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.

Aces and Diamonds - Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash

A bootleg recording of Bob joining Johnny for an episode of the latter's TV series. I'm not familiar with (or that interested in) the full details of where each recording comes from; some of it sounds like the stuff recorded for the show, some sounds like soundcheck material or even just playing with each other behind the scenes.

This album possibly sounds more exciting as a concept than it is to listen to - the album features little of either mans great musical personalities (though in little asides you do get a feeling of what they were like as people and how they got on) and, being a bootleg, there has been no editing of the concept. Instead it is an overlong collection of some fairly humdrum country standards that only really gets going with some of Johnny's more rockabilly classics. Bob sounds amazingly nasal on this recording with little of the classic proto-punk vocal rasp that I love from his electric period.

It's an interesting historical document but as an album it's too sprawling to be a great listen from start to end.

Accumulation: None - Smog

Bill Callahan's early pseudonym Smog. My first Smog album was the untouchable Knock Knock, which will come much later. Once I had bought most of his contemporary records I started reaching into his back catalogue and picked up this collection of B-Sides, singles, etc.

It starts off with a pretty challenging listen in Astronaut - seemingly the sound of a man banging a door while screaming amidst a pour of white noise. The lo-fi production continues with the ironically titled Hit (great "it's not going to be a hit so why bother?" lyrics) - lots of saturated guitars, saturated vocals, flirting dangerously with sounding a little too much like geeky whining but just avoiding it through the strength of the performance. The album flits about between these earlier noises and his much better alt-country period (though that's just a handy label for lazy people like me who like using categories as shorthand; he always makes music in his own distinct style). There are enough hooks, tunes and decent ideas peppered throughout to make it interesting but I don't think it will make it to heavy rotation as it seems more like the sketches that lead to the full blown masterpieces that come later; while listening to it I find myself tempted to skip off to Knock Knock or Dongs Of Sevotion.

Absolute Greatest - Queen

Blame (or thank) Wii Lego Rock Band for this limited set of two songs from this greatest hits album - We Will Rock You and We Are The Champions. My son loved playing those two songs and their common use in sport has also made him fond of them.

I think every young lad loves Queen. The rock solos, the operatic sing-along choruses that, to young ears, avoid any chance of sounding like anything other than proper rock. When we were later old enough to understand about Freddie that didn't matter, if anything it made it seem a little more exotic.

I listened to Queen so much as a kid, gorged on them really, that I can't listen to them seriously now. When the odd song comes on the radio I find myself excited enough to check out their albums on iTunes but quickly lose interest in the idea of listening to a whole Queen record from start to finish. They don't seem to offer enough depth, enough interest anymore to sustain repeated listening. However, as a couple of tracks to pop up on shuffle every now and again they do the business.

Abbey Road - The Beatles

The first proper album in the sequence and it's such a famous album I can't imagine anything I could say about it that hasn't already been written.

Abbey Road was one of the few vinyl albums I remember my Dad owning. That iconic cover photograph looked so cool and inviting to a young lad, even before I had a clue who The Beatles were. I think it also had a gatefold sleeve with a large pic of all The Beatles faces inside, or am I imagining that?

I didn't own it myself until a few years ago - I think most blokes reach an age where they realise they don't own any Beatles albums and think they really should go out and get at least a few.

Since buying it I've listened to it a lot - the 2nd side (I still think of it in those vinyl terms) run of songs without breaks is still one of the most exhilarating and exciting musical experiences, especially on headphones or up really loud. Side 1 is more of a mixed bag and to be honest making my way through "Something", "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" and "Octopus's Garden" feels like a bit of a chore, the journey that has to be completed before arriving at the party.

I do love the little hidden track at the end about the Queen. Paul was always my favourite Beatle - I found Lennon too pompous, too caught up in this persona of himself as some sort of revolutionary. He was also responsible for the worst post-Beatle solo records (and yes, I include the Frog Chorus in that comparison).

It seems I did imagine the gatefold sleeve, the back cover does stick in my mind though. Apparently it is full of "Paul Is Dead" type hidden messages ... if you're the sort of paranoiac who can find them.