Josef K

Some mini-reviews... before I begin, here's my rating scheme, copied from Pink_Rolling_Zeppelin on RYM:

Perfect - ★★★★★
Nearly perfect - ★★★★½
Exceptional - ★★★★
Very good - ★★★½
Good - ★★★
Decent - ★★½
Mediocre - ★★
Bad - ★½
Quite bad - ★
Utter **** - ½

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Captain Beefheart - Safe as Milk (1967)

I dig this. I don't love it and it gets sort of old by the end, but it's some really solid stuff.

Track pick: "Sure 'Nuff 'N' Yes, I Do"

3/5

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Nico - Chelsea Girl (1967)

Apparently Nico hated the production on this album, and it's easy to see why. Her voice, awkward and unsubtle (probably because of the accent), kind of grates against the strings and flutes - this reminds me of nothing so much as early Belle & Sebastian with a female vocalist and a smoother string section. If anything, though, that makes it a more interesting listen in terms of the way the vocals interact with the instrumentation. The songs get a little samey by the end - although, this may be my dad's influence talking, but I do think Jackson Browne is a great songwriter. Also, I appreciate the more avant-garde stuff ("It Was a Pleasure Then") more in theory than in practice and I think it could benefit from some percussion.

Track pick: "I'll Keep It With Mine"

2.5/5

I'll have more later today, probably.

Josef K

Sly and the Family Stone - Life (1968)

So this is pretty fantastic.

Track pick: "Plastic Jim", "M'Lady"

4/5

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Townes Van Zandt - For the Sake of the Song (1968)

Pretty good. Not as good as Our Mother the Mountain though, and "Talkin' Karate Blues" makes me cringe.

Track pick: "Tecumseh Valley"

2.5/5

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Isaac Hayes - Hot Buttered Soul (1969)

Let's see... "Walk On By" is awesome, "Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic" does nothing for me, "One Woman" is pretty good but inconsequential, and "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" has one of the best builds I've ever heard. Overall, excellent stuff.

Track pick: "Walk On By", "By the Time I Get to Phoenix"

3.5/5

Josef K

The Kinks - Arthur

This is without a doubt my favorite Kinks album. Completely essential, even if I prefer the Fall's version of "Victoria". Pretty much flawless after the first two tracks. If you haven't heard this (along with Something Else, Village Green Preservation Society, and Muswell Hillbillies), what are you waiting for?

Track pick: "Some Mother's Son", "Australia", "Shangri-La", "Arthur", just listen to the damn thing.

5/5

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Nico - The Marble Index (1969)

The issue with Chelsea Girls was that the vocals and the instrumentals both struck me as pretty boring, so all my interest came from the tension between the two. Musically, this one is much more my speed. It's dark, much more consciously avant-garde, and it sounds a lot like more modern stuff I like (although I'm drawing a blank right now). Nico's vocals - hypnotic now that they're freed from the constraint of trying to sound "pretty" - are a little spooky, as I listen to the album in the dark in my room, but that works to its advantage. Really good stuff.

Track pick: "Frozen Warnings", "Evening of Light"

3.5/5

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Can - Monster Movie (1969)

My first exposure to pre-Damo Suzuki Can is a good one, though it isn't going to displace Neu! as my favorite Krautrock album or anything. The album starts with "Father Cannot Yell". I know the obvious reference for it is the Velvet Underground, but it sorta reminds me of the Fall in a weird way. It's a little headachey, but when I haven't been listening to music all day it doesn't have that effect, so I end up feeling pretty good about the song. Next is "Mary, Mary So Contrary", which I was prepared to hate because, y'know, it's based on a nursery rhyme, but which ends up being a clear highlight for me - the guitar playing throughout is excellent, but the solo is immediately one of my favorites ever, and I really enjoy Mooney's vocal performance. "Outside My Door", which closes out the first side, is more conventional in a sort of ranting, garage-y way. It dawns on me that this is a very different beast from Suzuki's Can - a lot less subtle, a lot more aggressive, but maybe just as good. "Yoo Doo Right", then, is the closest to later Can that this album gets, a hypnotic (yeah, I've used that word twice now - deal with it) 20-minute jam anchored by a rolling drumbeat. Even if it were terrible, the album would still be quite good because of that awesome first side, but luckily it's a pretty fantastic song, and a pretty fantastic album.

4/5

Pet_Sounds

Arthur is awesome, but I still prefer Village Green. It's just a time travel album.

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Everybody's dying just to get the disease

Josef K

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.

The Batlord

Dude, Our Mother the Mountain is amazing. I'm sorry if I'm stu[pid cause I'm drank, but Townes is amazing. "Our Mother the Mountain" is pretty much the coolest country song every. Seriously. Those lyrics are out of this world and if I could write one song as amazing as that then I wouldn't care about anythng else.

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Josef K

Yeah, that's a great album.