The other albums Most people voted for Massive Attack's Mezzanine in the poll. Beforehand I thought it could well be my #1 of 1998 too. When I relistened to it though I was extremely disappointed. Only the first song Angel which sounds like the devastation of a bomb dropped in the dark (see also here) gave me the chills, the rest seemed totally flat and uninspired. I don't think my impression is due to over-exposure. There is something about this album which really puts me off. I feel that the density of the sound and sample layers hides an intrinsic emptiness.

An album which surprised me was Nada Surf's The Proximity Effect. This kind of power-pop still sounds extremely fresh. Lots of great songs (esp. Mother's Day with insightful and honest lyrics on rape to which I hadn't listened to before). Nada Surf are the better Weezer who come from LA as well and made similar tuneful good vibrations rock music. At least on their first release.

Almost a new discovery was the Silver Jews album American Water. D.C. Berman's funny, eloquent, poetic lyrics and his deadpan vocal delivery plus the laidback vibe of his simple but enchanting tunes make the Silver Jews the better Pavement in my book. Though I have to admit that this is the only Silver Jews I know. Steve Malkmus contributions in terms of singing and songwriting give this album more variety and make it even more loveable. My personal number three from 1998.

Next was Mark Hollis self-titled solo release which was #2 (ex aequo) in the poll. I hear the cries of a wounded deer set to a sparse almost classical instrumentation with lots of woodwind. This man knew when to stop making music. Only silence could top the brittle beauty of this great record which uses the human voice as an instrument and uses pauses and silence in an intriguing way to amplify the effect of the music. Only my #2 as I don't have the same personal relation to it as to my 1998 fave.

This album On November, 20th, 1998 there was a concert at the Frankfurt University (KoZ) where I saw Cat Power for the first time. There were three acts that night. It started with Quasi (Sam Coomes on keyboards and Janet Weiss who joined Sleater-Kinney later on drums) who made a lot of noise for a duo. The last performer was Elliott Smith. He seemed lonely and lost. In between there was Chan Marshall and two guys from the Dirty Three. Jim White on drums and Mick Turner on guitar. It was probably the most mesmerizing set I have ever attended. Chan hid behind her long pony and sang like in trance. She wasn't there, she was in her own world but it worked out. Mick Turner provided the connection to mother earth with his slow and thoughtful guitar play. I couldn't avert my eyes from Chan's long, brown hair and I was totally taken by her singing. Immediately after the show I bought their record Moon Pix which they had recorded in Australia earlier that year.

The first song, American Flag is the one I like less on the record. Apparently Jim and Chan had been waiting for Mick in the studio for four hours and had repeated playing that song over and over. I find it a little painful to listen to and it isn't as relaxed as the rest of the album.

With He Turns Down everything changes. The smooth, acoustic guitar and a dreamy flute are the perfect canvas for Chan's wonderful expressive voice. Nick Drake would have loved this.

No Sense is even slower. Chan sings

and despite the seemingly awkward pun it does touch me. This doesn't sound right but the song does, I swear to you.

Say is a little on the dull side. It features some thunder and it is okay in the course of things. Preserving the slack atmosphere.

The guitar on Metal Heart sounds like the morning dew on the rose petal of Chan's voice. Without the kitsch this description might enunciate.

Back of Your Head has a simple, innocent, lullabyish tune and lyrics hinting to an ominous experience Chan Marshall had with the other sex when she was much younger.

Moonshiner is a slomo blues on drinking. Romanticizing booze. I have problems to listen to the lyrics. I hope Chan has them too to sing this song. It's easier to just listen to the tune.

You May Know Him is the most religious of the songs. I see it as an interlude but it could well be more.

The grave piano ballad Colors and the Kids follows next. But it has some life-affirming lyrics

Cross Bones Style is the most hypnotic song. Again it juxtaposes a light, almost bright melody with lyrics alluding to a life-shattering experience.

Peking Saint, a short lo-fi guitar ballad finishes this album off. Not the greatest of all songs but a fitting end for this wonder of intimate, personal songwriting.

Further reading:

• Lyrics
• Guardian article on Meltdown festival by Patti Smith where Chan Marshall will perform Robert Mapplethorpe's The Coral Sea with Kevin Shields on June, 22nd (sold-out, I think)

Here is the overview of the series 40 years, 40 albums of which part XXVIII was this post.

One of the greatest rock albums of all-time. In the States they didn't realise for a long time how amazing this band from Boston was. It was the same with the Wipers almost ten years before. Concerning Giant Sand, Swell or Idaho it is even worse: they never got those. Maybe American ears are not made for ingenious American music. Whatever. Charles Thompson IV aka Black Francis aka Frank Black must have come from a black hole in a galaxy a million light years away. Born in sunny Long Beach in CA in 1965 he formed the Pixies in 1986. Kim Deal who had just started playing the bass answered an ad by Thompson looking for a bassist liking Hüsker Dü and Peter, Paul & Mary. Via the drummer of the Throwing Muses the Pixies got a contract with 4AD. The British label of ethereal otherworldly music. Not exactly how I would call their unpredictable blend of punk, indie rock and surf pop with a penchant for Spanish lyrics.

how could i forget about their brilliant music? the simple infectious magnificent bass lines of kim deal. joey santiago's guitar squalls. black francis voice ranging from falsetto to david thomas scream to lou reed's coolness. they were the roxy music of around 1990. every song had at least three different songs in it. hardly any one was longer than three minutes. they had the gift of melody and punk of the buzzcocks.

debaser opens the surreal circle of noisy pop. when kim deal joins in black francis heavy breathing on tame: je t'aime moi non plus seemed to have been for puffs in comparison to those perfectly synchronous sex sounds. the energy. the intensity. david lovering's drums in the vein of maureen tucker. throwaway but effective. wave of mutilation is more standard anthemic rock music-wise. not everybody drives his car into the ocean and rides away on a wave of mutilation though. i bleed is the first climax. a slow start with the bassline. guitar squeaks come in. restrain. total self-abandonment. here comes your man is the sunny side of life. a gorgeous almost countryish melody. dead does not betray its title. abrasive. more like their first two releases. difficult to love. a cooler song follows. this monkey's gone o heaven. 5-6-7. number mysticism. mr grieves is weird. starts like a kind of reggae but it changes to something else. falling apart and holding together like every good pixies song. the infernality and speed of crackity jones. and on la la la love you lovering sings so much better than ringo starr. what a nice whistling song. number 13 baby (if someone's interested this is the mp3 i would put up) is knocking me out. i am there on the floor, the referree is counting me out and i love it. what a beautiful way to go down. there goes my gun sounds like a song of a drunken sailor. hey is reviving my spirits. the singing on silver sucks but there is kim's slide guitar and joey's guitar fuzz. gouge away mentions marihuana and kim sings "la la la". enough to be utterly classic. altogether the best road and drinking music around. i haven't tried it for sex but it can't be bad in this setting. the better party album would have been mlah though, i guess.

Here is the overview of the series 40 years, 40 albums of which part XXVII was this post.

The self-titled Beatles double album is my favourite release by the fab four. There are at least three main reasons for this choice.

Firstly it is the most varied record they have ever made. 95 minutes full of sparkling ideas going into all kinds of directions. Ranging from surf pop echoes to ska, bluegrass, hard rock, experimental sound collage, film music, folky fingerpicking, several slow ballads, lots of blues and some weird unclassifiable bonusses. The main advantage of this record compared to the others is that it never gets boring, that the succession of songs never ceases to surprise, that there is so much to discover. Behind the versatility of the White Album lies the fact that it is their most collective effort. Calling it The Beatles was rather adequate. Everyone contributes at least one song, even Ringo though Don't Pass Me By is the weakest of them all. Ringo sings on the nicely sugary arranged dreamy lullaby Good Night which closes the album. George Harrison is responsible for four songs of which two are ingenious: While My Guitar Gently Weeps with Eric Clapton playing the phantastic lead guitar and Savoy Truffle which is the most funky (what a great fat saxophone section), psychedelic piece on the album. Paul plays drums on Back in the USSR and Dear Prudence. Here of course the paradoxon that they were a band slowly falling apart comes in. Ringo and Paul had had an argument and Ringo had left the studio for a while.

The second reason I like this double LP best is of a more technical nature. The music still sounds fresh. I hadn't heard most of the 30 songs before I discovered the White Album at the end of the 80's. Only Revolution was a single. And only three other songs (Back in the USSR with the falsetto choir nodding to the Beach Boys, the early ska-ish dance hit Ob-la-di, ob-la-da which I used to hate but like now and While My Guitar Gently Weeps) are on the blue double album comprising the best of their late years. Most Beatles songs may they be as gorgeous as e.g. Strawberry Fields Forever suffer from having been played too many times on the radio. They have become clichés and I can hardly appreciate them anymore.

Finally there is another almost metaphysical cause for my predilection. The Beatles had been in Rishikesh during February/March of 1968, listening to the lectures of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi known for his Transcendental Meditation (TM). There had been frictions in the band and a disappointment of the spiritual trip. First Ringo went back to England, then Paul, finally John and George. But over-all they had calmed down after the LSD-drenched craziness of the Magical Mystery Tour. In Rishikesh they met Donovan who according to legend taught John finger-picking. Of course they couldn't live without making music in India. But they were forced to concentrate on basic, simple music as they had only brought their acoustic instruments. Almost half of the songs on the White Album have either been written in Rishikesh or have been influenced by the meditative atmosphere there. It was as if they had come back to their roots. Before going back into the almost symphonic rock of their last studio record Abbey Road.

Sidenote: Let It Be was a slighter work in between featuring the cosmic(!) Across the Universe as a stand-out. A song written by John under LSD which pointed towards Eastern philosophy.

Two songs on the double album refer to the negative aspects of the Rishikesh experience. Lennon's great, melancholic Sexy Sadie on the extra lessons the guru supposedly gave to the females and the sardonicly titled phantastic rocker Everyone Has Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey which without the monkey part according to Harrison is a quote by the Maharishi.

My absolute favourite on the record is Julia. The most tender and touching love song I know. John is on his own here with his acoustic guitar and he sings about his mother Julia and about Yoko Ono (Yoko = ocean child in Japanese. The seashell eyes are hers.) who had just stepped into his life. John had lived with an aunt and had lost his mother whom he worshipped from the distance when he was 18. Yoko who was seven years older than John was just about to become his ersatz mother and lover at the same time. The way John starts this song whispering

is the most personally direct he has ever been in a Beatles song. For an outsider like me it is like listening to an intimate, private love letter only destined for the beloved. The poetic imagery of this song to which Yoko apparently contributed is breathtakingly beautiful. The tune is soothing and yearning at the same time. Every time it spins on my record player I have to listen to it attentively, I cannot avert my ears from it. It is so intense.

Here is the overview of the series 40 years, 40 albums of which part XXVI was this post.

P.S. The last song, the lullaby Good Night which nobody would have expected after the chaotic sound collage Revolution 9 namedrops (;-) the title of this weblog:

Can anyone contribute to this ILM thread I started today? I just ordered the album so I will hopefully be in the position to say something about it on Monday or Tuesday.

Anyone heard Keith Jarrett's new solo piano album Radiance?

From the Italian Jarrett site:

Blonde on Blonde

Following Highway 61 Revisited from 1965 this was Bob Dylan's second album after he had gone electric. He was 25 years old, exactly the age where men often realise that love and the physical act of love-making do not always have to coincide (speaking of myself). A double album to be precise. 14 songs on women, some blues, some ballads and some tunes. 73 minutes and 18 seconds as my CD player display tells me. Not all of those tracks are gems. There are at least to my ears quite a lot of samey songs which are too long and which lose me. But still this is by far the best release of 1966. The album which has matured best and whose songs didn't become played to death like most songs on Revolver for example. Whose charm escapes me anyways as it heads towards the dire symphonic art rock direction of Sergeant Pepper's and Abbey Road which was then to dominate large parts of the first half of the seventies. Been there, heard that and don't want to listen to it again.

Blonde on Blonde was recorded in Nashville but it hasn't got anything country about it. It starts ironically with a kind of marching band theme called Rainy Day Women #12 & 35. Is rainy day women referring to Mary Jane? This song has always been interpreted as a reference to pot because of the refrain Everybody must get stoned. I can suggest a new take on the lyrics. Basically based on the lines

Dylan was a lot on tour in 1965/66 and he and his band were booed most of the time as Robbie Robertson recalls. It was the first tour where Dylan didn't play his folk songs on acoustic guitar but was accompanied by the electric guitar of Robertson. I think it is obvious what Dylan means when he sings about getting stoned. He is referring to the hostile reaction of the public and not to the effect of a drug. And he sees it in a positive sense. A lukewarm reception would make him feel much more alone than the negative feedback he got. Like Nietzsche said: "What does not kill you makes you stronger".

The next song is an electric Chicago Blues. Pledging My Time. Could have been by Muddy Waters.

Then comes the first of three long ballads on this album. Visions of Johanna. The fave of many Dylan aficionados. About two women. The physically present Louise and the unreachable Johanna. There is another line (on Johanna) reiterating the change of guitar theme:

One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later) is a song which is supposed to be on breaking up with Joan Baez.

nails it as they didn't talk to each other for a long time.

I Want You is the kind of wistful melodic song which breaks my heart. And that mouth harp at the end, it just sums it all up.

Another ballad follows, with the long title Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again. Flowing all right in the course of this album but not really necessary. Too long for my likes but come on it's Bob Dylan and he can get away with this kind of thing.

Leopard-Skin-Pill-Box-Hat refers to some female fashion utensil which was hip at the time. Chicago piano bar blues. A little on the slight side. The comment to the song before applies 100% again.

Fortunately Just Like a Woman is a Dylan original again. Edie Sedgwick anyone? The Andy Warhol Factory girl Lou Reed sang about in Candy Says (New York was a small world in the 60s). Apparently she was very much in love with Bob Dylan. He was in love with her too (but he married Sara). Why else would he have sung

Two lovers are separating in Mostly You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine. It happens every day but not everyone can be so mysteriously frank about it as B.D.:

Temporary Like Achilles. A slow motion blues. Reversing roles in a way:

Absolutely Sweet Marie isn't a musical fave of mine. There are some great allusions to sex though. It starts like this:

(work in progress)

Here is the overview of the series 40 years, 40 albums of which part XXV was this post.

If someone wanted to know what my dearest voice in music was three women would immediately come to mind: Billie Holiday, Joni Mitchell and the singer of the Cowboy Junkies. Margo Timmins would be it, I guess, as Billie Holiday is too far away, too classic somehow and Joni Mitchell has tainted her voice in my mind with all her bloated ego talk. Margo Timmins tender dreamy voice has got this warm embracing quality. If you asked a baby it would choose Margo to sing the lullaby. The softest, smoothest pillow to fall asleep on.

Lay It Down is my favourite Cowboy Junkies album. Margo's voice is on its apex and it is very well mixed into the foreground. All songs on Lay It Down are phantastic. It all flows majestically like a river flowing into a warm ocean. The atmosphere is as laid back as on The Trinity Session which a majority seems to consider their best but which lacks the tunes and the songwriting.

The Cowboy Junkies are a family enterprise from Toronto. Michael on guitar writes the songs, Peter is on drums, only the bass player, Alan Anton is not a member of the family. There is a cohesion in this band which must have to do with the family bounds. Other bands with similar strong ties come to mind. Yo La Tengo and Low, both couples and a bassist. They all make highly original, distinctive, timeless, atmospheric music.

Lay It Down is an album in the same vein as Velvet Underground's third self-titled. It is as spiritual without ever mentioning Jesus. Another record I'd compare this to is Mazzy Star's Tonight That I Might See. There is a psychedelic vibe, though it veers more towards the relaxed effect of dope than the almost aggressive weird colourful properties of LSD. Margo's voice is so much more expressive than the languid, sexy-too-sexy voice of Hope Sandoval.

The songs on Lay It Down are wistful but not depressive. My favourite is probably Speaking Confidentially which kind of interrupts the stream of slow, intense campfire songs for a grooving more lively rendition without being less touching. That string arrangement with the solo violin hitting the sky and the cello right behind is about the most perfect one in pop music this side of the arrangements on the first two Nick Drake records.

Here is the overview of the series 40 years, 40 albums of which part XXIV was this post.

When relistening to Nick Drake's small precious œuvre in the last couple of days I realised I could never ever choose a favourite album by him (though I've done it here before). From the beginning on I have been exposed to the Fruit Tree box which includes all three studio albums plus the four songs recorded in 1974, a couple of months before his death. It has always been of one piece for me without any disposable song. As I let 1970 (Bryter Later) and 1972 (Pink Moon) slip by now I have to select the last remaining Nick Drake album.

Looking at the contenders it was easy to choose. Though there was also Velvet Underground's stunning double album 1969. Live with Lou Reed. One of the best live albums of all-time. Lou is very funny when introducing the songs and the over-all atmosphere is so relaxed. But Nick Drake engraved himself much more in my heart. One explanation was that I discovered him a long time before the Velvets.

That is not the main reason though. Five Leaves Left didn't change my life. It confirmed it. I had been an introspective and almost suicidal teenager already when I heard him for the first time in the winter of 1979/80. Listening to Nick Drake's soft tender voice singing lines like

didn't make things better. But they made them feel better. I had found a brother in soul who appropriately had overdosed in his mid-twenties on anti-depressants. There was an aura around him and additionally I seemed to be one of the few people knowing of his music. Outsiders are attracted by outsiders, that must be a psychological truth.

Five Leaves Left was his first studio album. Smokers of roll-ups will decipher the title easily. It alludes to the message printed on Rizla papers when only five papers are left in the box. A nice reminder to help the smoker not to run out of one of the two necessary parts to roll a cigarette. In retrospect I also read the title as Five Years Left as Nick Drake had only five years to live after the recording of the album. And he probably knew that his life was going to be very short.

There are more foreboding signs on this record. In Fruit Tree Nick Drake anticipates the lack of success he would have during his lifetime and suffer from:

For those who have no idea how this album sounds and who are still with me I can say that FLL is very eclectic and very original at the same time. It is a songwriter album by a guy who was a guitar virtuoso using alternate tunings (like Joni Mitchell and Sonic Youth). I would file FLL under chamber folk jazz. Some arrangements are almost classic with string sections. Danny Thompson's (Pentangle) bass is rather prominent on FLL and provides the jazz vibe. Richard Thompson (Fairport Convention) plays electric guitar on the first song Time Has Told Me and it makes me think of a pedal steel, there definitely is a country tinge to it. There is also congas on two songs (Three Hours and Cello Song) which adds a rhythmic world music ingredient. The most striking components are nevertheless Nick's singing and his perfect fluid play of the acoustic guitar. His voice is innocent and mature at the same time. If it doesn't touch you I can't imagine that you could ever be my friend. On the two subsequent albums he maybe reached higher highs (and lower lows) than here: the iceberg-melting instrumentals on Bryter Later and the heart-breaking personal confessions of someone who was living in his own world on Pink Moon. But on the pastoral FLL everything is there already. The deep, life-inherent melancholy and the ability to put it into song. I think Nick Drake's battery had run out of energy after the three studio albums. He had condensed his life into music, hardly anybody had listened to it and that overdose was a logical consequence. He had completed his life, there was nothing left to say.

Here is Cello Song. It is one of the less emotional and more universal songs on the album. Somewhere in between classical, world and guitar gem.

I like how Gabrielle Drake, Nick's sister, responds to the eternal question if it was suicide or not:

Further reading:

• The Nick Drake files (including discography, lyrics, news etc.)
• Long essay by Ian MacDonald on Nick Drake: Exiled From Heaven

Here is the overview of the series 40 years, 40 albums of which part XXIII was this post.

1981 was the year where

• I started my last class at school.
• A second-rate Hollywood actor became president of the U.S. and heralded the last phase of the cold war.
• Greg Sage and his Wipers released their second album, the 30 minutes mini-LP Youth of America

The Wipers whose founding members had been cleaning floors hail from Portland, Oregon. A place far away from the centres of American punk and post-punk rock. Their mastermind, the guitarist Greg Sage is one of the ingenious outsiders of modern rock. His approach to music is relentlessly non-commercial:

Nevertheless he hoped that his band would get their audience through hear-say which kind of worked. But only in Europe where they reached insider status in France and Germany. In the U.S. they were more or less ignored.

It is quite hard to pin down the influences of the Wipers. Their gloomy hard-rocking post-punk which is dominated by layers of guitar with the occasional controlled feedback outburst sounds more British than American (maybe because of the dull rainy weather on the North-West coast). It evokes the oppressive atmosphere of Joy Division mixed with the noisy Velvet Underground of White Light/White Heat. There is also a psychedelic jam component which goes back to The Doors. In a way their tunefulness and punk speed make me think of the Buzzcocks. But altogether Greg Sage had his own vision of mesmerising fierce music with trance-inducing drones describing the state of the U.S. in the early eighties.

Unfortunately this is not really the music for the season (it is winter night road music). And I prefer to listen to it on my own as it is too dense as background music. But the god of chance decided that 1981 was the year to cover. I knew from the beginning without listening to anything else that this would be my album of 1981.

Somewhen during my student years in Munich in the mid-eighties I taped a track from the radio (Bayern 2 Zündfunk) called When It's Over. It was mainly an instrumental involving guitar, bass and drums building up and up and up until it does not seem to go up anymore. And then reaching a plateau when the piano sets in on low notes and replaces the guitar. The singer utters some words. After that it goes further up. Like a spiral turning towards the sky. The guitar layers are distorted by now. I listened to this song on headphones at night in my small room on repeat. And got totally taken away by the undescribable sadness which permeates this track. Till now this was the closest I have ever come to an enlightenment when listening to music. A transcendental trip into someone else's mind. It was like a maelstroem turned upside down. I felt being pulled towards the sky until my head exploded. I had been looking for the Wipers album containing that song for a long time and had bought all of their 80's releases except one on which I didn't expect it somehow. Youth of America which I finally got in Brussels in 1996. And listened to on my trips back from Bruxelles to Luxemburg on Sunday evenings in the rainy winter of 1996/97.

The song Youth of America (tabs and lyrics) is based on a dream by Greg Sage about the future where

It is an apocalyptic ten minute punk statement with distorted guitars, a rhythm section moving ahead of its time and bellowing vocals on the pity state the U.S. are in. When Sage barks Youth repeatedly it sounds like a reproach and a call for action at the same time. He doesn't care about conventional punk song length and delivers a dense piece of revolutionary music which is even more relevant today than 24 years ago:

By the way both the Melvins and Mission of Burma (last year on tour) covered this song.

The other four songs on the album are excellent as well though they don't reach the heights of the two I tried to describe a little.

When Kurt Cobain asked Greg Sage to open for Nirvana on one of their tours, Sage said no. It has been speculated that this refuse was one of the reasons leading to Cobain's self-destruction. He was a big fan. Probably the most fervent fan of the Wipers in the U.S. together with Dennis Hopper who insisted on including them on the soundtrack of River's Edge.

The band most blatantly influenced by the Wipers are Dinosaur Jr. I cannot imagine Freak Scene's melodic guitar-fuzz bliss without Youth of America. Other bands which probably got some inspirations from Greg Sage: Sonic Youth, Spacemen 3, Jesus & Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, Jesus Lizard, Dandy Warhols, Brian Jonestown Massacre.

My LP features the black and white cover with the photographs of the band members. I don't like the goth cover which was used later. Though the motif, a skull instead of the stars on the mutated stripes of the American flag is rather fitting. The strange original do-it-yourself cover with the degenerated comic stars Batman, Popeye, Mickey Mouse et al. around a map of the U.S. which has not been accepted by their record company has been recycled for the box set (including alternate versions and bonus tracks) with the first three albums. The price used to be the price for one CD (Greg Sage being nice to his fans) but today it seems to be more expensive.

Reviews:

• #1
• #2, AMG
• #3, Rate Your Music

Band:

• Everything2
• AMG
• Trouserpress

Here is the overview of the series 40 years, 40 albums of which part XXII was this post.

Seventeen Seconds.