The Who: By Numbers

The Who By Numbers

Best song: Slip Kid

Worst song: Squeeze Box

Overall grade: 5

From what I understand, the general consensus surrounding this album has worsened over the years. It was originally released to great acclaim (although considering how huge The Who were around the time, people may have just not wanted to rock the boat) but since then most people have expressed a distaste for its more introspective and self-conscious style.

But I heard most of the Who albums before I had any idea what other people thoughts of them. And while, in some cases (see: ‘Face Dances’) I later discovered that my opinion was basically identical to everyone else’s, with ‘By Numbers’ I was quite shocked by all the criticism, because I’d always really liked the album.

Thing is, Pete Townshend had tried three times to make a perfect rock opera, and with ‘Quadrophenia’ he’d basically succeeded. He was hardly going to go back into the studio and make another one, knowing that it could never live up to the standard he’d set himself. Clearly, his only option was to make an album so completely different that people would never compare it to its predecessor.

Yet here I am, comparing them. ‘Quadrophenia’ was a wonderful story, but it’s only here that I feel like I’m getting to know Pete Townshend as a person. ‘Imagine a Man’, ‘However Much I Booze’ and particularly ‘How Many Friends’ are painfully intimate and confessional: ‘How many friends have I really got/That love me, that want me, that'll take me as I am?’ The rest of the band are constantly giving these highly personal compositions the respect they deserve, even when, like on ‘However Much I Booze’, the uptempo music doesn’t seem to quite fit with the mood of the song. But maybe that’s just to give Pete’s vocal performance (one of his best; move over, Daltrey) even more gravity.

It’s not all doom and gloom. Those who call the album ‘Pete Townshend’s suicide note’ obviously have copies that omit side two’s ‘Blue Red & Grey’, a stunning ballad about enjoying all parts of life rather than always waiting for one thing in particular. It doesn’t really have any traditional rock instruments, it’s just ukulele (and a few horns) which again makes it sound different to the rest of the album, but the gentle, quiet instrument is perfect – it puts the focus on the lyrics and complements the simplicity of the message perfectly.

My pick for best track here is the opener ‘Slip Kid’, a great demonstration of Townshend’s talent for combining an infectious melody with a serious message and something a bit unconventional thrown in there too. It really plays out like ‘here’s the same band that made ‘My Generation’, only with 10 years more experience’. It’s very dynamic and guest Nicky Hopkins plays a neat bit of piano, playing off Keith Moon in a great, idiosyncratic way. It has the same feel of a classic that ‘Baba O’Riley’ and ‘Love Reign O’er Me’ do, but, perhaps unfairly, never got the same recognition.

Still, I guess hating on this album is justified if you’re only talking about ‘Squeeze Box’, a song with an incredibly annoying and generic melody that’s far too immature for someone who’s just turned 30. It really disrupts the flow of the album with its cringey, over-sexualised lyrics and the repulsive ‘in and out and in and out’ part. Disappointing, because without this I'd be able to play on one of the album's lyrics and say 'I like every minute of this record'.

Good news to counteract that terrible song is that Entwhistle hasn’t been forgotten. He gets a word in edgeways with side two opener ‘Success Story’, and in true Pink Floyd style, it’s a sarcastic criticism of the music business that shows off his talent and versatility as a musician and contrasts the quieter acoustic numbers on the album with some glam rock and space rock influences. Lastly, final track 'In A Hand Or A Face', while nowhere near as climactic as some closers they've done, is definitely work noting for its distinctive riff and almost gospel-like chorus.

 Personally, I’d be the first to mention this album in a conversation about ‘overlooked gems’ or whatever, and I’d really encourage anyone who’s dismissed it before to have another listen – it’s obvious that it can be easily overshadowed by the massive scale (both commercially and musically) of their previous efforts, but, though it’s making a very different statement, it’s one that’s just as valid – and enjoyable.

King Crimson: Discipline

Discipline

Best song: Indiscipline

Worst song: I like them all, but Frame By Frame?

Overall grade: 6

Ah, King Crimson. I’m going to miss reviewing them. A band so inconsistent that they can’t even be consistent in their inconsistency… this album is almost as good as the last one! Of course, it’s allowed, because this came after a seven-year hiatus during which the band was broken up “for good” and during which Robert Fripp was doing solo stuff (which incidentally, is also pretty good) and, unsurprisingly, there’s been another lineup change. Tony Levin has replaced John Wetton on bass and the wonderful Adrian Belew has joined us to play guitar and sing (aren’t we lucky?!)

Seriously, two thirds of the ‘Red’ trio might still be around, but 80s King Crimson is a mile away from that album. There’s still a focus on instrumental work and experimenting, but it’s very much of its time, taking influence from a bunch of other bands who were relatively new at the time, most notably the Talking Heads but also

Songs. There are seven. (I’m not great with sentences today, it seems.) The first one is called ‘Elephant Talk’, and I love it, which is quite strange, because I find Belew’s vocal performance really disturbing – he sounds like he’s out of his mind. The lyrics are great, and it’s not often you can say that about this band. Some electronic backbeats keep you on your toes and it’s all topped off with a guitar sound that’s never been recreated – it’s uncategorisable.

‘Frame By Frame’ is when Levin comes to the fore with some really interesting basswork, but I can’t always hear it so well because Belew is mixed so high. It’s stylistically pretty similar to the opener but a bit more soundscapey and a bit less mind-boggling. ‘Matte Kudasai’ is a bit more slow-tempoed than the two preceding it. It’s got some great sound effects, like the guitars that sound like angry bird cries that pop up occasionally, and it’s surprisingly melodic and emotional, filling the place of the ballad that Crimson like to throw in occasionally to shake things up. A better version can be found in amongst the bonus tracks, that has an interesting guitar part from Fripp worked into it.

Then comes ‘Indiscipline’, and it’s just flat-out crazy, it’s… put it this way, you used to be able to look up the Wikipedia page for ‘Indiscipline’, and there were at least twenty different genres listed for the song, including psychedelic metal, which I’d never even heard of. And all twenty of those genres seemed to fit the song. It’s such a freak-out, with amazingly chaotic and out-of-control instrumental sections interspersed with robotic vocal parts that are almost too… well, disciplined. ‘I repeat myself when under stress’, Belew intones, several times in a row, and it’s pure genius. If you’ve got five minutes to spare and you’re only going to listen to one song from this album, this is definitely the one.

Course, nothing on side two could come close to that. They try, though. Like ‘Thela Hun Ginjeet’ – this is a polyrhythmic song, meaning it is played in two different time signatures simultaneously. (One of my friends told me I didn’t use enough technical terms in my reviews, so that one’s for her.) It’s such a cool effect. However, this is probably the furthest removed from Crimson in their previous incarnations, focusing mostly on the beat and the new short, clipped style. (Is this prog-techno?) In other news, this is the last vocal track on the album, which is a bit of a disappointment. Belew’s my second favourite Crimson vocalist after Lake, and for this material specifically, he probably is the best guy for the job.

In contrast, ‘The Sheltering Sky’, the first of two instrumentals that close the album, is closest to old Crimson – not even 1974-era, but going right back to their roots with ‘In the Court’. It’s probably a bit more easy-listening than anything else here, although it does have just as much substance if you pay attention – some real virtuoso playing and a few world music influences here and there. And the title track lives up to its name by displaying how well and how effortlessly the new band members have fit together, and is a great example of them playing off each other really well.

Overall, the best word I can find to describe this album is paranoid. All these crazy rhythms, they don’t want to stay still for too long, even the notes don’t, so they’re always jumping around and forever looking over their shoulders to check nothing’s coming to get them. There’s so much life in this record – like one day it’s going to jump out of your CD player and become something more than a flat disc.

Whether intentional or not, this was the perfect album for the band to make at the time – it was progressive and just plain weird enough to keep their long-time fans excited and yet relevant and cutting-edge enough to bring them to a whole new audience. On their next two albums, they tried to achieve this balance again, but found themselves focusing more on current trends than their own legacy, and this album remains as the only surviving studio document of the fusion of the two styles.

 (I should have done The Who today but I’m doing this instead, in celebration of the fact that KING CRIMSON ARE REFORMING! I could not be more excited about this and I’m just really hoping I get the chance to see them. The Who tomorrow.)

Locusts, Roaches & Ants: The WRC Compilation

Locusts, Roaches & Ants: The WRC Compilation

Best song: probably The Drapes, but there’s a handful of greats that are pretty much equal

Worst song: I feel bad doing this on a compilation… but, Fun Festival

Overall grade: 5

I don’t normally review compilations, but I’ll make an exception for this one, because I know (or at least know of) all these artists in another capacity. Specifically, they all are or were members of the Web Reviewing Community, a group of people who all ran music review websites much like this one (but generally better) mostly in the early 2000s. At some point, somebody noticed that as well as writing about music, a lot of these reviewers also liked to make music, and out of that came the bright idea to put some of these songs onto a compilation album and share it with everyone in the community. Thirteen different reviewers got involved, and this is the end product.

Credit where credit’s due: Chris Willie Williams from the Disclaimer Music Review Archive is the guy who put all these songs together and still offers this as a free download if you ask him very nicely, and Steve Knowlton of Steve and Dennis and Abe’s Record Reviews is the guy who did title and cover art.

‘Ritalin Rock’ (The Other Leading Brand) – From the title, I expected this to sound like a pretty straightforward rock song, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. It’s percussion-heavy, which keeps the whole thing feeling focused and driven, and seems to have a purposeful bootleg quality to it. Over the top, there’s a lot of spoken vocal samples which somehow manage to be catchy, repeated and layered on top of each other to create something really compelling.

‘Saskatchewan’ (Steve Knowlton and the Knowl-Tones) – In a prime example of good positioning, this song is a lot more melodic, and chilled vs. the anger of the last one. It’s very pretty, dreamy and nostalgic with some interesting jazz influences and has a cool relaxed guitar solo at the end. I like it, but it’s a bit too consistent in its tempo to reach greatness.

‘Dead in 41’ (Willie Simpson) – This is very folk-rock singer-songwriter, and Simpson has the Dylan-esque voice down to a T. This is the song that most makes me wish the album came with a lyric booklet, since I can’t quite work out all of them, but the ones I can hear sound really good, kind of a World War 2 theme going on there. One of those things you start singing along to, and then you realise you’re singing about shooting a Nazi between the eyes. Great tune.

‘Hell’ (Disclaimer) – this icy, dark, rhythmic, no-nonsense first couple of minutes recalls… but then the chorus swells and is smoother, more content even as it’s talking about going to hell. These two approaches are juxtaposed against each other throughout the song. Oh, and it’s a brilliant song, did I mention? Very skilful songwriting – taking pop and distorting it to give it an edge. I can imagine myself recommending this song to someone who wasn’t familiar with the WRC.

‘Walk Me Home’ (Mike Kozak) – A slowly developing instrumental, but as the longest track on the album at almost seven minutes, it’s able to take its time somewhat. I’m very impressed with the fact that all the instruments are played by one guy, and for the most part it’s very well structured too, with the same symphonic theme carrying us through all the way, coupled with the odd moment of dissonant anarchy that prevent it from becoming too…

‘Gamle Klassiker’ (Joel Larsson and Adam Johansson) – A brief interlude in the overall context of the album, it seems like an odd choice for the pair to include, because it has the feel of a novelty song. I don’t know if that’s in the non-English lyrics or the delivery or the lack of any real instrumentation, but I’m not a huge fan of this.

‘Heterosapiens’ – If you want an example of a successful joke song, look no further. This track manages to successfully parody a bunch of aspects of 70s hard rock by making it all just a tiny bit too ridiculous, and its purpose is obvious here, but the beauty of it is that in a compilation of ‘fantasy rock songs’ it probably wouldn’t stick out as being the one imposter. Right up there with clever parodies and highly enjoyable for anyone who knows a little of music history.

Mark Prindle’s three long-titled songs – Mark Prindle, the sneaky fellow, managed to combine three of his songs into one high energy track that’s no longer than anything else on here. You could actually jog to the fast-paced but steady ‘Jogging Is The Bestest’ and its riffs are really entertaining. ‘A Guy Who Said My Web Site Is Overrated (Why Does Everybody Hate Me So Much?)’ displays some of the classic humour that makes his site so unique, and ‘My Songs Would Be Significantly Less Sucky If I Bothered To Save Up For More Powerful Recording Equipment’ might just be my favourite – my brain can’t even keep up with the tempo it’s played at but it’s just so much fun!

‘The Drapes’ (Daniel Fjall) – a depressing and strangely captivating tale of a pathetic man who’s lost his girlfriend and now sits at home not doing anything with his life. Even the whispered vocals add to this; it’s almost like it’s been so long since he’s sung anything that he’s forgotten how (in a good way) This is one of the songs that feels the most professional and also stays with me the most. People would wave their lighters to this at a concert, at one with the pain and moodiness of the narrator, and I always come away from the song thinking a bit more about life.

‘Fun Festival’ (Poly Lite Plus) – A space-rock style instrumental that doesn’t feel as though it’s really a very fun place to be. I think this could be something if it was worked on, and would probably also be better in the context of an album of similar stuff, but here it feels a bit clunky and random.

‘Tantric New Romantic’ (The Hector Collectors) – Catchy, short but still feels like a full song. This synth-pop song wins by having nothing more than a great hook, lots of random and cute rhymes in its lyrics, and a singer with a great accent. It’s hardly meant to be taken seriously, but I honestly can’t get enough of it, the humour not getting old after quite a few listens.

‘The Open Window’ (Physical Illusion) – Home-made art rock such as this is automatically at a disadvantage compared to other stuff in the genre, considering Nick Karn probably doesn’t have access to the same range of instruments and studio effects as well-established bands, but this doesn’t show here. It might not be my absolute favourite song here, but this mini-epic is definitely the one that most inspires me to get more from the same artist, since it’s great but also hints at so much more.

‘Mercury’s Star’ – I love this as a closer. It’s an unhurried and beautiful ballad that feels very comfortable in its own skin, helped by the fact that it’s probably the best produced song here. I honestly don’t think any other song could effectively follow this one, the guitar is so gorgeous. It ends with a sample of ‘Everybody Hurts’ and another song that I recognise but can’t place. Its skilful summation of this compilation always leaves me wanting more.

Overall, I think it was Chris Willie Williams who said it best of all, in the liner notes: ‘the unqualified love of rock music is evident in each track here’. The songs display a definite knowledge of what works in music and what elements make up a good song, and I think that’s why there aren’t any huge failures here. Maybe the most important skill you need to make music is to know music.

[REQUEST] Cloud Cult: Light Chasers

 Light Chasers

Best song: The Arrival: There’s So Much Energy In Us

Worst song: The Departure: Today We Give Ourselves To The Fire

Overall grade: 5

I’d hazard a guess that Cloud Cult are a band you have not heard of. (Unless you requested this review, of course.) They’re very independent, and it’s completely through choice – although they’ve had some very highly regarded albums and several offers from major record labels, they’ve made the decision to remain out of the spotlight, in order to focus on such things as helping the environment (this is the same reason they never tour outside of the US.)

The album as a whole skips in a carefree way between dream pop, indie rock and something slightly experimental. Legend has it (well, Wikipedia) that some of their previous albums focused more on the experimental aspect, meaning they basically managed to sell out while remaining completely underground – something of an achievement. I believe this is also technically a concept album, but that’s pretty much restricted to the story, as I don’t hear anything in the music that ties any of the songs together, although some of the transitions are well done.

But taken as individuals, a lot of the songs are pretty fantastic. The opening is spacey, ethereal and subtly majestic, bringing to mind a funeral procession for a highly respected public figure. The moment when the drums come in is a bit clumsy and unexpected, but I’m over it by the time the violins join the proceedings and add an orchestral feel.

The vocals are good, if a little unconventional. Maybe this song would have been on the next Neutral Milk Hotel album if they’d stuck around. But my favourite part of this song is the dark, tribal instrumental section that occupies the last minute or so.

So we had a good start, but sadly ‘Today We Give Ourselves To The Fire’ doesn’t match up. The not quite in unison voices are really grating and although I think it’s trying to be inspirational with its rising melodies and hand claps, but I don’t feel inspired at all. It’s an unwelcome distraction between the opener and ‘You’ll Be Bright’, which has a funky hand-drawn music video that you should watch. It’s the prototypical indie rock song, starting with minimal backing and high mixed vocals before transitioning into something harder with more balance between these elements. If you like that kind of thing, this is a good one.

‘You Were Born’ sounds, on first listen, like a  very pretty but not very exciting acoustic song, but reveals itself to be a little different on subsequent listens. For example, the piano is doing some pretty clever fiddly stuff in the background, and the violin solo in the middle turns out to be a winner. It’s nothing like its weird followup ‘The Exploding People’ which is distorted and detached. It feels like I’m running for my life away from… something. Still has a great hook though in ‘one by one the people they explode…’

I LOVE the chaos that rules over the opening to ‘Room Full Of People In My Head’, and some of the lyrics are pretty clever too: ‘Part of me is the hangman looking for a scapegoat’. It becomes less schizophrenic after the initial blow but it’s still notable for being the hardest rocking track (is there such a genre as indie metal?)

‘Running With The Wolves’ could just as easily have been a Soft Bulletin-era Flaming Lips song, and it has that same protective layer of production that wraps up the song and kind of separates it from the outside world. ‘Responsible’ has a lot of weight to it, and seems to be the moment of the story where the main character, whoever he/she is, finally grows up and realises they can’t keep running away from their mistakes, so I guess it’s a transition piece, but musically it doesn’t do anything that can’t be found on the early songs – I much prefer the claustrophobic, enclosed ‘The Guessing Game’.

At the end, highlights include the intimate whisper of ‘Dawn’… forget it. That’s a good song and all, but closer ‘There’s So Much Energy In Us’, which overshadows everything within a three song radius. Here, the pretentious titles and false builds found elsewhere come to a head in the purge of negativity that feels like a ritual song, a call to do good things. And the title line really is sung with an impressive amount of energy. It’s the kind of song that just climbs higher and higher and never seems to stop, reaching up as far as the sun.

So in a sense, there is a path you can follow through this album, but it’s not one of musical themes, it’s one of emotional themes. At the start, things are more relaxed and content, but they pick up the pace into fear and restlessness, and then slowly seem to come round to acceptance and then to something that’s almost like rejoicing. I also don’t think it’s too hard to broadly categorise each track into ‘dream’ or ‘nightmare’, so maybe it’s about the contrast between those two things as well.

I think I might work backwards with this band, just to be contrary. I am interested to hear their earlier stuff and see their raw and experimental side take a turn in the limelight. Hopefully, that won’t cause them to lose their moments of odd beauty that are what attracts me to this record.

[REQUEST] Daft Punk: Random Access Memories

Random Access Memories

Best song: Within

Worst song: Touch

Overall grade: 3

Daft Punk are not a punk band, but I’m not going to comment on the first half of their name.

For anyone who doesn’t know what Daft Punk sound like, they’re not really known for music that’s actually made by humans. Most of their output consists of computer-programmed, machine-generated beats, thumps and wubs. For this reason, and others which I will discuss later in my review, I’ve been known to call them ‘Kraftwerk for boring people’. This new album is generally considered to tone down these elements a lot more and include a lot of actual people, but sometimes I can’t see that, and at other times I can see it, but don’t really think it’s a good thing.

I don’t have anything against electronic music, but while listening to this I find myself craving those rare bursts of real instrumentation, whether good – like that all too brief electric guitar solo that appears on ‘Instant Crush’ – or bad – like absolutely everything on ‘Touch’, because at least they make me feel something. My feelings towards the first three songs are identical. Variously, they blend electronica and house with funk, disco, dubstep, and techno, and each time a song begins I think to myself, ‘Hey, this is pretty interesting!’ This lasts for an average of twenty seconds before I start to get bored, and after maybe a minute, I realise that the interesting parts are just going to be dragged out and repeated to eternity. It’s not soothing or atmospheric enough to be background music but it’s far too repetitive to be actually entertaining. On the third track, ‘Giorgio by Moroder’, we’re also treated to a length monologue by famous producer Giorgio Moroder himself on his life, and that’s something that definitely does not hold up to repeated listens. But at least he pronounces ‘Moog’ right.

There is one song that I feel like I can freely compliment. ‘Within’ is based around a melody played on a real piano that’s actually quite beautiful and the weirdly hypnotic vocals play around with pitch in an interesting way. The lonely confusion of the song’s narrator is demonstrated well by the understated juxtaposition of the robotic and the human. I don’t know how they managed it, but the pair should be very proud of this one: it’s genuinely touching. It may be sung by a guy who wears a helmet whenever he goes out into a public place, but it makes me believe that he actually feels something inside, and I don’t get that anywhere else on the record.

The band were relatively unknown (compared to now) before they had a massive hit single, ‘Get Lucky’, which was played on every radio station, at every party, and in every shop over the summer. The first time this happened, I heard the song. The second time, I recognised it, and realised that it wasn’t a welcome reprise. As I tend to tune out songs I don’t like, it took a while before I realised just how huge it had become… but the song really had been stalking us all for several months now. Imagine my horror when I was commissioned to write this and discovered that the album version was not the four minute radio edit, but six full minutes (the extra two just consist of the line ‘We’re up all night to get lucky’ on repeat). On a similar note, second single ‘Lose Yourself To Dance’ follows the same sort of pattern, and sounds like what would happen if Primal Scream sold out and tried to score a Top 10 hit. I blame Pharrell Williams for the unpleasantly sexualised direction these two songs take – he’s a credited songwriter on both, but no other tracks.

I’m very confused by ‘Touch’. It’s so ridiculously dramatic that it may or may not be intended as a joke. If it is one, I don’t find it very funny. It tries to do many things, like create a creepy atmosphere at the beginning, move into a more serious, personal, evocative middle and then have a big, sweeping climax to close, complete with angelic female choir. Now, that’s a fair enough framework for an ‘epic’ song to follow, but each element is turned up to eleven in its extremity, and the overall effect causes the song to be almost physically repulsive. The lyrics are awful, too, and often pretty hard to ignore.

I could make a similar criticism about the opening to ‘Beyond’. Remember how in some of my prog reviews I argue that being overblown or bombastic isn’t necessarily a bad quality in music? Well, it certainly can be a bad quality, and this is a prime example. Nothing in the rest of the song justifies the over the top approach of the beginning, making it a pretty big letdown. In fact, I’d argue that this is the three-quarter mark slump, an old trap that Daft Punk have let themselves fall into. I mean, I can’t even work out where ‘Beyond’ ends and ‘Motherboard’ begins, and ‘Fragments of Time’ is another one that just doesn’t stay with me, returning to my point that some of this stuff doesn’t make me feel anything except empty.

‘Doin’ it Right’ picks things up a little bit towards the end. It’s probably the only track where vocals are the primary instrument, and it features a surprising guest musician in Panda Bear (of Animal Collective – I love them!) who delivers a characteristically bizarre and schizophrenic performance, and I actually like the way this works, set against the rhythmic and consistent beats of our helmet-clad band. Then, we close things off (finally – this is one CD, but it’s the length of a double album) with ‘Contact’, a space rock themed instrumental that actually goes somewhere for once and isn’t bad per se, but doesn’t need to be so long – the last minute and a half, for a start, are completely unnecessary.

I’m actually pretty glad I’ve listened to this album all the way through. As one of these things that delights all three of a mainstream audience, serious music fans and professional rock critics, it was a pretty big gap in my knowledge for a few months. That said, I’ve yet to understand all the fuss.

The title’s weird, too. There’s nothing random about this music. It’s perfectly scripted, every time interval precise to the nearest millisecond, and the only thing shinier than their production is their helmets. But in most cases, it’s all show. No matter how beautiful it is on the outside, when there’s no life beneath the surface, I can’t like this album.

Yes: Tormato

Tormato

Best song: On the Silent Wings of Freedom

Worst song: Arriving UFO

Overall grade: 3

It had to end somewhere. The idea of having six outstanding albums in a row is an unfathomable dream for most bands (King Crimson, lookin’ at you) but Yes managed it, made it look effortless even. Yet on their seventh attempt they crashed and burned spectacularly, resulting in a bigger mess than a tomato thrown at a wall with great force. Which, incidentally, isn’t a completely random simile – it’s a true story, as when Rick Wakeman first caught sight of the cover art for this album, he hated it so much that he did indeed throw a tomato at it. That’s a pretty standard response for me when I don’t like something, too.

My two main problems with this album are 1) bad songs, and 2) the band don’t seem like a proper unit here. They’re all playing, a lot of the time, but with very little awareness of what everyone else is playing, which gives a lot of the songs a jumbled and messy feel, as though they’ve been thrown together. It’s a million miles away from the elaborate symphonies they conducted on ‘Close To The Edge’.

I’m pretty tired and I don’t want to waste too many words on this third-rate album, but I’ll throw out a quick description of some of these songs. I’m completely indifferent to ‘Future Times/Rejoice’. The sound quality is absolutely terrible (as it is on most of the album) causing me to spend the first couple of minutes just thinking about that, during which time nothing in the song has managed to grab me. The rest of the song continues to amble by, its watered-down-Yes too bland to provoke a reaction.

‘Madrigal’ and ‘Release Release’ are the two most disappointing things on here – not the worst, just the most disappointing, because they display the band’s sad first few stabs at a commercial hit. ‘Madrigal’ is a kind of ‘Wondrous Stories’ rewrite, but seriously inferior, while ‘Release Release’ rocks much harder, but it’s as though the band were so focused on that aspect that they forgot to make it do anything else.

In actual fact, neither of these ended up being a hit, but they had some vague commercial success with one of the other tracks, ‘Don’t Kill the Whale’. Though Yes doing a protest song is a bit unexpected, it’s actually pretty good, although it’s better if you don’t think too much about the lyrics. A lot of songs here are quite simple and as such, not great showcases for the band’s playing, but the same can’t be said for Wakeman and especially Howe here, where they both get a chance to cut loose and solo a bit.

Second side; ‘Arriving UFO’ is pretty painful, with the group going embarrassingly sci-fi and taking the phrase ‘nerd music’ to a new level. Kind of like ‘The Ancient’ on ‘Tales from Topographic Oceans’, it’s Yes trying to play a more experimental, sound-effect-laden piece, and totally failing – there’s no musical progression in this song or anything to make it more than a medley of themes.

Luckily, things finally start picking up towards the end with the Anderson solo song ‘Circus of Heaven’, which is fun and innocent and seems to reflect his personality really well, and the Squire solo song ‘Onwards’ which is unexpectedly a straight-up love song, and even more unexpectedly, pulled off with ease and grace. It would probably be really pretty if the sound quality didn’t suck so much.

We close with the only song that I can be really positive about; ‘On the Silent Wings of Freedom’. It’s about half the length of ‘Awaken’ on the previous album and also about half as good, but there are worse things than half as good as ‘Awaken’. The whole band are involved and all of their parts work (it feels for the first time like they can hear each other play) and I can tell that if I didn’t know many Yes songs, I’d absolutely love this. As it stands, it feels just a touch formulaic, as if the group have developed a pattern to their epics. Still I enjoy it; it’s jazzy and enigmatic, and Squire’s bass playing is a particular highlight.

To be honest, the odds of a prog band releasing a good album in 1978 were not good, and to their credit they didn’t fail as spectacularly as ELP did with ‘Love Beach’. That said, if an album is so bad that it makes you throw a tomato at it, it should make you think twice about whether you really want it to be released.

Ramones: It's Alive

It’s Alive

Best song: you’ll never see this one coming will you… Blitzkrieg Bop!

Worst song: one of the covers; maybe California Sun

Overall grade: 6 (at this point I can’t imagine ever giving a live album a 7, to be honest)

Well, if I’m not very much mistaken, this is my first review of a live album! Wait, no, I did ‘Ummagumma’, which is half live and half studio… so this is my first time looking at just a live album. And I can’t really think of a better one to start with: ‘It’s Alive’ is easily in my top five live albums of all time, as well as being my favourite Ramones album, because it’s as close as you can buy to the absolute essence of the Ramones, smothered as it is in accelerated riffs, random bursts of aggression and a fuzzy home-grown feel. Course, it would be far better to actually see them in concert, and if that were still possible, you can bet that I’d be there the moment ticket sales opened. Sadly, this album is the closest thing I’m ever going to have.

Most live albums work because they show a different side of the band to the studio albums. Not the case here. ‘It’s Alive’ is amazing because it amplifies every aspect of the Ramones listening experience into a barrage of great sounds that attacks you non-stop for twenty-eight songs and fifty-three minutes. The first aspect it takes to extremes is (as you might have worked out if you can do quick maths) song lengths. In direct contrast to most live albums, these songs are actually even shorter than their studio counterparts, and are basically all sped up to make room for as many songs as is humanly possible. That’s fine. Even after only three albums (this was recorded before ‘Road to Ruin’, though it was released afterwards) they already had more than enough great songs to justify this approach.

Brief interlude: four concerts were recorded and considered for a live album, and the reason this one won out over the others was because the front ten rows of seats were thrown at the stage after the concert was over. That’s clearly how you judge the success of a concert.

Other features of the band highlighted by this album include their sheer energy – a lot of these songs flow directly into one another with barely a pause for applause, and they manage to keep this up for the entire set without it noticing in their performance whatsoever – and their complete lack of taking themselves seriously; see the way Joey growls the title of each song before they start playing it, and before ‘Here Today Gone Tomorrow’ he even claims that it’s “for all you lonely hearts out there”. That line gets me every time.

While the setlist generally sticks to my favourites, there are of course a handful of songs that I didn’t love quite so much in their original incarnations. Without exception, though, I prefer the versions included here. The fact that the songs themselves are a bit unnecessary is cancelled out by the way the group put just as much effort into them as they do the fan favourites – it’s incredible to me how they can be so hardworking in each of their live performances and perform as many times per year as they did and still manage to reach the high standard that they did.

The big hits aren’t all collected at the tail end of the album, they’re nicely spread throughout it, meaning that even someone who doesn’t know the band’s entire output could still find something they knew every few minutes. And nothing is a significant drop in quality from its original! If I had to pick a song that doesn’t work quite as well on here… it might actually be ‘Surfin’ Bird’, because its infuriating catchiness doesn’t have quite the same effect sandwiched between so many other super-catchy songs. On the other hand, absolute highlights (aside from the obvious) are ‘Sheena Is A Punk Rocker’, ‘Cretin Hop’, ‘Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment’ and the impossibly fast ‘We’re A Happy Family’, all of which already set themselves some pretty high standards, but only manage to improve on them in this context.

I love this album because it’s so unashamedly hedonistic and because it manages to achieve the same heights as most objectively “serious” albums just by being a head-spinningly good time. By 1979, disco was in the mainstream, post-punk and New Wave were the new musical movements, most punk bands (including the Ramones themselves) were embracing other styles of music into their work, and this was one of the last true documents of the original punk era – but what  a high for the genre to end on.