only hints at luxury, but enough remains to tempt listeners back to the superior release. Will I still be perfect tomorrow? Perhaps, but only one of these two will be. (Content: Tom Jones' hormones.)

Blue: 🌟🌟🌟🌟
Pink: 🌟🌟🌟

Pink Floyd, Wish You Were Here

The band's famous elegy for Syd Barrett, their then-faltering former bandmate, studded with some of Hipgnosis' best photographic work and a slightly harsher edge. Though it is beloved, it is by no means perfect: the sprawling "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" overflows half of the album and practically smothers it, and its meandering feel is something I used to listen to when I was a moody teenager to make me even moodier. Indeed, one of the few good things about A Collection of Great Dance Songs is that they substantially cut this down and merely in doing so made it better at the same time. On the other hand, the other three songs are excellent: the brooding "Welcome to the Machine," full of ominous, unsettling synthesized effects, and the gentle fan favourite title track with David Gilmour's murmuring guitar and that inspired "car radio" introduction. My personal favourite, however, is the slyly arresting "Have a Cigar," atypically featuring guest vocalist Roy Harper, full of cheeky caustic satire, later to be covered by numerous lesser bands unsuccessfully aspiring to that level of tarty wit. Wish You Were Here's elevated ethereal sensibilities make it really the last Floyd album to maintain the fluid ambience and floating mood of their earlier works which would fade as Roger Waters' influence was exerted more strongly. In that sense, it is an elegy for the band's early days as well, their old space-rock roots now fully shed for the tumultuous years that would follow. The "Experience" deluxe reissue includes the unreleased Household Objects demo "Wine Glasses," interesting historically to the completist, but by its nature even less developed than the "Shine On" suite it inspired. (Content: no concerns.)

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Chromeo, Head Over Heels

The wackiest musical restraining order I think I've ever heard. Nobody calls them concept albums anymore, but that's indeed what Montreal's Levantine funk act hath wrought, a meditation on attraction's incarnations all the way from infatuation to incarceration ("I'm not a creep," insists Dave-1 on the ironically named "One Track Mind"). The grooves are overall pretty sweet, especially the album's gleefully berserk standout single "Bad Decision," played in slut chic fashion joints worldwide just before your girlfriend buys that tube top, and the Gap Band-esque "Count Me Out" with its deep and funky baseline. At times there's even a remarkable amount of self-reflection ("Just Friends," "Slummin' It") but the second half's illustrations of love gone wrong get depressing and the tedious two-part "Bedroom Calling" wears out its welcome before it even begins; fortunately there's a strong finish in the smooth "Room Service," bookending the excellent "Must've Been" that leads off. You can't expect an even effort from an album devoted to relationships anything but, and P-Thugg's legs on the cover really are too distracting with that beard, but while I'm not head over heels for this album I certainly feel I could park outside its house with a pair of binoculars. That's praise, right? (Content: adult themes, a couple S- and F-bombs.)

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Les Rita Mitsouko, Marc & Robert

France's oddest musical duo, and that's saying something, n'est pas, decided they weren't odd enough and had to pair up for a few tracks with America's oddest fake English duo. This may not have been a wise idea; indeed, this album actually was their lowest charting effort in their home country, though that may simply mean French audiences found its Anglophilic tendencies treasonous. As means of adaptation acoustic instruments are credited in the liner notes but sunk in the mix, bringing forth a more synth-heavy style which suited Sparks' contemporary output, and Catherine Ringer's vocal range matches Russ Mael's eerily well. He doesn't sing French so good ("Hip Kit"), but what do you expect from Americans? — rather better is "Singing in the Shower" even though it turns the French half basically into a glorified session band. The non-Sparks tracks are actually the majority, and it is here that Les Rita's usual sprawling madness reasserts itself in things like the shrilly schlocky continental pastiche "Mandolino City," the aspirational "Ailleurs" and the luxurious "Petite Fille Princesse," though there are less inspiring efforts, to be sure: "Le Petit Train"'s attempt to be thought-provoking is undercut by the overpowered dance beat and their independent English language output is just bizarre ("Harpie & Harpo" and "Perfect Eyes" in particular, though the eyebrow-raising "Tongue Dance" at least has a good groove to recommend it). Marc & Robert's incautious mashup of styles and even languages is on balance a little too unbalanced to appeal to the casual listener, but Europop devotees may find it a refreshing change of pace, Sparks fanatics like me will certainly find it interesting and Canadians will at least understand the lyrics. The CD issue adds another Sparks cover of sorts in "Live in Las Vegas," but this Ringer-Mael duet is a rare live performance actually worth listening to even if you're not a Sparks freak. (Content: no obvious issues, though my French est beaucoup rusty.)

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Talking Heads, Fear of Music

If you looked upon its diamond plate steel cover and thought this must be David Byrne's version of Metal Machine Music, you would be dreadfully wrong, for this album is far more coherent and much more developed than that aberrant Lou Reed headscratcher. Admittedly, starting off with the gibberish but funky "I Zimbra" (that's ee zimbra, sports fans) would not be a great way to dispel the comparison, but the laid-back and saucy "Mind" with its simmering changes in metre and keys ("what's the matter with you?" mutters an offhand Byrne between verses), the oblique "Paper" ("see if you can fit it on the paper" might apply to either Rolling Stone or your dog), the throwback "Cities" which could have easily come off one of their prior albums, the cheerfully ominous single "Life During Wartime" and the grim gritty solipsistic musings of "Memories Can't Wait" all make for a strong first side. I wish I could say as much for the second side, however: "Air" has a fun little beat but unless it's an obscured reference to smog I don't get the lyrics, and "Animals" and "Electric Guitar" are both paralysed by perverse rhythms and inscrutable, sometimes inaudible vocals. On the other hand, "Heaven"'s thoughtful depictions really make you ponder the actual mechanics of eternity (the melody doesn't really go anywhere, but that may be a musical commentary in itself), and the exceptional, ethereal production of "Drugs" coupled with its ambient musical backing and Byrne's almost primal shout feels like the most mind-altering musical acid trip you've ever taken. (Um, I'm told.) Virtually every track is listenable at least in some fashion, and while it certainly pushes the stylistic envelope in some places it never yields anything most ears would fear. In that sense the cover of this enjoyably adventurous album is inaccurate for both listener and musician, and that's probably exactly the effect the band intended. The CD reissue adds the previously unreleased "Dancing for Money" with the unintelligible vocals of Byrne in one channel and Brian Eno's on the other, plus alternate versions of "Life During Wartime," "Cities" and "Mind." As is typical for such bonus tracks, there's good reason why they weren't used. (Content: an S-bomb in "Animals.")

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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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