Townes Van Zandt - Townes Van Zandt (1969)
This has some nice rerecordings of stuff on his first album. It doesn't beat Our Mother the Mountain, but it's better than the debut.
Track pick: "Lungs", "Quicksilver Daydreams of Maria"
3/5
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Sly and the Family Stone - Stand! (1969)
I was prepared to give this a lower score than Life, but "Sex Machine" is a really good song - in fact, the whole back half is pretty much flawless - so I think they're about even.
Track pick: "I Want to Take You Higher", "Sex Machine"
4/5
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Captain Beefheart - Trout Mask Replica (1969)
I came in with really high expectations because this is an album with a massive following. My opinion of it ends up falling somewhere between Trollheart's and Frownland's (no surprise there). I really like what I hear - it's a mess, but I enjoy the mix of blues and free jazz and spoken word and god knows what else. The sprawl (it's also 80 minutes long) is both a great strength and its biggest flaw. It's a very adventurous album and it's almost defined by its refusal to stay in any one place for very long, but I can't help thinking that a whole album like "Hair Pie" would be really good. Whatever, I like the other songs and all, but it's exhausting to take all 80 minutes and 28 tracks in in one sitting, and I feel like the only way to appreciate it fully is as a whole album, although I like a lot of the individual songs - actually, almost all of them. So a lot of the appeal ends up being a little lost on me - I'll listen to it again, but I don't really feel it right now as much as I hoped to.
Track pick: "Hair Pie: Bake", "Hair Pie: Bake 2", "Pena"
3.5/5
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For every one of these little posts, I'll do one review of a randomly-selected album that I already know and like. So to begin:
Uncle Tupelo - March 16-20, 1992 (1992)
Uncle Tupelo are the band that got me into country. I thoroughly enjoyed the punk energy of No Depression, which seemed to me a logical extension of bands I was already into, like X, and I appreciated Still Feel Gone's range - my favorite two tracks on it were "Gun", the best song the Replacements never wrote, and "Watch Me Fall", and it's hard to imagine either one of those on the debut. My favorite Uncle Tupelo album remains Anodyne, but the one in between is special.
Recorded over the span of five days (no prizes for guessing which), March is basically a sincere tribute to American folk music (seven of the fifteen songs are covers, and the originals stay close to their spirit), the result of Uncle Tupelo ditching the punk side entirely, with great production by Peter Buck. The covers are uniformly great (well... see below), especially "Lilli Schull" and "Atomic Power", keeping the album strong through what could be a boring middle stretch. The originals are some of the band's best, especially Jeff Tweedy's songs - come on, "Wait Up" and "Fatal Wound"? - but Jay Farrar's are excellent as well ("Grindstone" especially) and the album also has some of their most collaborative moments ("Sandusky").
It's not a perfect album - it's hard to take Farrar seriously during "Coalminers", for example, and as much as I like the song, it sort of rubs me the wrong way - but it's a really good one and it's one that's basically required listening for any self-proclaimed alt-country fan.
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