Jethro Tull, Stand Up

Stand up and pull their finger out is more like it. There are fun moments (the sludgy blues of "A New Day Yesterday," the Bach redo in "Bourrée") and deep moments ("Reasons for Waiting") and at least one heavy rocker ("We Used To Know," chiefly), but the Celtic affectations get old fast; much of the album are songs in perpetual neutral (the chronic rhythmic tease of "Back to the Family" comes to mind) while we wait for them to cut the crap and get to it. Even the snark in "Fat Man" can't save it from the noodles and molasses, and the album's generally tinny mix doesn't help. "It's not easy singing sad songs," warbles Ian Anderson, but he forgets it's not necessarily a good time listening to them either. The 2001 single-disc remaster improves this by including their two 1969 singles, the excellent "Living In The Past" and the superbly menacing "Sweet Dream" on the A-side, and while B-side "Driving Song" is perfunctory the other B-side "17" transcends its flat recording with actual rock and an actual beat. See, they can do it when they want to, so why didn't they on the album? The three-disc 2010 and 2016 releases largely just add extended live sets and are best left to the obsessed. (Content: no concerns.)

🌟🌟

Danny Elfman, So-Lo

Not so much a contractual obligation album as a contractual supplication one after getting dropped by IRS, this Oingo Boingo album in all but name was Elfman's only official solo effort until his quarantine release in 2021. It's still not their best: trapped in their A&M malaise until Dead Man's Party, it was an acknowledged low point for the band (Kerry Hatch and Richard Gibbs departed and only appear on one track, a leftover off Good For Your Soul) and their previous energy and subterfuge just aren't consistently apparent. Still, "Gratitude" in its several incarnations was a credible radio hit (and even made the soundtrack for Beverly Hills Cop), "Cool City" is just seamy enough and "Tough as Nails" and "Everybody Needs" still have their old caustic tang. Other than "Gratitude" none really stands out but at least none really sags. So low, indeed. The various reissues have alternative edits of "Gratitude," not always to the song's benefit. (Content: adult themes.)

🌟🌟🌟

Jimmy Barnes, Soul Deep

In the context of Cold Chisel a solo soul covers album makes some demented sense. Not that Joe Tex lead-in "I Gotcha" has aged particularly well, but it serves Barnes' bad-boy aesthetic, and he's got sufficient range and groan to match the male vocalists he apes ("(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher" and his duet with John Farnham in "When Something Is Wrong with My Baby" in particular). His girl covers are less accomplished: the Supremes retread "Reflections" is a little by-the-numbers and "River Deep Mountain High" is just leaden. Similarly, "Here I Am (Come and Take Me)" doesn't have enough runway to take off. But even if he doesn't really do anything new with these songs, what's here is cromulent and competent, though any added artistic value seems slight. (Content: mild adult themes in "I Gotcha.")

🌟🌟🌟

Deodato 2

Continuing almost straight on from Prelude, Deodato hews again to a careful mix of original works and redos — and, unlike many of his contemporaries, actually succeeds. Though some of the covers let it down, it's not his classical stuff that does: his arrangements of Ravel's "Pavane for a Dead Princess" and Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" are sumptuous, super and right on point (I like Walter Murphy's arrangement of the latter best but this one is still outstanding), and the two original pieces on the LP, "Skyscrapers" and "Super Strut," are entrancing jams with lots of jazz and depth to get lost in. Instead, it's the more modern rearrangements that fall flat; on the original LP cut, this was "Nights in White Satin," which lost its sexiness along with the vocals and runs like emasculated Muzak, and his replay of Steely Dan's "Do It Again" on the CD reissue analogously flails. But the CD reissue also adds two more excellent original tracks ("Latin Flute" and "Venus"), so no matter which one you've got, you're getting a lot of good music. (Content: pure instrumental.)

🌟🌟🌟🌟

Funkadelic, Maggot Brain

For as many choice moments as it offers this album's awfully hard to wrap your head around. Oh, sure, it starts out strong enough with Eddie Hazel's incredible guitar on the title track (notwithstanding George Clinton's grim musings of Mother Earth being pregnant for the third time ... by us), but then left-turns into pleasing but incongruous flower power gospel with "Can You Get To That" and then acid heavy funk in "Hit It And Quit It" (and we know what). Analogously on the flip side, I dig the Jimi vibes of "Super Stoopid" but I can't reconcile it with the dorkily appealing "Back In Our Minds" nor the scatological long-form "Wars Of Armageddon," clearly aspiring to the Beatles' "Revolution No. 9," except bereft of class, quality of production or any sort of internal structure. And then there's the gatefold itself: on the front the Afro-personification of allegedly knocked-up Mother Earth, teeth glistening and bared, either emerging from or sinking into the loamy soil (if the back is any indication, sinking), along with unsettling liner notes from no less than The Process Church of the Final Judgment concluding that "the tide will not ebb until all is destroyed." It's still worth a spin for all that, and the extended solo in "Maggot Brain" is not to be missed, but lurching aimlessly from amiable funk to menacing cacophany one does wonder whom, exactly, Geo. Clinton et amis considered their audience to be. (Content: adult themes and drug references, S-bombs in "Wars of Armageddon" and "Maggot Brain.")

🌟🌟🌟

Roger Waters, Radio KAOS

In his continued multi-album rant against Thatcherism, he decided to transplant the next concept album to Southern California mostly to get some digs in on Reagan. If that were the extent of his efforts, that would have been fine and even expected from the man who rendered us The Final Cut. But his libretti still need work, because why would his chosen vessel for "all those who find themselves at the violent end of monetarism" be a twentysomething disabled Welshman tinkering with cordless phones and speaking like Stephen Hawking on the radio? The music isn't terrible even if the production's a trifle overwrought, "Radio Waves" is a fun little opener which Waters' hoarse vocals kind of make charming, and while "Sunset Strip" is a tad too transparent as an L. A. radio pastiche, for being hip enough to sample-check KMET it's not that far off the mark. Likewise, "The Tide Is Turning" (allegedly demanded by Columbia because "Four Minutes"' nuclear climax was too bleak) has that great combination of maudlin and meaning to be an instant pop anthem. Too bad about the rest of it, then, because the effort demanded from the listener is just too great. How does the everyman identify with a figure like this? You don't understand where he's coming from, why he does what he does and why this means everything's got to change. More critically, the album doesn't just need you to put the story together: you have to actually care about the protagonist too, and really nothing about this record causes me to do that. (Content: no concerns.)

🌟🌟

Green Day, Dookie

You know what you're getting into from the title. The lyrics are sophomoric and none too sophisticated ("Sassafras Roots" was the dimmest bulb) and some of the riffs ring samey, but it starts hard ("Burnout"), goes fast and doesn't really stop. Plus, for as simplistic as the themes are, their tongue's in their collective cheeks enough that the joke might be on me ("When I Come Around" and "Longview"). This brand of punk has a little too much bubblegum for the hardestcore ("Pulling Teeth," "She") and their intermittent slower moments don't quite connect (especially "F.O.D.", though I salute the venom), but those are brief and a matter of degree. It's iconoclastic, ebullient and irreverent, the kind of album that really sticks to the wall. (Content: S- and F-bombs, adult themes.)

🌟🌟🌟🌟

The Jam, Snap!

What made The Jam really stand out was, for all the neo-Mod trappings and punk class consciousness, its fundamentally optimistic blue-eyed soul basis throughout. Paul Weller may have been a jaded observer of humanity in the form of all the best punk bands, and sometimes the style leaks through, but don't confuse that sort of societal mirror with nihilism (cf. Sex Pistols, etc.): if society could be shown its wrongs, it could change them. That means the thuggery in "Down in the Tube Station at Midnight" or the bitter ennui in "Smithers-Jones" or even the hoarse defiance of "Going Underground" are rooted in a very different outlook that this collection shows truly evolving, peaking in piercing social studies like "Town Called Malice" punctuated by pop-friendly cuts like the evergreen "Start!" or the resigned acidity of "The Bitterest Pill (I Ever Had To Swallow)." Indeed, it's their earlier, more proto-punk efforts that are the weaker tracks on this exquisite compilation, though only by degree. Originally a double LP with a special 4-track live EP in the earliest pressings, for years fans contended with Compact Snap!, a 60-minute bowdlerization which eliminated eight tracks and all of the EP to boil down to a nearly complete singles pack. Universal corrected this indignity in the 2009 rerelease, even throwing in the EP, but I'll say for my money that the twelve missing tracks were good but hardly essential. There's something to be said for getting straight to the point. (Content: mild expletives.)

🌟🌟🌟🌟

Mark Ronson, Uptown Special

Get your friends together and groove because it's a funk party throwback album in 20-freaking-15, and all Ronson's buddies are coming here to jam. Sure, you have Bruno Mars and the chart topper "Uptown Funk," and it's so fun and fresh you can almost forgive the heavy rotation it gets. And yes, two Stevie Wonder artsy-fartsy bookend collabs smacks of stunt casting, and the callback in "Crack in the Pearl" was unnecessary. (Plus: Mystikal on "Feel Right" needs to chill the heck out.) But for as plastic and commercial as the production comes off, the Kevin Parker tracks ("Summer Breaking," the unironic use of the word isosceles in "Daffodils," and especially the gauzy, glittery edges of "Leaving Los Feliz") have real emotional heft to them, and "In Case of Fire" and "Heavy and Rolling" run silly, smooth and sparkly in suitable measure. Not consistent enough ("I Can't Lose" - oh really?) nor long enough to win that fifth star, but he certainly didn't send his guest performers home in the morning with nothing to show for it. (Content: F- and N-bombs on "Feel Right," mild expletives on "Uptown Funk," drug references in "Leaving Los Feliz.")

🌟🌟🌟🌟

David Bowie, (The Rise and Fall of) Ziggy Stardust (and the Spiders from Mars)

Compare with Lou Reed around this time: Bowie had some of the same challenging subject matter, definitely a similar milieu, clearly cross-pollinated styles, and yet delivered a cleaner, clearer product with actual performance value. (Thought question: whose fault was Transformer, performer Reed or co-producer Bowie?) The turbulent early 1970s still ring true in "Five Years," but the net effect is more carefully constructed, and even prattly nonsense like "Soul Love" and throwaway tracks like "It Ain't Easy" or "Suffragette City" (a good glam bopper, at any rate) rub shoulders with richer productions in "Moonage Daydream," sharp character studies in "Lady Stardust" and of course gorgeous crown jewels like "Starman" and the title track. Even though his lyrics (and for that matter the bare wisp of a concept) aren't always on point, when they are they cut deep, even literally in closer "Rock'N'Roll Suicide" which manages to be sensitive without being (too) maudlin. Not all Bowie's contemporaries learned the artistic lesson this album teaches — maybe Ian Hunter, but probably one of the few — and definitely to their detriment. (Content: adult references and mild language.)

🌟🌟🌟🌟

The O'Jays, Back Stabbers

A provocative landmark of soul from title to tracks. Yes, you have the hit singles like "Back Stabbers" and the instant hook of "Love Train," but the album cuts and B-sides are almost just as solid, particularly the feel-good grooves like lead-off "When The World's At Peace" and the effervescent "(They Call Me) Mr. Lucky." Some clever lyrics are on offer here too, my favourite being the thoughtful infidelities of "Listen To The Clock On The Wall" as an interesting emotional foil to the album's more acerbic offerings (the title track for sure but also "Shiftless, Shady, Jealous Kind of People," which doesn't mince any words with its opinions). The fifth star falls off partially for "Back Stabbers"' core riff turning up too many places but largely for its carefully considerated sedateness; while this is also its strength, it also means some otherwise better cuts take longer to get cooking than they ought to ("992 Arguments" and ironically "Time To Get Down" in particular). But other than that the rest is sublime, and I've got no qualms saying so right to their faces. The 2011 remaster adds the abridged single of "Back Stabbers," and as such is largely pointless by definition, but the six-minute remix of "Love Train" is as close to a 12-inch as you'll get of a song that really deserves one. (Content: adult themes on "Listen To The Clock On The Wall.")

🌟🌟🌟🌟

Joe Satriani, Surfing With The Alien

Some of Satriani's finest technical work surfaces here but unfortunately the real problem with this arresting red beauty is compositional. Besides its questionably short length most of the tracks on the second side don't exactly know where they're supposed to be going ("Hill of the Skull," "Circles") or only noodle their way there with difficulty ("Lords of Karma," "Echo"), and the obvious splattered-on drum machine riffs don't help. But when he's on, he's on: not just the scintillating title track or the deft "Ice Nine," or the fresh and crispy "Satch Boogie," but most of all the practically poetic "Always With Me, Always With You" with its central solo waxed so heartfelt his amplifier fairly sings. Just stop listening around the halfway point unless you're bored and you'll still get your money's worth. Current reissues omit the iridescent John Byrne Silver Surfer art due to a licensing dispute with Marvel; find any of the earlier pressings if you can for the full experience. (Content: pure instrumental.)

🌟🌟🌟