American Slang - The Gaslight Anthem

A band that channel 70s era Bruce Springsteen via modern indie rock - that's the best way I can think of describing them. The result is a collection of soulful rock songs, earnestly sung (but genuinely, not in a histrionic and therefore annoying style) and raucously played. When I listen to it I think of classic Motown numbers, or even Dexys; that earthy blue-collar/working-class sound that cuts right to the bone, singing about love and loss. Great record with a great sound.

American IV: The Man Comes Around

 

The Man Comes Around is possibly the best opening track of any album. Johhny's now raspy voice delivers a chilling verse from the bible and then we're into a richer sounding music than the last album. Rick Rubin surrounds Johnny with perfect accompaniment without losing that close-to-the-mic quality that this incredible series of records has.

I think this album (IV) was made when Johnny was really ill, close to the end with cancer; as such, but I could be projecting here, you can't help but feel there's a desperate desire to record one last set of classics. The feeling turns what could be a mournful set of records into something beautiful while at the same time, and as you'd expect from Johnny, it has an edge. An edge that feels like Johnny is sticking two fingers up to death. Who else could turn a lame middle class self-hating narcissistic pile of tosh like Hurt into a joyous lament?

A perfect record from start to finish.

American III: Solitary Man - Johnny Cash

Cash's series of covers albums gave him a critical rebirth in the 90s and cemented his man-in-black persona. As the subtitle suggests, it's a pretty much stripped down affair of just Johnny, up close to the mic, and his guitar. His cracked leathery voice, like aged bourbon, is perfect for the selection of songs on here. No matter what he is singing it ends up sounding like a Cash record. Even the lumpen One by U2 is transformed. My favourite is I See A Darkness, the Bonnie Prince Billy record that Billy joins in singing, his cracked falsetto the perfect accompaniment to Johnny's end-of-the-earth voice. A warm and deep album to put on and sink into.

American Idiot - Green Day

I just couldn't bring myself to listen to it... not interested in this album at all anymore. Might come back to it later.

Alligator - The National

I think this was one of those records I bought because it had an interesting sounding review in a "best of the year" list in The Word. One of the things I was hoping to achieve with this structured walk through of my collection was to discover some gems I might not have given enough time to in the past and this is certainly one of them. The opening track, Secret Meeting, sets the tone for the album with beautifully layered guitars, deep vocals and the sort of lyrics that draw you in closer so you can try and crack their meaning.

The rest of the album keeps delivering great songs with great lines ("a ballerina on the table cock in hand" is one startling example). The music reminds me of Interpol but without that bands distanced and glassy chill; this album feels like a warm fireside number with a dark edge created by the slightly atonal vocals delivering half heard creepy lines. This gives it depth that rewards repeated listening.

Alien Lanes - Guided By Voices

 

Don't like this song? Never mind, another one will be along in a minute. Although stuffed with 28 tracks this is still a normal length album as the average track length is somewhere underneath 2 minutes. This creates a non-stop lo-fi trip through a massive range of sounds, ideas, styles, noises. Not all of them hit the mark but the overall effect is exciting enough for this to be a decent album to put on and bask in for the first half hour but then the experience can start to wear a bit thin as you start to yearn for some decent tunes. This means that it is not their best effort - some of the ideas sounds like little sketches in search of a decent melody or finish - but it is interesting enough.

Ain't That A Bitch - Johnny "Guitar" Watson

One of my favourite radio shows is the Craig Charles Funk & Soul Show on BBC 6 Music. 2 hours of the best soul music - the sort of stuff that makes you wish you had the knowledge, time and style to be able to track down this stuff in second hand vinyl shops yourself. In an interview a few years ago Craig Charles was asked what record would he save if his house was on fire and he chose this one. I'd never heard of it but I liked the show enough to make sure I got hold of it.

The cover got me straight away - not a cover I was particularly comfortable with lining up in my rack. Unfortunately the cover is a fairly accurate reflection of what is inside - over the top love/sex smooth-soul-jazz-funk (that was deliberate) wandering tunes. Lots of horns, a little bit of evidence of Johnny's previous incarnation as a mean guitar player - he was more Chuck Berry style (I have a best of CD of his from that period and it is much better than this), now he's more George Benson. There is also a lot, I mean a lot, of Johnny either serenading "the laydeez" or telling us how good he is at serenading them.

This is probably the first time I've seriously tried to get through the whole thing ... skippable (and should be deleted) naffness.

Aha Shake Heartbreak - Kings Of Leon

Kings Of Leon were not always a slightly boring stadium filling band - their first album came out at about the same time as The Strokes, resulting in them being packaged (as they were a pretty heavily styled and marketed band, in the same way The Strokes were) as a more homely, good-ol-boy country rockin' example of the skinny-white-guys-with-guitars class. I loved that album, a neat (by that I mean short and tight) collection of great rock 3 minute singles with enough changes to still make it their best record.

This is their second album - an album I didn't get for an age as I felt that as much as I enjoyed their first record it seemed to say all they possibly could with their style of unintelligible vocals and Creedence-vs-Strokes guitars. Massive saturation of the singles quickly changed my mind, or wore me down.

Their more recent stuff is now played so much on all media and has reached such insipid levels of cliche that it's a bit hard to listen to their earlier stuff without thinking of them droning on and on and on about fire and sex (or some other crap). Initially I loved this album, playing it all of the time, then the lack of any real tone or style change throughout the record eventually started wearing. Those little 3 minute hook laden stompers they do still sound great in isolation (Soft is the albums highlight) but a whole abum's worth is a little too linear to suffer repeated listenings.

After The Goldrush - Neil Young

A timeless album, not in the cliched "you must buy this timeless classic" sense, but timeless in that it sounds like it could have been released any time in the last fifty years. This is mostly one of Neil's more acoustic albums from what I think of as his golden period around the time of the 60s moving into the 70s.

Tell Me Why opens with clockwork strumming, gorgeous harmonies that instantly evoke the 70s for me, even if I was a little baby for most of it. After The Gold Rush has Neil's vocals right up front over piano and is a perfect second song. This theme of perfect seguing continues throughout, each song sounds like the perfect next course, right up to the whimsical sounding closer Cripple Creek Ferry.

Southern Man, which stands apart on the album as more of a Crazy Horse style full blown band stomp, was written as a response to the civil rights movement and subsequently taken as a bit of an insult by Lynyrd Skynyrd who replied with Sweet Home Alabama.

I love everything about this album - the sequencing of the songs is perfect, the cover is enigmatic, it sounds like a complete and well crafted whole, everything. It's not as jaw droppingly innovative as his other classics of this period, nor does it have the incredible overwhelming sound, but it is a perfect piece.

Admiral Of The Sea - Nova Mob

An EP from Nova Mob, Grant Hart's post Husker Du band. Two mixes of the title track, which sound pretty identical; The Last Days Of Pompeii, a throwaway instrumental of one of the album tracks and a completely embarrassing live cover of I Just Want To Make Love To You. I like the Nova Mob songs but this EP offers nothing over the Last Days Of Pompeii album.

Addictions Vol. 1 - Robert Palmer

Sigh.... just two songs from this greatest hits collection, Addicted To Love and Sweet Lies. Both of them are lame. Move on.

Across The Great Divide - Music Inspired By The Band - Various Artists

 

A free cover mounted CD from a magazine I long ago threw in the bin, but I vaguely recall this being linked to a retrospective set of pieces on The Band (Bob Dylan's backing band but also artists in their own right).

Who decided this music was inspired by The Band? I have no idea, I suspect the truth is a rather more mundane case of "let's shove some free americana/alt-country on the cover with a big pic of Bob Dylan on it" than a well researched series of records that can trace their creation right back to the artist listening to or channeling The Band. I know that music journalists like to talk about The Band as the creators of some sort of "cosmic american rock" that supposedly combines 60s psychedelia with traditional country but I never understood what that meant. Perhaps because I am coming at it from a few decades later but to me The Band always sounded like pretty great American country rock - nothing groundbreaking but thoroughly enjoyable. So a collection of music "inspired" by them could be massive given the size of that genre.

As with most of these sprawling compilations the music is a pretty mixed bag, not helped by starting off with Drive By Truckers, a band with a lot of critical love who I have completely failed to understand. The highlights are Little Feat and the always brilliant Sufjan Stevens; the utter lowpoint is Old Mule by Ben Weaver which sounds like a parody of a country song, deliberately done for laughs.

I keep this album around for nostalgic reasons (I remember buying music magazines religiously) and simply because it adds a lot of bands to my collection who wouldn't be in it otherwise, giving me the chance to hear something new on shuffle every now and again, but it's not an album I would aim to listen to as a complete collection. If I was more ruthless with my collection I would delete it.