Welcome back to another installment of the 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die! It’s been a busy week: I’ve also had a review of Indietracks festival published here, as well as signing up to a couple of gigs with my own band. Still listened to seven albums as ever, though, with this week’s selection picked out of the many albums I was looking forward to hearing.
As always, feel free to start the discussion in the comments or on the social media platform of yr choice.
Jeff Beck, ‘Truth’
One of the best things about ‘Roger the Engineer‘ was Jeff Beck’s unpredictable soloing, and his solo album goes into further unusual directions, featuring blues, proto-metal, folk rock, weird riffing, psychedelic noise, bagpipes, and a version of ‘Greensleeves’, because why not eh? There’s a Who’s Who of 60s rock royalty accompanying Beck (some of which are actually The Who, but I’ll refrain from doing the Abbot & Costello bit): Keith Moon, Ronnie Wood, Rod Stewart, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones all show up. It’s mostly pretty interesting, although the final two songs let the side down a bit, being unremarkable blues songs with a combined running time of 12 minutes.
Kate Bush, ‘The Dreaming’
Recorded with no apparent thoughts about commercial potential or live performance, ‘The Dreaming’ features two singles optimistically extracted by Bush’s label, who gave up releasing further singles after neither of those two went anywhere. No wonder: this might be the weirdest album I’ve listened to on the list. A patchwork quilt of fragments, oddly-processed vocals, samples, didgeridoo and choirboys, with some Art of Noise style collaging and some Cardiacs-style quirk-pop, this album is freakishly unusual in a way that Emilie Autumn wishes she could achieve. All the hits are on ‘Hounds of Love‘, but this peculiar work is well worth a listen.
Killing Joke, ‘Killing Joke’ (1980)
There are two eponymous Killing Joke albums, but the one on the list is their debut from 1980. KJ’s interests on this album are all groove and riff, rather than necessarily adhering to a verse/chorus format: it’s mostly flange-y guitars, tribal drumming and singer Jaz yelling (although in a less hoarse, aggressive way than on, say, ‘Pandemonium’), with some similarities to contemporaries like Siouxsie and the Banshees and Public Image Ltd. An interesting debut, with tracks like ‘Requiem’ giving hints towards heavier, more violent albums in their future.
Todd Rundgren, ‘Something/Anything?’
Rundgren’s brain-nuking acid trip ‘A Wizard, A True Star‘ is one of the stand-out discoveries from this project, but before he got there, he sprawled his experimentation over a double album, with a different vibe on each side of vinyl. The first side is essentially poppy soft rock, the second a ‘cerebral’ set of weirdness, the third a patchy collection of heavy rocker and the fourth a loose, ramshackle collection of semi-improvised jams with a under-rehearsed squad of hacks. There’s too much of it, and listening to all 90 minutes is probably for diehards only. Still, it’s full of offbeat personality, and juidicious skipping means there’s some fun here (‘I Saw The Light’, ‘Breathless’, ‘Couldn’t I Just Tell You’, ‘Hello It’s Me’, ‘Slut’).
Steely Dan, ‘Pretzel Logic’
The band’s last album while they were still both a touring and recording proposition (they moved exclusively into the studio after this), ‘Pretzel Logic’ retains the two guitarists from previous albums, but is mostly Becker and Fagen working with a bunch of session musicians to create the polished sound they were after. Poor Jim Hodder, the band’s drummer, doesn’t play drums on the album at all! Unsurprisingly it’s highly competent and musically cohesive, with horns taking a more central role than on the other album I’ve heard (‘Can’t Buy A Thrill‘), but perhaps without the quirkly intrigue of that album. Still, unusually for a 70s rock album, it’s unshowy: a mere 34 minutes with no instrumental jams, virtuoso guitar trickery or vocal flashiness.
Suede, ‘Suede’
By the time I got into music, Suede had already had a line-up shuffle and the hype around them from the music press had long since faded, even if ‘Coming Up’ was a commercial and critical success. In 1993, though, the NME were so high on Suede that there was a lot of expectation riding on their debut album, expectation which they mostly lived up to. Starting with ‘So Young’ and ‘Animal Nitrate’, ‘Suede’ shows a band who’ve done their homework: there’s something of Echo’s swoon, Smiths croon, the Spiders from Mars’s sass, that Husker Du-ish processed fuzz tone on the guitar, and a kind of “smart guys lost on the London bedsit scene” vibe that they share with the Pet Shop Boys. Yeah, this is a good album. ‘Dog Man Star’ is also on the list, but I’ve heard it already.
X, ‘Wild Gift’
The shortest band name on the list (no appearances for A), X were mainly driven by twin vocalists/husband and wife John Doe and Exene, whose shared harmonies and interplay gives the album a cohesiveness and unity of purpose. The music behind it is punk rock with a 50s rock’n’roll or country shuffle, which is a style that you still hear all the time among the double bass and sideburns crowd. Yet there’s a yearning and urgency about cuts like ‘Universal Corner’ that separates X from Z. Pretty decent.
Next week: we’ll be looking at some of the best pop music from the 90s and 00s (according to the 1001 curators anyway).
Status update: 588 heard (59%), 413 remain.
JT Listens To 1001 Albums 