Next up: Zack, Sunday 21st June
Marcel’s notes:
After learning his trade with the Yardbirds and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, LED Zeppelin’s debut album gave Jimmy Page the opportunity to show off his skills. Combine that with arguably the greatest rock vocalist and drummer and the virtuoso that is John Paul Jones, and the result isn’t bad. Pour yourself a stiff drink and turn the volume to 11. It’s Led Zeppelin (remastered) Jan 69
Paul’s notes:
The New York Times wrote, "Stevie identifies himself as a gang and a genius, producing, composing, arranging, singing, and, on several tracks, playing all the accompanying instruments. But Stevie Wonder, you see and want to know more. At the center of his music is the sound of what is real. Vocally, he remains inventive and unafraid, he sings all the things he hears: rock, folk, and all forms of Black music. The sum total of these varying components is an awesome knowledge, consumed and then shared by an artist who is free enough to do both”
Innervisions is widely considered by fans, critics, and colleagues to be one of Wonder's finest works and one of the greatest albums ever made.
The nine tracks of Innervisions encompass a wide range of themes and issues: from drug abuse in "Too High", through inequality and systemic racism in "Living for the City", to love in the ballads "All in Love Is Fair" and "Golden Lady". The album's closer, "He's Misstra Know-It-All", is a scathing attack on then-US President Richard Nixon, similar to Wonder's song a year later, "You Haven't Done Nothin'".[4] "Living for the City" was one of the first soul music songs to deal explicitly with systemic racism and to use everyday sounds of the street like traffic, voices and sirens which were combined with the music recorded in the studio.
What’s more, he plays ALL the instruments on seven of the nine songs.
Paddy’s notes:
Transformer is a great album, one where each song could stand alone. The first time I heard it I wasn't expecting much, having listened to some of the Velvet Underground's self-indulgent drivel, which frankly left me cold. The songs on Transformer are so much more accessible and poppy and catchy; they just bring a smile to my face! Perfect Day is just a beautiful song, I think - very hard to beat for lifting the mood.
Interestingly, Rolling Stone gave it a mixed review, dismissing much of it as artsyfartsy kind of homo stuff…
Andy’s notes:
Rush is a Canadian progressive rock band known for its musicianship and initially a guitar-driven style and synthetic instruments and heavy elements of fantasy (all of the members of the band were nerds). Simply put, Alex Lifeson, Geddy Lee and Neil Peart are all national treasures.
The 80s marked a slight departure from this trademark sound which the band claims was abruptly entirely accidental. Permanent Waves is their 7th studio album which produced some of the band's most well known songs, "Spirit of the Radio" and "Freewill", yet still contains several tracks which are in-line with their progressive rock blueprint.
Joe’s notes
The first time I remember listening to ‘Turn The Page’ I was driving with my mate Andy Hitchman to a house party. I’d not heard anything like it before. Skinner’s style of rap and storytelling was something that resonated with me. As the party progressed Andy and I just kept repeating lines to each other as we drank - ‘stand with me my apprentice cos this goes deep.’
Here is a Guardian article that championed it as one of the albums of the 2000’s.
‘At first hearing, the almost pathological self-effacement of Tim (the mild-mannered bong-builder who goes head to head with lagered-up Terry the law-abider in the Streets' Socratic dialogue The Irony of It All) seems about as far from the defiant self-assertion of the Who's "Hope I die before I get old" as you could possibly get. But for those who would like to remember the Noughties as a period in which British pop actually moved forward at the same time as regressing into The X Factor's primordial ooze, Mike Skinner's generational rallying cry is every bit as potent as Pete Townshend's ever was.
The two most important criteria for any self-respecting album-of-the-decade contender to meet are that it could not conceivably have been made in any other 10-year period, and that it should be impossible to imagine how that decade might have sounded without it. And the Streets' triumphantly down-home 2002 debut, Original Pirate Material, ticks these boxes for the first decade of the 21st century with the same winning flourish as Massive Attack's Blue Lines did for the 1990s.
Whatever bold claims you might make for Derek B or Mr C or even Massive Attack's 3-D, Mike Skinner was the first to prove that a British rapper could speak directly to a nationwide constituency in a voice entirely his own. The raw-boned but finely honed debut of this "45th-generation Roman" established that British hip-hop could be more than just an aspiring frontier outpost of the imperial American homeland. It also turned out to be the missing link between the observational songwriting of the Kinks and the Specials, and the current pop apotheosis of Dizzee Rascal.’
Steve’s notes
While I love everything R.E.M. put out, even the mediocre one, Murmur is their first, released in 1983, and stands out in an era of synth and brash pop. Michael Stipe had long hair when this was released; he hid behind it, lacked confidence in his lyrics and was incredibly shy.
Listen out for how the vocals are at the same indecipherable level in the mix as the instruments (not heard that before), and how the bass pushes the melodies in most songs with jangly The Byrds influenced guitar on top. I’m not used to hearing bass much - try it on headphones.
It was made on a minuscule budget, 1000 copies of the first single were made and yet it won Rolling Stone album of the year from nowhere. They got huge by 1989 when Warner Brothers signed them for the most expensive record contract ever at that point, and they still hadn’t written a major hit single.
Zack's notes:
“EXP” is Hendrix’s white tornado advertisement aperitif (come-on), “my God Martha, it’s a white tornado”: “There ain’t no life nowhere.” The science fiction continues (Mose Allison) in “Up from the Skies,” while “Spanish Castle Magic” transforms the Clovers; in fact, much of Axis demonstrates that Hendrix stands in relation to rhythm and blues of the fifties as the Who stand in relation to mainstream rock of the fifties
Mabs's notes:
"'The Dark Side of the Moon' was an expression of political, philosophical, humanitarian empathy that was desperate to get out," Pink Floyd's Roger Waters states at the start of the "Classic Albums" retrospective dedicated to the record. Revered as one of the greatest rock albums of all time, "Dark Side" -- which tackles weighty themes of greed, conflict, religion, mortality and mental illness -- was first released in the U.S. on March 17, 1973.
Recorded at London's Abbey Road Studios between May 1972 and January 1973, and having been developed and rehearsed during a series of live performances in the months preceding, "The Dark Side of the Moon" is the ultimate expression of Pink Floyd's sonic artistry – an Olympian psychedelic concept album that, despite being very much of its time, still retains the ability the dazzle and astound in the digital age.