David Bowie: Space Oddity

Space Oddity

Best song: Come on, really? Do I even need to say it? …Space Oddity.

Worst song: Unwashed And Somewhat Slightly Dazed

Overall grade: 3

After spending a few weeks powering through Floyd, dealing with a bunch of requests and random side projects, and generally having to put off writing reviews in favour of completing university applications, I’m finally doing what I promised I’d do a month ago, and starting on a couple of new artists. First of these is David Bowie, and I’m planning to tackle his entire 70s discography as well as selected later works.

Bowie did have an album before this one, officially, but to all intents and purposes his career started when he released the single ‘Space Oddity’. In June 1969 it managed to capture the heart of a generation of people who were fascinated by space and had it constantly on their minds in the wake of the first moon landings. Its rise up the charts is one of those pivotal moments in music history, one that always makes you wonder what would have been without it.

Almost forty-five years later, space is still a source of interest to a lot of people, and the song hasn’t lost any of its power. It’s a crushingly sad tale, but we should have seen it coming all along – the opening is creepy and ominous, which both represents Major Tom’s fear of the unknown and foreshadows the climax. Slowly, torturously, it ripples and builds, until we hear the first call of ‘Ground control to Major Tom…’. I forget just how cool the lyrics are sometimes; organised as a conversation between Major Tom up in his spacecraft and the people back on the Earth who are monitoring him. They carefully give him instructions: ‘Take your protein pills and put your helmet on’, and he’s just excited and overwhelmed by the whole experience: ‘I’m floating in a most peculiar way/And the stars look very different today!’ There’s the poignant moment of ‘Tell my wife I love her very much/She knows!’ coming right before the unexpected shock of ‘Your circuit’s dead, there’s something wrong/Can you hear me, Major Tom?’ They sound panicked, but Tom can’t hear them, so he interrupts with his ‘Planet Earth is blue, and there’s nothing I can do…’ All communication between them is dead, and the implication is that he soon will be too, out there on his own. In around three minutes, Bowie’s managed to create a character that I care about so much and who seems so real that it breaks my heart when he’s left stranded in outer space.

This portion of the song is, of course, focused on the vocals (although there are the obligatory spacey whooshing noises) but there’s a two-minute jam session to finish, featuring the lovely Mellotron sounds of the wonderful Rick Wakeman, while Bowie himself plays a Stylophone (I heard that he only included that on a dare) and it feels like a much needed release of tension spiralling out.

I’ve heard a few different interpretations of the song – that it’s a metaphor for heroin use and that it’s criticising the British space program – but I prefer to take it at face value, as an excellently crafted story perfectly matched with its accompanying music. It may have mostly become famous due to the circumstances of its release, but I think it would have stood out at any time.    

Sadly, this album is not just ‘Space Oddity’, though it’d probably be better if it was. I don’t really see why anyone would choose to listen to this all the way through. A case in point is second track ‘Unwashed And Somewhat Slightly Dazed’, a ridiculous Dylan pastiche that completely makes a mockery of Bowie. In ‘Letter to Hermione’, Bowie himself sounds bored and like he’s not all that interested in the song. I’m not either, the melody’s pretty dull.

The one other good song on this album is ‘Cygnet Committee’, which uses prog influences (maybe from hanging out with Wakeman) and an outstanding and emotional vocal performance to completely justify its ambitious 10 minute length. Lyrically it doesn’t always make sense, although it has its moments of clarity, but the music is actually probably more dynamic than the title track, seamlessly transitioning through a few distinct phases that show Bowie’s innate songwriting talent even this early on in his career. I love the ending, where the vocals become more echoey, gradually getting further away, as the drums become more rhythmic and staccato – cool effect.

Sadly, the second side is basically filler. ‘Janine’ is a fairly forgettable finger of folk-pop, ‘An Occasional Dream’ is very pretty and nostalgic at the beginning and has some occasional nice flute playing but gets kind of stagnant, ‘Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud’ begins in a very similar way to the title track and so disappoints me when it’s not, ‘God Knows I’m Good’ has really annoying, almost unlistenable vocals and a melody that’s repetitive and nowhere near good enough to make up for it. And ‘Memory Of A Free Festival’… it’s in two parts, the first quiet and reflective and the second slightly louder and with more of a sense of community. Honestly, both parts should have been cut out of the song. But if I had to pick one to cut, I’d pick the second part. Bowie’s singing on autopilot and it all sounds very clunky, the different parts out of time with each other.

TL;DR version: Listen to ‘Space Oddity’. The song, that is. Listen to it every day for the rest of your life. Never get tired of it. Listen to ‘Cygnet Committee’ pretty often too if you like it, which I do. Everything else should be treated as more of a historical document than something that’s still supposed to be listened to. I know I can look back on it, shake my head in bewilderment and think ‘who would have predicted…?’

[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.

[REQUEST] One Direction: Take Me Home

Take Me Home

Best song: Change My Mind

Worst song: Rock Me

Overall grade: 3

I never used to give One Direction much thought. Much like Justin Bieber or Jedward, they were famous for having hairstyles, and happened to also release the odd song that sold like ice cream on a beach but that nobody older than thirteen actually listened to. And then it happened. People I knew, who I otherwise considered to have very good taste in music, began to confess to enjoying certain One Direction songs. Well, this wasn’t on! I see the appeal of the band to a certain demographic of people, but I just couldn’t understand why a commercial product with so little substance could satisfy a person whose favourite album is Revolver.

I made my feelings clear and then moved on, until a couple of weeks ago, when I was asked to listen to this album with an unbiased ear and review it. Which I did – and would you believe it, I only hate maybe ten of the songs on here!

It is difficult to know how to grade this, though. There are certain things I don’t know if I should take into account. For example, their superfans are often horrible people: I’ve often heard comments made by devotees to new fans like ‘we don’t want you, this fandom is full’. Bit harsh; surely it’s a good thing if more people appreciate your music? But I’m not using that as a criteria, since they don’t choose their fans. But there’s also the fact that the five members are actually pretty good singers. It’s never going to be demonstrated well on highly autotuned songs like ‘Kiss You’, but they have talent. Should I include that fact when deciding on a rating?

In the end, their abilities in the voice department were cancelled out by the fact that only three songs on the record give a songwriting credit to any member of the band, which is enough to make me lose respect for any artist. So I am judging this album entirely on its songs, most of which live up to my expectations.

Lead single ‘Live While We’re Young’ could almost be a parody. It really embodies every cliché of a modern day pop song: bright guitars, ridiculously obvious hook in the chorus, a more tender, slow bridge section in the otherwise uptempo song, never more than three seconds without some kind of vocal even if it’s just ‘oh, oh, oh’, most of the chorus layered and loud before the last line which is sung almost a cappella, and such a polished production that you could slip over on it. It’s blatantly assembly-line and doesn’t even try to hide it. I honestly can’t find a thing that might make it stand out from the crowd or distinguish itself from a thousand others released in the past few years. I particularly hate the lyrics, which are crude and obviously about sex, which is kind of inappropriate considering their fanbase.

Continuing with convention, One Direction follow the tried and tested pattern of two big, peppy singles followed by a ballad. I find ‘Little Things’ less painful to listen to than its two predecessors on the album, because it’s not so overtly commercial. But it’s still very formulaic and a song that’s meant to be this emotional and sincere really should be written by the band.

This album pretends the Beatles never happened, and goes back to the old tradition of padding out the singles with a handful of album tracks that don’t need to exist. ‘C’mon C’mon’ is a good example of this – it seems like it was written in half an hour to fill some space, and although it has an appropriately rousing chorus, the verses are mediocre and the quiet to loud transition in the third chorus is so awkward. Another example is ‘Over Again’, which I actually quite like the beginning of, as it’s more stripped down and has lost the production sheen – but that doesn’t last long. It’s written by Ed Sheeran, who has written a few good songs in his time, but this is clearly taken from his reject pile. ‘They Don’t Know About Us’ has a pretty piano introduction so that I originally thought it might be a nice surprise, but again, it quickly descends into pointlessness.

Each member of the band does make a token songwriting contribution, and some or all of them are featured (alongside professional songwriters) on ‘Last First Kiss’, ‘Back for You’, and ‘Summer Love’. Interestingly, these are three of the songs that come across as the most believable, and I think it shows that they’ve been more involved in the process from the start. But the first and last of these are also the most sickeningly sweet songs, making me gag with their too-perfect harmonies and lyrics that talk of unrealistic relationships.

As much as this style annoys me, it’s nowhere near as bad as ‘Rock Me’, the unlistenable Queen pastiche that occupies the middle spot on the album. I’d like to commend them for branching out, but hearing these five preppy, clean-cut boys try to convince us all they can play rock music is excruciating. In ten years’ time, it’ll be the embarrassing photo they have to keep hidden when people come round.

But finishing off on a positive note, there’s a couple of songs I can tolerate! ‘Heart Attack’ is mixed. The cries of ‘ow!’ in the chorus are really annoying, but I do find the tune very catchy. The pre-chorus section is good, and I like the way the close-up individual vocal of that part is neatly contrasted with the big group harmonising of the chorus. Should have been a single. And the biggest surprise of all is ‘Change My Mind’. It’s not positioned to be noticed and I’d never heard of it before I was commissioned to write this, but I’ve actually found myself growing to enjoy it rather a lot. It has a more mature feel than the surrounding tracks, and I can’t see it becoming dated as quickly as the rest of the record. The longing confusion of a guy who doesn’t know where he stands with a girl shows through, and although the multiple vocalists diminish the effect somewhat, its wistful melody and candid delivery show that maybe, just maybe, there’s some potential with these guys.

So while you won’t be finding me in the queue of people waiting to buy their next single the moment it comes out, I will be keeping half an eye out. Just to see where they go next.

Pink Floyd: Ummagumma

Ummagumma

Best song: Careful With That Axe Eugene

Worst song: The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party

Overall grade: Live album – 6 and studio album – 3. Overall – 4 because of inconsistency .

Pink Floyd’s first live album is also their best. That’s not to say I don’t like the other ones, but… well, put it this way, if I had a time machine and I was allowed to use it to go back in time to see live music, Pink Floyd in the sixties would be right at the top of my list. As it happens, I don’t have a time machine, and I never will, because if time travel was going to be invented, surely the people from the future would have travelled back in time and told us? But that’s hardly on topic. Point is, this album is the only official document of live 60s Floyd there is.

All four live tracks are better than their studio versions, and three of them are amazing in studio, so that tells you something. ‘Careful With That Axe Eugene’ was only ever released as a b-side and never worked so well in the studio setting, but live it’s mind-blowing, a masterpiece of playing with dynamics, suspense and shock complete with bone-chilling screams and the single vocal line which is growled with an ominous intensity.

‘Astronomy Domine’ is done in more of a psychedelic jam-band style, and again both are superb, although it’s always sad to hear David singing instead of Syd. ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’ is majestic and powerful in its restrained quietness for the first few minutes, before becoming more improvisational near the end, and even though its counterpart on the ‘Saucerful’ album is one of my favourite Floyd songs ever, I still just about prefer this rendition. And lastly, there’s ‘A Saucerful of Secrets’ itself, the most similar to its original version, but with a ‘Celestial Voices’ section that’s infinitely more beautiful.

Then, because the band didn’t have any group compositions planned, and clearly didn’t like each other enough to get together and write any, so, ELP-style, each of them was given a quarter of a studio album to fill with their solo work. To be honest, they should have just made it a double live album, including Interstellar Overdrive and other such things, but maybe the record company wanted some new material.

One of the band members rose to the challenge superbly and came up with two classic songs, and the other three, well, didn’t. I’d like to say that it was somebody surprising like Nick Mason who excelled, but no, it was predictably Roger Waters. He was the only member to split his portion of record into two wildly different musical ideas. His first contribution was ‘Grantchester Meadows’, possibly his most successful pastoral folk rock style piece, although ‘If’ comes close. Spacious, gently played and softly sung, someone who normally sees the Floyd as too weird could easily enjoy this song, so long as they turn it off before the fly gets swatted at the end. However, the same can’t be said for ‘Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together In A Cave and Grooving With A Pict’ (on my list of 5 Greatest Song Titles Ever™; coming soon) which I can’t in good faith refer to as music. Essentially, it’s Roger testing out all the studio effects he could, and only on his voice – there’s no instruments at all in this song… which technically makes it one of the first purely electronic songs? The Scottish poetry and animal noises are hilarious once in a while, but I’d be concerned if someone claimed to play it every day.

Going down in quality, David Gilmour writes a piece called ‘The Narrow Way’, which I think could have been really good if the rest of the group had been involved with writing it. Sadly, I don’t think a 23-year-old Gilmour was capable of successfully writing a 12-minute track, so although there’s some groovy space rock in the second part and a good melody in the final, vocal part, it feels more like an unfinished demo than a real song.

Down one more, Rick Wright pens a pseudo-classical piece based on a Greek myth about a guy called Sisyphus who was forced to roll a boulder up a hill, watch it fall back down and repeat this for eternity. Does it sound like Rick’s getting ideas above his station? He is. The piece isn’t worthless, as Rick’s a good player and this does show through at times, like the piano section which is quite enjoyable, but overall it’s hardly essential listening.

Since it’s Rick’s birthday at the time I’m writing this (July 28) I feel compelled to mention that he did write some good songs and I’m a big fan of his 1996 solo album.

Last, there’s Nick Mason’s ‘The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party’. My favourite thing about this closer is the title and my second favourite is the flute intro/outro, which is played by his now-ex-wife. The rest of it is a 9-minute Mason drum solo, and although I really like long drum solos played by skilled, exciting and inventive players, Nick Mason is none of these things, and I would not encourage listening multiple times in search of hidden depths – there aren’t any. Nick is a good speaker and writer, though, so perhaps he should have used his section of the record to tell a story.

A necessary purchase, but if you eventually start using the studio disc as a coaster, don’t be too surprised.

Pink Floyd: More

Soundtrack To The Film ‘More’

Best song: Up the Khyber

Worst song: A Spanish Piece

Overall grade: 3

This is the oddest record of all among early period Floyd, and when I say that, I mean it’s odd because it’s so normal. The amount of experimental stuff you’d expect from listening to the surrounding albums is drastically reduced. There are a few exceptions, which are generally the high points, but for the most part, when you’re trying to concentrate on a film about hitchhikers, former Nazis and heroin, you don’t want to be distracted by sound collages in the background.

Yeah, that’s why the album’s such an anomaly: it wasn’t actually ever planned by the band themselves. Instead it was commissioned by a Barbet Schroeder, who was a weird French film director, for his new movie ‘More’. Now, I have never seen it, since from what I understand its only real appeal is that it features a bunch of songs by one of the all time greatest rock bands.  But I’ve read an online summary which actually just confuses me more than ever: knowing the gritty subject matter it covers, I would expect some dark and foreboding type music, rather than this album.

Because what you actually get is a whole bunch of folky tunes! Which is unexpected but not unpleasant. Songs like ‘Cirrus Minor’, ‘Crying Song’ and ‘Green Is The Colour’ have very little to them, and while they’re fairly enjoyable, they and most of the instrumentals on this album are a real sidenote in the band’s catalogue; somewhat surplus to requirements. These songs, since they were meant to be backing music, as an album are not very satisfying.

The one ‘song’ I really can’t deal with is ‘A Spanish Piece’, an unlistenable collection of every Spanish music cliché and a whole bunch of inaccurate stereotypes. Gilmour should be ashamed of this one. It’s only just over a minute long, but even so, I find it very difficult not to skip it. I would probably put the album a whole grade higher without it, to be honest.

The only other songs I have minor issues with are ‘The Nile Song’ and ‘Ibiza Bar’. I love Pink Floyd, in the main, because they were very good at playing to their strengths, but these two songs are something of a misstep – the cock-rock style doesn’t suit them at all. Luckily they’re balanced out by one really fantastic tune, an instrumental called ‘Up the Khyber’ that mostly just features Rick Wright and Nick Mason. It’s experimental and jammy and was originally played live as part of an unreleased ‘The Man and the Journey’ suite, and the interplay between these two musicians that we rarely see is fascinating.

If you’re a big Pink Floyd fan, then get this because it’s decent, but get it last because it pales in comparison to everything else they did. I’d probably be more likely to recommend this album to someone who’s a big fan of folk rock. That’s a style of music that nobody ever really thinks of when they think of the Floyd, but it can be seen in a lot of Roger Waters’ songwriting, particularly in this 1969-72 period, and these songs are simultaneously among the band’s prettiest and most overlooked. Although I guess that if you wrote The Wall almost singlehandedly, it’s easy to have a lot of your simpler stuff overlooked.

The Who: My Generation

My Generation

Best song: The Kids Are Alright

Worst song: Please Please Please

Overall grade: 3

I don’t understand why this is hailed as a classic. I understand why it’s influential, certainly, it’s an obvious example of a protopunk record and definitely inspired a whole host of later bands, but it’s not a good punk record (of the kind that would later be released by the Clash and the Ramones.) It makes me wonder if, had the punk movement never happened, this would still be in such high regard of most critics, or if it would be forgotten.

 I can find three songs here that I actively enjoy. Then most of the others have something going for them, but nowhere near enough to keep me occupied for their full running time. And then there’s a couple that I just despise.

I’ll start with the positives: ‘My Generation’ is angry and snarky and I love the way Roger Daltrey stutters his vocals. It gives the impression that the band have a point to make and a reason for existing. ‘The Kids Are Alright’ might be the most melodic and poppy song on here, and a great showcase for Keith Moon’s drumming technique. It’s still got a lot of power and purpose but is a lot more sophisticated than most songs here. And ‘The Ox’, the instrumental that closes the British version of this album is heavy and thudding and sinister. It’s credited to the whole band butt it’s very bass-driven, very much John Entwhistle’s piece, and John Entwhistle is fucking awesome. If he’d written a couple more of these maybe I’d like the album as a whole a bit more.

Other good moments here include the guitar part that opens ‘The Good’s Gone’, which is really clever. There are some decent hooks on ‘La-La-La-Lies’ and ‘Much Too Much’, even if the songs themselves are a bit immature. And on ‘It’s Not True’, a really stupid song with lyrics that I just hate (and they have the nerve to repeat them!) the ‘So there!’ at the end is worth it, it’s got so much attitude behind it.

But of course, these things are not the reason I gave the album a failing grade. The production is too rough and the overall sound quality isn’t up to much, which doesn’t make it easy to listen to. I’d rather go without the first two songs, ‘Out In The Street’ in particular I find really repetitive. Roger Daltrey’s voice in these early years is almost unlistenable. He’s trying to emulate 50’s rock and roll/RnB musicians and failing miserably. And there’s the covers, the worst offender of which is ‘Please Please Please’. In my notebook where I was taking notes while listening, all I wrote next to this one is ‘WHY TORTURE ME LIKE THIS?’ and that about sums it up.

In conclusion, I don’t hate this album, but I do get tired of it in several places, and I could certainly live without it. Rumour has it the band themselves consider it rushed and not as good as their live performances… I’d have to agree. I’d much rather listen to ‘Live at Leeds’.