490: Gang of Four- Entertainment (1979)

http://open.spotify.com/album/4lktnCTpQK5vV1im9Z3htY

Ah, once again we enter the ctitical minefield of the 'hugely influential'- abandon all hope all ye who dare attempt an objective opinion. By all estimates 'Entertainment' sold around 46 copies when it was first released, and even then mostly to the band's immediate family, but it's influence on pretty much all incidents of politically charged post-punk and rock that have occured over the past quarter decade has vastly outweighed its meagre sales. Indeed, there was an 18 month period around 6 years ago, mainly the fault of Franz Ferdinand releasing their debut album, where ebery single new British indie band just seemed to be subtly re-working 'At Home He's a Tourist', the only real noticable difference being that the lead singer might perhaps wear slightly different shoes. They are possibly the first band to have their music described as 'angular. I want to enjoy this, I truly do...

00:30 Mmmmmmmmmm, angular...

02:52 There's a fantastic affect that happens just at the start of the chorus in 'Ether', where the guitar jumps out of tune for a few miliseconds and makes the record sound like it's skipping in time to the song. Well I liked it. The first song is brilliantly raw and unsettling, which is a brilliant relief after sitting through Mott the Hoople

06:37 'Natural's Not In It' is pleasantly abbrasive enough, but there's really good tune hiding within its jangled walls, and you can't help but feel they've undersold it somewhat

08:40 At it's best 'Not Great Men' sounds like a blueprint for much of the Talking Heads, there are moments, however, when you hear the clipped vocals and bass guitar and can't seem the shake the horrific image of Sting and the Police out of your mind (shudder...)

13:48 'Your kiss so sweet/ Your sweat so sour/ Sometimes I'm thinking that I love you/ But then I know it's only lust'. Gang of Four's take on sex is hardly Barry White. Great as some of the lyrics are, you can't help but picture the band as possibly the last people you would ever invite to Wetherspoons to make the most of their 'Pound a Cider' night.

15:16 I have a real problem with songs where the singer just sings along to the guitar line, and I can't explain why. Answers on a postcard...

16:30 'Return the Gift' is the first song that really feels a bit flat, especially that wierd spoken word bit at the end done in a comedy Mexican accent. Oh, hang on, that's an advert for Nandos.

17:06 People do realise that Nandos is just chicken don't they?

17:36 I mean, that's it. Chicken. Nothing else.

19:29 I'm gonna try and sound all clever now by pointing out that 'Guns Before Butter' is probably a rteference to a famous Herman Goerring quote. The song itself doesn't quite sound fully formed- not nearly angry enough to be tuneless.

19:46 'Angry enough to be tuneless' would be a great T-shirt quote

22:20 After losing its way for a couple of tracks, 'I Find That Essence Rare' is a classic example of spiky post-punk, and is good enough to stop me sneaking off to the toilet, which when you think about it is all music really aspires to.

24:35 Considering that this album is thirty years old, it's a little bit disheartening to note how little the great majority of this genre of music has evolved.

27:24 Track nine now, and it's all beginning to get a bit relentlessly po-faced. I would suggest a cover of 'Atmosphere' by Russ Abbott around track seven to leaven the mood slightly.

28:32 Russ Abbott's version of 'Atmosphere' is almost unrecognisable from the Joy Division original.

31:42 Twang, scratch, schwang, eeeeeeeeeeek, thwudunk...

32:00 'At Home He's A Tourist' must be one of the strangest 'hit' singles of all time, barely a tune to speak of underneath all the guitar crunches and spat lyrics, but it's strangely affecting all the same.

35:32 'Watch new blood on an 18" screen/ The corpse is a new personality'

40:17 'Love Like Anthrax' (those old charmers) is a brilliantly odd end to the album, squeals of feedback and spoken word threaten to make the whole thing an unlistenable mess, but the sense of rythm and raw funk of the bassline serve not only to make it very listenable, but almost danceable. It's a lesson in how to make something extremely challenging without it turning into an unlistenable turgid mess (cough, coughPearlJamcough, cough). It ends the album on a high note.

The album's influence is as clear as a bell to anyone without frog-spawn in their ears (yes, I'm talking to you, you know who you are, take that out at once, you're forty six now for God's sake, if only your mother were alive to see you now, I dread to think what she'd make of you), and it's easy to consider just how much of a shock to the system this album would have been 30 years ago. However, it's power has unarguably waned over the years, and while a good half of the tracks are pretty great, and the none of the others could be classed as stinkers, the unrelenting seriousness of it all, the creeping suspicion that the band only really have one trick which they continue to flog admittadly well, and the simple paucity of enough truly killer tunes all combine to make this an album which is around ten times easier to admire than it is to truly love

C+

491: Mott the Hoople- All the Young Dudes (1972)

http://open.spotify.com/album/2aOWMZo9zarFg3wIPLdTA7

Ah, Mott the Hoople, what can you say about Mott the Hoople that hasn't already been said? Come to think of it, what can you say about them at all? I know one thing about Mott the Hoople, the title track off this album was written by David Bowie, and I'm sure that neither I nor anyone else would want to know anything else. Even looking at that album cover fills me with a painful indifference, I have no interest in listening to this album at all, I pretty much know what kind of music lies therein and I know that it's not for me, I know the music is going to wriggle in one orifice and politely shuffle out the other without ever even making eye-contact with my conscious. A large part of me just wants to skip this album altogether and save myself 40 minutes. My life, my day even will not change one iota by listening to this album. No-one's life has ever been truly affected by this record. It's not even going to be rubbish enough to slag off. Sigh...

So as I say I'm approaching this from a purely objective standpoint...

00:31 Starts off with a Lou Reed song (this band were certainly well-connected), the singers delivery is a further reminder that absolutely everyone has a better voice than Lou Reed

04:10 One of those sepia-tinged-guitarist-playing-with-a-cheeky-smile-on-his-lips-all-boys-in-it-together mid-tempo FM rock songs that were all the rage in the 70s. The 80s were much better musically than the seventies- discuss...

7:34 There's an obvious laid-back approach to the songs here that I can kind of understand people warming to, but to me it just suggests that they've probably worked very hard for a sound that makes out like they've put in no effort at all, which to me just makes it sound disconnected from the listener

12:17 All the Young Dudes' is a great little pop song and stands out a mile when placed next to the first two half-arsed tracks. The singer seems to really connect with the words for the first time (ironically, seeing as they didn't write it) and in doing so delivers his first performance where he actually sounds like he gives a shit

14:37 United are playing Liverpool tomorrow, it'd be fantastic to get a result and really hammer a nail in their coffin, but I've got a horrible feeling the Liverpool players are going to play like they've got something to prove and sneak a result, especially if Fergie packs the midfield as a cautionery measure

20:45 This band owe David Bowie a massive drink- every other song has been so tediously mediocre that it's actually making me want to weep

21:56 Any band that has a song called 'One of the Boys' really isn't worth 40 minutes of anyone's time

25:18 It's a damning indictment of the music that,when I try and picture the lead singer, I can only think of Robin Askwith.

27:50 That song did seem to come alive at the end, for a moment there the album actually had a pulse.

30:14 The album's trying to mount an unlikely comeback now- 'Soft Ground' is a great hammond organ-led number, shot-through with a sense of malevolent charisma that finally suggest the band may have a personality to speak of. I think you can actually here Deep Purple making notes if you listen hard enough

33:37 'Ready for Love/After Lights' single-handedly invents the Glam-rock-ballad, and while it's hardly going to be playing at my funeral, it exudes some slight variety and invention which is a Godsend after the sludge-rock of the album's first half.

37:45 Are Mott the Hoople the best band to have ever come out of Herefordshire? Are they the only band to have come out of Herefordshire? I mean, there's Fred West, but he was less a band and more of a freaky-haired serial killer.

39:52 And Lady Godiva of course, she was pretty rock and roll

40:44 Oh, it's finished.

There's an issue raised here that's going to crop up dozens of times throughout this list. I can accept that this was a very influential record, and in listening to it I can hear its impact on glam-rock and a lot of the heavy rock of the 70s, I'll even accept that it's an important album (though in terms of importance and influential it's severl furlongs behind 'It Takes a Nation of Millions...'), but that doesn't mean that it still stands up as a great album more than 30 years later. The fact is that this kind of music has been done so many times and often so much better that this album just sounds simple, undemanding and ultimately almost naively primitive. It's cruel, but thems the breaks- one piece of work doesn't dserve to be ahead of another merely because it did it first. Of course, there are plenty of albums that could be described as both the first and best example of their field, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

The album itself sounds so pedestrian and workmanlike in places that it's almost depressing, if the fantastic 'All the Young Dudes' didn't make like a sore thumb on the record's first half then I honestly believe cement would've started pouring out of the speakers. Luckily the last three tracks belatadly injects the album with a modicum of life, which is just as well as the first few tracks had merged into one tuneless aural dirge in my head to the extent that I resembled Jack Nicholson at the end of 'One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest', or Keanu Reeves in... well... anything really.

While it's patently not as bad as the borderline offensive Kiss record, it's unrelenting mediocrity actually made it a lot harder to listen to. Kiss had the decency to be spectacularly bad, there was absolutely nothing spectacular about this record

D-

492: Pearl Jam- Vitalogy (1994)

http://open.spotify.com/album/3ZJplfadDFMU8oV5IpvGtI

History hasn't really been kind to Pearl Jam, the increasing beatification of Kurt Cobain in the 15 (sweet Jesus I'm old) years since his death has led to the band being seen as a commefical cash-in on Nirvana's fame, the Monkees to Cobain's Beatles. Cobain himself called them coperate cock-guzzling sell-outs (or words to that effect, I'll be damned if I'm trawling through Wikiquotes at this time in the morning) years ago and the accusation has stuck to them.

Completely unfairly really, as out of the two bands it was Eddie Vedder's cash-cow that really shunned fame and fortune at the height of their success- following their mega-huge debut Ten by releasing second album Vs with next to no publicity and refusing to release any singles or videos while Nirava seemed happy to follow their breakthrough with even more expensively constructed promotion and promos, and allowing the word 'rape' to be removed form the sleeve of In Utero in an effort to please Walmart- and have continued to attempt to marry the punk spirit to their enormodome success ever since, assidously attaching themselves to worthy causes and endlessly fighting in order to stop bigger business simply ripping off their fan-base. Most impressively, they have always seemed to achieve all this without fucking going on about it all the time.

Musically however, if Nirvana were The Beatles, Pearl Jam are actually somewhere closer to Hermann's Hermits. Their chugging, work-ethic rock, which seems to honour good solid workmanship over anything else, is often cited as the biggest influence on contemporary American rock, for which they all should be extremely ashamed. Their po-facedness and ability to take themselves astonishingly seriously positions them as kind of an American U2, but at least the Iriash band has festonned us with some rare moments of inspiration over the course of their career, all Pearl Jam have left us with is the strong feeling Eddie Vedder needs more fibre in his diet.

This, their third LP, may prove my previous points. Apparantly it's an admirable attempt to make a more complex and experimental album, a step away from their fame. I'll also bet it's as dull as dog's cock

00:12 Great, a 'jazz-influenced' intro...

02:20 If I wanted to be a bit mischievous I'd say that 'Last Exit' sounds like it was a big influence on Foo Fighters. Dave Grohl knows where his sympathies lie

04:15 'Spin the Black Circle', as you may well guess, is very metal. A pretty decent little rock song though, I think every major rock band should try at least one mid-career album where they employ such a stripped-down production, as the re-energising affect it can have on the music can occasionally be awesome. I'm looking at you Oasis...

08:15 Brendan Rodger's production sounds absolutely fantastic on 'Not for You' (and all three songs so far actually), the sound's so crisp it's all I can do to stop myself peeling it off the speakers. Vedder's voice on this track though is particularly grating

10:05 They seem to have stolen the font for this album from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Possibly in respect to Gene Wilder's definitive version of 'Evenflow'

11:44 Chugchugchugchugchugchugchug...

14:56'Tremor Christ' is a laugh-a-minute riot, as you'd imagine. There's actually nothing wrong with being so unrelentingly serious, but you do have to make sure the music itself exhibits a modicum of vitality (excuse the pun)

20:07 'Nothingman' is a seriosuly lumpen rock-ballad that was only momentarily exciting when I initially thought it was called 'Nottingham'. This is the kind of lighters-aloft-can-I-play-the-coffeeshop-in-the-OC-please-Mummy-barely-a-fucking-song rubbish that's about a dime a thousand amongst mainstream American rock nowadays. If Pearl Jam are even partly to blame for that they should hang their heads to the sodding ground like Ostriches.

22:12 Vitalogy was actually the second fastest selling album ever in America at the time. Any guesses as to what the first was?

26:33 'Cordurouy' is a pretty standard rock song, but it has a definite 'zip' to it that's missing from many of the other tracks. Hey, I'm tapping my foot ever so slightly, and sometimes that's enough for me, Ok?

30:18 'Bugs' is actually a lovely little surprise, an accordian-led little ditty that's the first time on the album that the band sound like they're ambling ever so slightly outside their comfort zone

34:16 Times up, any ideas what the fasting selling album ever was? Astonishingly, it was the band's previous album Vs:They were huge!

38:10 For 'Better Man' see 20:07

44:57 For 'Immortality see 20:07

53:54 'Hey Foxymophandlemama, that's Me' sounds almost like a compromise to the idea of experimentation, a seven minute plus noise collage that merely sounds like it was tacked on to the end of the record to give the impression of radicalism. It's completely unnessecary and pretty much unlistenable, and being the kind of noise anyone with with a half-decent mixing desk and twenty minutes free could make it proves absolutely nothing about the band's ability to make truly challenging music.

55:02 Twenty seconds of silence, presumably to take stock of the magnitude of what you have just heard, and that's yer lot...

Most critical receptions to this album freely use adjectives like 'challenging', 'experimental' or 'uncompromising', and yet what you really have is 90% a solid if unspectacular rock album (albeit with fantastic production and a handful of really decent tracks) and a few insignificant (apart from the pretty great 'Bugs') tracks where the band experiment with different sounds to varying degrees, yet these tracks seem so removed form the general fabric of the album (and 'Pry To' and 'aye Davanita' are little more than instrumental fillers) that they contribute nothing to its sound other than being barely diverting asides. While the album obviously sees a pretty succesful attempt to strip down their sound (which again jars with the more elaboratly produced 'experimental' cuts) there's really little evidence here of the band really moving their music forward.

C+