Yello, Stella

Everyone has heard at least one song on this album. In fact, most people have only heard one song on this album, and that's "Oh Yeah," a thematically light but relentlessly earwormy synthogroove nowadays synonymous with gluttonous indulgence (and Ferris Bueller). Indeed, this album was an attempt to get past their sometimes excessively autostimulatory early style (see, particularly, Solid Pleasure), and while for the general listening audience they only hit pay dirt once, there's certainly more here to enjoy than merely that. Yello's trademark affected spoken word musings don't wear well on this album either (especially on "Desert Inn" or "Let Me Cry"), but its strongest tracks lead off with a bang, "Oh Yeah" included but also the noirish tongue-in-cheek "Desire," the infectious "Vicious Games" (sung by Rush Winters, who reappears for the similar but no less worthy "Angel No" at the end) and the absolutely bonkers "Koladi-Ola." The second half is unfortunately less accomplished despite a credible attempt at substance: the deep philosophical thoughts of "Domingo" aren't brought out by the aggressive guitars or the spitfire lyrics, and neither the drearily overwrought "Sometimes (Dr. Hirsch)" nor the grim yet unsympathetic "Let Me Cry" have any real breakthrough moments, though "Angel No" successfully redeems itself with a welcome callback to the first side. A particular oddity of this album — possibly reflecting its original provenance as an opera — are the periodic bloodcurdling screams on many of the tracks (the startlingly complex instrumental "Stalakdrama" in particular) and the overall spare production which both give the listener the impression of being trapped in a europop torture chamber, though I really mean this in the best possible way. There's a lot here to like and a lot here to ignore, but either way you get a lot, and none of it is anything you've ever heard before except for that one song you already have. The 2005 reissue includes "Blue Nabou," the B-side for "Vicious Games" and a decent song of its own, but the other three shoveled-on remixes of "Oh Yeah," "Desire" and even "Vicious Games" itself seem more commercially cynical than musically innovative. At least early mixes have historical interest even if they suck, whereas these wreck the artistic appeal of the originals in a vain attempt to get on DJ setlists. No thanks. (Content: no concerns, though "Stalakdrama" may be a little intense for young ones.)

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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.)

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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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