Roxy Music: For Your Pleasure

For Your Pleasure

Best song: For Your Pleasure

Worst song: you’re implying that there’s a bad song on this album? there isn’t of course, but let’s say Beauty Queen

Overall grade: 7

It’s been forty years since 1973, and not one of them has come close to topping the number of exciting, innovative, near-perfect albums that were put out that year. Roxy Music trailblazed here, getting their second album out in the first quarter of the year, and actually going above and beyond to put out another one before the year was over. Despite this, there’s nothing at all rushed about any of this work. If anything, it feels more carefully put-together than ever.

‘Roxy Music’ and ‘For Your Pleasure’ are, in my opinion, two halves of the same double album that just happened to be released at different times. ‘Roxy Music’ is the late afternoon and the early evening, where people are poised and careful and there’s an anticipation of what’s to come, and ‘For Your Pleasure’ had moved onto the late night where everything is wilder, sexier and more dangerous. You can even see this just by looking at the album covers, and there’s all kinds of links between the two in song titles and musical ideas as well.

‘Do The Strand’ is an intense and passionate opener that sums up the essence of Roxy Music for me; there’s some great texture in all the instruments and Ferry sounds so involved in his vocal performance. It’s only four minutes long, but has the feel of a much longer song all packed together into a shorter length, and it never takes a moment to find its way – it knows exactly where it’s going and powers through to get there as fast as possible.

Both ‘Beauty Queen’ and ‘Strictly Confidential take things in an entirely different direction, slowing the pace right down and allowing more time to show off the band’s talents. Ferry certainly demonstrates to anyone who didn’t already know his capability of adding copious amounts of emotion into his vocals on ‘Beauty Queen’, a song that some people consider too ‘normal’ – but in actual fact there’s a lot of weird stuff going on in the synth and guitar parts, they’re just not such a blatant part of the song. They are there, though, quietly resisting the vocals’ insistence on becoming a straight up love song. ‘Strictly Confidential’ is a definite highlight on both lyrics and atmosphere, and I love the role the sax plays in this.

If Roxy Music had been going to release a single from this album at the time, then my pick is for ‘Editions of You’, the definitive fusion of pop and art rock, with foot-tapping rhythms, hooks everywhere, amazing solos from pretty much every member of the band. It’s one of those songs that succeeds in being instantly likeable but also has a lot of long-lasting appeal. If it had been released in the 90s, it would probably have its own dance.

But if they were going to release a retrospective single, then what could be more recognisable than ‘In Every Dream Home a Heartache’? I mean, how many songs can you think of that are about inflatable sex dolls? Personally, I can think of two (some people might think that’s two too many) and this is definitely my favourite. It’s almost an inside joke, the way everything seems so cinematic and melodramatic at first even despite the subject matter, and Ferry’s singing this love poem as though he’s entirely serious about it, right up to the ‘I blew up your body…’ line, and then gives up all pretence at the punchline ‘…but you blew my mind’, and then it’s like nobody else can keep a straight face any more as all the instruments cascade in at once. It’s genius.

There’s a dreamlike, surreal quality to the first few minutes of ‘Bogus Man’, which definitely ties into this being a nighttime album: it’s like that feeling when it gets so late that nothing seems real anymore. Its rhythm seems to predate the Talking Heads, who Eno would of course go on to work with, but that’s not the only foreshadowing of Eno’s later work; the hypnotic, repeated phrases are exactly the same principle that he would take to extremes with his ambient work. Then, ‘Grey Lagoons’ is a 50s-style song with an inimitable solo from Phil Manzanera that tends to get overlooked because of its position on the album, but definitely holds its own by rocking out between the two epics of the side.

Course, absolutely everything else is leading up to the pure indulgence of the title track, where the vocals are rich and the piano is lavish and the whole song is a special treat that never really gets moving because it doesn’t need to; it’s perfectly OK with just lazing around and getting the absolute most out of everything it has to offer. Still, it has that unsettling feeling that something’s not quite right beneath the surface, keeping you alert, making every second of the song fascinating. Eno may not have a writing credit but he’s all over this song in the haze of synths coating it and steps forward to take his bow in the experimental section that closes it all out. If such a thing were possible, then I’d say this song knows just how good it is.

Though that may be the culmination of it all, every part of this album is essential, and I wouldn’t want to change a thing about it.

And so ends the altogether too brief period of Eno’s Roxy Music, which can overall only be described as one of the most successful genre mishmashes of all time. Eno would go on to have an incredibly impressive good-to-bad ratio in his string of song-based solo albums as well as invent an entire genre of music before the decade was over. Roxy Music, meanwhile, would stay together with Ferry coming to the front more than ever before, and within months would release the album that most people consider to be their best. Personally, although the first time I heard ‘For Your Pleasure’ was before I heard ‘Stranded’, I was pretty confident even then that they couldn’t release an album greater than this one.

Pink Floyd: Animals

Animals

Best song: Difficult choice, but I’ll pick Sheep.

Worst song: Not applicable.

Overall grade: 7

Round of applause, everyone, please. Pink Floyd become the first band on this website to achieve the great honour of having not one but two albums with a top grade of 7, something which won’t happen a lot, but here I just can’t help myself. This is also the first album I’ve reviewed that I refused to pick a worst song for, but we’ll get to that.

Somewhere between touring the ‘Wish You Were Here’ album and building Britannia Row studios, Roger Waters, now in full-on concept mode, came up with the idea for writing an album based around George Orwell’s novel ‘Animal Farm’. Then, he took a pair of songs that he’d worked on in sessions for the previous album, then known as ‘You Gotta Be Crazy’ and ‘Raving & Drooling’ and reworked them to fit the concept, turning them into what we now know as ‘Dogs’ and ‘Sheep’, so I guess it’s not really a surprise that this album sounds in some ways musically similar to ‘Wish You Were Here’. In other ways it doesn’t, though. Whereas on that album it felt like he was complaining and feeling sorry for himself from a distance, here he’s been influenced by the punk scene that’s just started to appear in the UK, and he’s angry and wants something to be done about these issues he’s writing about.

The opening and closing track to the album is ‘Pigs on the Wing’ (same melody each time, slightly different lyrics) and it adds both nothing and everything. I’d be shocked if it was anyone’s favourite track (either part) since it’s just basic acoustic guitar strumming and Roger singing a little love ditty to his girlfriend, but at the same time it’s what really takes the album to the next level for me. Without it, you’d just have three songs that use animal metaphors for types of people; with it you get a complete concept, and also a ray of hope in the otherwise-downbeat world of the album. It also adds a personal side, making the record feel like it’s about one guy’s experiences with all these types of people and the eventual realisation that no matter how much things might suck, he has this girl he loves to help him through, which is really quite touching.

The rest of side one is entirely taken up by ‘Dogs’. I’m just going to repeat what’s always said about this song and point out that it’s undoubtedly one if David Gilmour’s best vocal parts, ever – one of the first times where his hard-rock voice is really convincing, and he definitely shows us the ruthlessness of the ‘dogs’ he describes: I love when he sings the ‘you’ll get the chance to STICK THE KNIFE IN!’ line. Gilmour also plays slow, calculated solos which enhance the feeling of paranoia while drums march ominously in the background. I mean, it’s actually a fairly simple song if you think about it - but it’s damn good at hiding that fact. I don’t know what I respect more; a band with amazing technical proficiency, or a band that actually doesn’t play that well but makes it so you barely notice.

‘Pigs (Three Different Ones)’ follows, and it begins with that weird, spacey, piano melody, before a relaxing guitar part comes in, and gradually, the melody changes and a few more effects and instruments come in until SUDDENLY, it’s no longer mellow and gentle, it’s a full on foot-tapping funk song that completely denounces the old saying ‘you can’t dance to Pink Floyd’ even while it’s completely trashing various people in power (the identity of two of them remains unknown; the third is Mary Whitehouse, a name which doesn’t mean a whole lot to someone born in 1996.) Well, you can’t dance to the middle section so much, since it’s full of all kinds of weird sounds and guitars fed through machines to actually sound like pigs, but it’s still all really clever.

The easiest way of picking a best song on this album is to pull a name out of a hat, but maybe I’d put ‘Sheep’ twice in the hat to give it a better chance. After a quiet opening, the song becomes quiet chaotic, with a panicked vocal and a mess of instruments falling over each other, perfectly conveying the fear of the sheep; the loyal followers. (So, to recap: one slow and deliberate song, one fast and upbeat one, and one all-out crazy one. Great contrasting but complementary styles.) The echo of the ‘dragged down by a stone’ line and the chilling recital of the Lord’s prayer are inspired additions to an already perfect song. The darkness is lifted by a rousing electric guitar riff, also the song’s best hook, that begins a couple of minutes towards the end, as the sheep rise up to take on the dogs, proving that Roger Waters wasn’t always relentlessly cynical.

Then we have the reprise of ‘Pigs on the Wing’ to round things off in that simple but impossible to dislike way it does, and I hate it, but only because it means the album is coming to an end. I love it really. ‘And any fool knows a dog needs a home… a shelter from pigs on the wing’. It’s quite essential to bring things round full circle and tie everything together, and that’s why I absolutely can’t select a worst song for this album, because without any one song, it simply could not be a 7-rated album, or work as a cohesive piece at all.

Roger Waters, speculation says, is on the last leg of his massive Wall tour (which I am going to see in six days, hooray!) so as soon as that’s all over, I’ll begin thinking of ways to persuade him to take the entirety of this album out on tour. Maybe he can perform it at Battersea Power Station (as featured on the stunning cover) before they perform the criminal act they’re planning of turning it into an apartment complex.

The Who: Quadrophenia

Quadrophenia

Best song: Love Reign O’er Me

Worst song: I’m One

Overall grade: 7

Everyone does stupid things sometimes. A stupid thing I once did (a long time ago, before I was a big Who fan) is bought the album ‘Quadrophenia’ having never listened to it before, putting it into my computer to play, taking the sound off mute and listening to the whole of disc one, all the while thinking ‘What’s up with this? The music has potential but either the sound quality is dreadful or it’s drenched in so many sound effects that you can’t hear what’s going on!’ Then I took the disc out and the sound effects continued and I realised that they were coming from somewhere else on my computer entirely.

But Pete Townshend did not do a stupid thing by making this album, because when I got to listen to this without any volcano noises in the background, I found that it is not only the best thing the Who ever put to tape, but it is a crowning – and pioneering – achievement in the rock opera form as a whole. (All the other rock operas I think are amazing were released after this one.)

In essence, this is the story of Jimmy Cooper, an adolescent boy struggling with trying to survive alone in the world, having just left home, and also fit in with the other Mods of the day. Partly because of his identity crisis and partly because of his drug problem, he feels like his personality has split into four (hence ‘Quad’) which mirror the personalities of the four band members. It’s actually quite a clever story and not all that difficult to follow, but just in case, the basic plot is written out in a great first-person narrative in the liner notes.

This album flows together incredibly well, not in that the songs have smooth transitions, but more in that you’re constantly reminded that you’re listening to a part of a whole. This is mostly down to the four themes, also known as the title lines of ‘Helpless Dancer’, ‘Is It Me’, ‘Bell Boy’ and ‘Love Reign O’er Me’, which are played throughout the album at appropriate moments, so cleverly that they feel like part of the song they’re imposing upon, to symbolise which personality Jimmy is associating with at that moment. They’re all first introduced in opener ‘I Am The Sea’, which foreshadows the whole record and adds symmetry (it both starts and ends at sea.) Each themeis also expanded into a full song at some point (although sadly not one on each side) giving further insight into each area of his character.

So, this gimmicky stuff is all well and good, but what of people who don’t care about those things and just want to hear great tunes? Well, this album is actually perfect for that too. In fact, the only song I’m not sold on is ‘I’m One’, and even then, it has a great beginning which contrasts the previous song, and it’s only towards the end that it descends into bland, generic hard rock. Aside from that, these songs are either great, really great or classic.

Side one includes ‘The Real Me’, one of Entwhistle’s most stunning bass parts – this would still be amazing if it was JUST the bass and nothing else, seriously. But that and the rough, growly vocals give the song its raw quality which contrasts the clean feel of the final song. Another connection between the beginning and end of the album is that the second and second last real songs are both instrumentals, further developing the four themes and allowing Pete to play around with his synths and be a bit experimental. They’re clearly different songs, yet similar enough that I can’t help see them as a pair.

Another high point is ‘The Punk And The Godfather’, which has some sections driven by a heavy bass and others by a pretty acoustic guitar, reflecting the confused mental state of the protagonist. Daltrey’s vocals are expressive and amazing, as everywhere here, and I really believe that he is Jimmy. ‘The Dirty Jobs’ has a classic moment in its ‘I’m being pushed down…’ line, and it reallys trikes me how Pete has been writing about exactly the same subject matter – difficulties of everyday life while you’re young – ever since ‘My Generation’, but he’s become so much more sophisticated as a songwriter that you can hardly tell they’re related.

‘Helpless Dancer’ has a gorgeous opening and ‘Is It In My Head’ is poppier with Beatlesque vocals, but by ‘I’ve Had Enough’, the final song on the first LP, our main character seems to have given up. The hopeless atmosphere and more understated song (compared with the others at least) again highlights the triumphant final song, which is in fact quoted a couple of times here.

Moving onto disc two, we have more songs which I feel honoured to have constant access too, like ‘5.15’ which begins by sounding quite melancholy in its downbeat reference to ‘Cut My Hair’ from earlier, before exploding with heavy backing music, call and response vocals and lyrics full of imagery and symbolism. ‘Sea & Sand’ is a delight too, showcasing Pete’s innate ability for transitioning from hard and rocking to quiet and sentimental and back again without making it feel clunky. ‘Bell Boy’ has a great marching beat which I really get into, but then it occasionally stops for a short time, which might seem annoying at first but which is actually a great way of showing the crazy, unpredictable nature of this personality.

By side four and the national anthem-style opening of ‘Doctor Jimmy’, you can definitely tell we’re reaching the end, but everything continues to build until we reach the peak with ‘Love Reign O’er Me’. From the first three piano chords of that song you can tell that something special is going to happen – they have such gravity. Roger gives his vocals a soaring, epic feel and although I’ve never seen the Quadrophenia film, I can just imagine Jimmy standing on his rock, arms raised to the heavens, singing this song. The epic guitar part provides a huge release and a suitably overblown finish to this album; one that has rarely been matched in its impact.

If ‘Tommy’ proved that a bunch of songs could be strung together to tell an epic story, then ‘Quadrophenia’ proved that that could be done without compromising the music at all. It’s a truly special album that takes basic hard rock and adds progressive elements and a pinch of Broadway-style theatrics to create an album that is totally deserving of its place in what was (subjectively of course) the best ever year for music.

Steven Wilson: The Raven That Refused To Sing

The Raven That Refused To Sing (And Other Stories)

Best song: Take your pick. I think I’ll pick The Watchmaker

Worst song: why? why? why? ok, The Pin Drop

Overall grade: 7

Look, it’s the album that’s in my little icon!

Reviewing my very favourite albums is something of a terrifying prospect, because I know I’ll never be able to do them justice, and I feel that particularly strongly with this one. Today, it is August 6 2013 and I can categorically state that Steven Wilson’s third offering is, without doubt, the best album released this decade so far. I’m fully prepared to re-evaluate this on December 31, 2019, but considering we’re over a third of the way through and there’s been no real competition as of yet… I’d say Mr. Wilson is in with a fair chance of the prize.

Whereas on his first two albums Wilson went a bit crazy having been let loose alone in the studio and started trying out thousands of ideas, most of which worked in fairness, here he finally seems able to stick to one main idea and create a work that is incredibly cohesive, driven, refined and which contains approximately 0.01% filler. It cleverly blends classic symphonic sounds with modern inventiveness and in doing so, fills every possible definition of ‘progressive rock’.

Of course, when I say one main idea, I don’t mean that this is a concept album. (Although somewhere around my third listen I began to see it as based around the concept of winter and loneliness.) Instead, as the title suggests, each one of these songs has its own story to tell. You get to meet a new character every time and hear about their life and often death, usually in quite a twisted way. I guess you could say that this is to a rock opera what a book of short stories is to a novel.

Opener ‘Luminol’ is a clear stylistic throwback to the 70s. I’m not sure what a chemical that makes blood fluoresce has to do with a busker who’s treated as nothing more than part of the scenery, but there you go. It’s jazzy with a lot of different melodies, all of which are interesting, and a particularly brilliant instrumental passage in the first couple of minutes. It’s not heavy on the lyrics at all, in fact they feel more like a special effect like a solo or a fuzz pedal than the focus of the song.

‘Drive Home’ is all about the guitar solo; I believe Guthrie Gogan plays it and it’s fast becoming one of my favourites in studio recordings of music. Prior to the sheer awesomeness of that, the song is a classic ballad but one of Wilson’s absolute best. It really does feel like a late night journey home.

There’s a lot of texture on ‘The Holy Drinker’ that makes the previous two tracks seem sparse in comparison. If we’re sticking with my winter concept, the first two related to the cold and the snow and the outdoors, while this one is indoors in front of a raging fire. I also think of this as the most unique and original part of the album. And the musicians that play here are literally of the highest possible calibre, and hearing them play really makes this song a joy to listen to, although it can seem a bit overwhelming at first with all these players being of an equal standard. I love Adam Holzman’s organ in particular.

‘The Pin Drop’ seems to be the token single, even though it wasn’t officially a single. It’s an objectively “normal” length, has the most energy and the most obvious hooks. I actually think it’s an amazing song that goes through an incredible amount of changes for its length, but even so, if he made a whole album full of Pin Drops I’d consider it selling out.

But the scariest thing of all, scarier than any of these stories, is that even after these four masterpieces the album hasn’t properly hit its stride yet. It does so with the magnificent ‘The Watchmaker’, which contains four minutes of frail beauty which perfectly represent the aged man in the story and the meticulous arranging of tiny parts in his craft. And then that wonderful cascading guitar part comes in and we realise that maybe the watchmaker can feel emotion after all! But after a few more plot twists, the watchmaker dies in a blast of dissonance. It’s perfectly written to tell a story through music with as few words as possible.

Wilson’s voice is at its absolute best and most tender on the title track – in fact there are times when I can’t believe the song isn’t a true story about his own life. The only half-decent word for this is spellbinding in how its dark, wistful atmosphere washes around you, and by the time it reaches the ‘Sing to me, raven…’ part I’m crying. Not many songs have that effect on me. It’s a perfect contrast to the ambitious epic of the previous track and I quite honestly cannot find a fault with it.

I feel like this album is probably full of little tricks and subtleties that I haven’t discovered yet. I can’t wait for it to be twenty years’ time and to be hearing this album, by then an old favourite, and to suddenly sit up and say ‘Hey! I never noticed that before!’

Prog rock in the 70s didn’t really have one person that completely defined the whole movement. These days it does, and that person is Steven Wilson, and he has just released one of the classic albums of the future.

Radiohead: Kid A

Kid A

Best song: Everything In Its Right Place

Worst song: no, I just can’t. but In Limbo if you make me choose

Overall grade: 7

If Sigur Ros and Kraftwerk decided to make an album together, the end product would probably sound similar to this. Only not as good, because few things are: this is not only the best Radiohead album, it is one of my top albums of all time. You don’t have to like it, but I’ll probably be more inclined to like you if you do.

I’ve noticed a very different attitude to this album between ‘serious’ music fans and more casual music fans. Either of them might like it or dislike it, but upon hearing that I think it’s the best thing Radiohead have done (yet) the serious fan shows little surprise, yet to the casual listener, this is considered to be a surprising and controversial opinion. Maybe that’s because a lot of critics rate it, but people who don’t read reviews just remember back to when it was first released and everyone was really shocked that it wasn’t OK Computer, version 2.0.

Now I heard about all this controversy before I listened to the album, so I was actually expecting to hate it, or certainly be more surprised by it than I was. However, what ended up happening was that not only did I fall completely, uncontrollably in love with Radiohead’s fourth effort, but it also made perfect sense. ‘OK Computer’ hinted at the band’s interest in electronic music, and it seemed only natural that they would take that further.

It’s not full blown electronic, though. It may be mostly made by computers and packed with even, regulated rhythms but the human, emotional touch is always present. Like ‘How to Disappear Completely’, where Thom Yorke’s wailing is absolutely heartbreaking, and there are more legato, swirling textures enveloping the whole song. (Is using an Italian word in a music review too pretentious? I’m not sure I’m comfortable with it, to be honest. Might not do it again.)

You might expect an album where the first track is the best to feel top-heavy and be a letdown later, but no, the quality is top notch all the way through. The opener truly is almost faultless, slow and deliberate and intriguing to introduce the album’s themes, with those opening notes that seem to be warm and cold at the same time. Then there’s the atmospheric title track, a piece of music that defines the ‘less is more’ philosophy. And then there’s ‘The National Anthem’, heavier than the first two barely-there compositions with a  noisy horn section at the end that contrasts the note-by-note perfect construction of the rest of the album. That’s okay. Not everything has to be precise, this isn’t math rock, you know.

‘Treefingers’ is the song Radiohead always seem to have, that works really well but only as a part of the album. I can’t see anyone hearing just this song and liking it, but as part of a whole it’s excellent. Some people call it ambient, I don’t really see that – I prefer to think of it as a song that requires patience.

Another favourite of mine here is ‘Idioteque’, a Krautrock-influenced track with a whole bunch of unrelated layers looped and thrown in together, creating a really unsettling landscape. People have covered this song, which seems crazy to me. How can you cover something that has so much unique identity?

Things slow down again towards the end of the album with ‘Morning Bell’ and ‘Motion Picture Soundtrack’. The first of the two is a harrowing, empty song about cutting kids in half. Well, we actually had a positive song earlier in ‘Optimistic’, so that had to balance out somewhere! About that final song, what kind of messed up film would it take to have that as a soundtrack? That’s not an insult, though, it’s a wonderful conclusion to an incredibly intense album. It’s not the conclusion – there’s actually a mini hidden track after a couple minutes’ silence, ‘Genchildren’, but I don’t listen to that one, it ruins the album’s symmetry and completeness. Maybe it should’ve been on ‘Amnesiac’.

This album almost casts a spell. Once you’ve started it, you can’t turn it off until the end; it takes you to another world – the impersonal, indifferent ice world of the cover. Then somewhere around ‘Optimistic’, you realise that that’s this world, and that’s terrifying.

Yes: Close To The Edge

Close To The Edge

Best song: Close To The Edge

Worst song: …you cannot be serious. Oh, fine then, And You And I

Overall grade: 7

There are albums I think are better than this one. Not very many, but they do exist – often those that are more coherent i.e. are so great because the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. But I cannot think of one single album that has less flaws than Yes’ 1972 masterpiece here. (Many would agree: it has over 2000 5 star ratings on ProgArchives.com)

However, I believe I am supposed to be objective while writing this and so I’ve tried very hard to find some negative aspects to comment on in order to show I’ve considered both sides. Here’s what I came up with:

1.       It’s too good. Sometimes it’s just far too much awesomeness to cope with in one sitting so I have to split it up into individual songs. When I do listen to the complete album, it basically spoils me for all other music for the rest of the day.

2.       Yeah, that’s all I got.

I can actually understand why someone wouldn’t like this album. I’ve never read a truly negative review of it (though I’d be interested to, so if you know of one…) but it’s hardly everyone’s thing; as whether or not you like it depends on your priorities regarding music. It’s very much an album to listen to. If you just have it on in the background, half-listening while doing something else, it sounds like random noise. It’s complicated and you have to pay attention to make sense of it. A lot of people don’t like that in music and I think that’s fair enough – there’s only a certain number of hours in the day and not everyone wants to spend them solely on music. It also hasn’t got lyrics you can particularly relate to, a beat you can dance to or anything that’s likely to make you shed a tear, unless you’re really really moved by Bill Bruford’s drumming.

But it’s technically perfect and the structure and writing of the title track is flawless. Let me break it down: some very quiet bird noises grow louder and eventually segue into some fairly soothing outdoor music before the faster guitar crash in and the band dissolves into a fast, complicated, slightly jazzy instrumental piece, with a couple of minute pauses for Jon Anderson to let out an ‘aaaah!’ Then, at around the 3 minute mark, he gives the band a cue to change direction into a more structured, symphonic section which lasts until Bill Bruford gives us a great drum line and Jon starts to sing the first verse, at which point the music picks up pace again. For a short instrumental break and the chorus, the instruments become rougher and choppier until a wonderful swirling organ comes in and a couple of backing singers add lovely harmonies. This fades and the volume goes down, some rhythmic drums keeping the pulse for a while but then coming to a stop, leaving us with just some calming naturesque sounds, like the dripping water sound effects and the atmospheric music. But as we pass the halfway point the organ comes back in and begins to build things back up, joined after a while by some far off soft vocals which carry us through to a much quieter part of the song that feels very melancholy. Jon’s voice shows a rare emotion and the music just envelopes you completely. A few drum taps count the band in and then we’re back in a more excited freeform style where everyone present is displaying their best-ever musicianship. A bombastic and triumphant chorus comes out to finish it off and we revisit the original theme to tie everything up before the instruments gently fade out, returning to the simple tweeting of birds that we first heard, and that’s your song.

It’s not like a sidelong that’s a bunch of short songs strung together with connecting pieces, this is very much a single track, and everything is timed to perfection. But as if hearing that wasn’t enough to change your world, we have two more songs to go! Neither of them try to be the first, there’s the more acoustic ‘And You And I’ that’s almost folky in places, and the hard rock-influenced ‘Siberian Khatru’ which is great except it just fades out to silence at the end, making it kind of a boring finish to the album. But after 38 mindblowing minutes, it’s not much to complain about.

I also like the cover art. It’s green! But not plain green, a range of shades. What does it symbolise? Is it the earth becoming shrouded in darkness? Is it Roger Dean running out of red paint again? Is it an unused design for one of Rick Wakeman’s capes? For something that doesn’t have a real picture, I look at it for far too long.

Even if it doesn’t sound like your thing, I think you should listen to this record once in your life just to experience it. It’s the pinnacle of Yes and of everything classic prog tried to achieve, and it’s not just a record, it’s an experience; a musical rite of passage.

Joy Division: Closer

Closer

Best song: Decades

Worst song: Colony

Overall grade: 7

People always debate as to whether ‘Unknown Pleasures’ or ‘Closer’ is a better record. The fact that there’s no real consensus opinion really says a lot about the band’s strength, but in my opinion, this one wins out – but only by the tiniest fraction. Course, ‘Pleasures’ has better cover art, so it evens out in the end. Anyway, I’m hoping this review will be a little easier to write than the last Joy Division one – I have more notes made for this, so let’s see…

Interestingly, pretty much all of the reviews I’ve read of this have given it a perfect score. The notable exception is Robert Christgau (who was surprised by that? Not me!) and I completely understand their viewpoints. It doesn’t have a major flaw. Well, it has things that would be major flaws on other records, such as being ridiculously dark and having the same repetitive mood throughout, but this record breaks all the rules by making those things good. Innovation-wise, this group achieved more in two albums than the Rolling Stones have in fifty years. (That’s not a dig at the Stones, by the way. I love them but you can’t deny they never really invented anything, which puts things into perspective.)

This thing has songs; nine of them to be precise. In general they’re slightly longer than those on ‘Unknown Pleasures’ and consequently it feels like they have plenty of time to either develop or to crush your soul. ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ is brilliant as an opener. It’s heavy, dissonant and relentless with chilling screams going on in the background. There’s also a bunch of machinery-type noises in it which sound kind of like industrial rock before that was even a thing. Also, Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook randomly traded instruments for the song. I don’t know if that changes it but I think it’s a really cool thing for a band to do.

Side 2 opens with a really quiet, creepy bassline, and then we’re in ‘Heart & Soul’. The instruments are kind of mixed the wrong way round, so we have the rhythm section at the forefront while the vocals are pushed more into the background, giving them an echoey sound, like Ian Curtis is separated from everybody else. That’s oddly prophetic. The pace of the album increases for ‘Twenty Four Hours’; the mood doesn’t, but that’s not the only difference with this song. The instrumental parts of it seem to me like the only time where the members (other than Ian) seem properly human. At other times the keyboards and drum machines have an eerie, robotic regularity about them.

‘The Eternal’ comes next, starting with what I can only describe as tuneful static, and turning into a very slow, gothic song that could very well be a funeral march. And then Curtis’ career comes to an end with the outstanding, darkly beautiful ‘Decades’, backed with a shimmering guitar and basically standing as a summation of everything Joy Division. And that’s where we leave them – a band that had two very powerful, very different albums (plus a single, ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, that links them). And as devastating as Curtis’ suicide was (and still is), maybe it’s for the best. This way, no future releases will ever try to ruin the brilliance of these two. As much as music can be, they’re untouchable.

(I don’t think this was anywhere near as bad as the last one! Maybe I’ll get round to rewriting that someday…)

Pulp: Different Class

Different Class 

Best song: Common People

Worst song: Live Bed Show if I have to pick

Grade: 7

I listened to this yesterday afternoon, and I already want to listen to it again. You’d think I’d be sick of it by now, but I’m not, it’s just that kind of album. It also might be one of the hookiest albums ever made… every song gets stuck in my head on a frequent basis, which doesn’t annoy me anywhere near as much as it should, because every song is good.

That’s something you don’t realise at first, though. The big single is the third track, Common People, which reached #2 in the UK, and it deserved to be huge. And the first time I heard the album, I was so blown away by this one song, that I wasn’t really able to appreciate everything that surrounds it. It’s only on subsequent listens that you come to the realisation, ‘Hey, Mis-Shapes is good too! Oh, and so’s Sorted for E’s and Wizz! And so’s… wait, you know what? There isn’t a bad song on here!’

So, what makes these songs so good? Apart from the great melodies, there’s a lot of variety – within every individual song are a lot of different textures; parts where the focus is Jarvis’ voice with very little backing, and parts where there’s a very thick layer of instruments all built up. The tracks are an excellent mix of the accessible (see: the fun, feel-good pop of ‘Disco 2000’) and the slightly more experimental (‘Feeling Called Love’, which is a good explanation of Pulp’s reputation as the artiest Britpop band).  And, it goes without saying, the lyrics, which are some of my all time favourites. A sample: ‘I can’t help it, I was dragged up/My favourite park’s a car park/Grass is something you smoke/Birds are something you shag.’

I chose ‘Live Bed Show’ as the worst song but I still think it’s great, with its smooth, gentle melody and warm feeling that opposes the sadness in its lyrics. But maybe it seems weaker because it comes directly before another ballad, ‘Something Changed’, which I prefer because of the obvious sincerity behind it and the way it messes around with timings – beginning ‘I wrote this song two hours before we met’, but then going on to describe things that happened after they met. So is it all inside his head, a crazy daydream, or does it really happen?

My version of this album has 12 different cover options – little cards that you can slot into the front of the lyrics sheet to create your own cover art. It’s a gimmick but a good one; I change it every time I listen. The covers all feature full-colour scenes with some or all of the band members present, but they’re in black and white. This relates to the idea of being outsiders, a theme that runs through the whole album, which is full of commentaries on other peoples’ lives, other peoples’ relationships, that the narrator is not quite involved in. Yet they still manage to be anthemic and uniting, bringing these oddballs together from ‘We don’t look the same as you, we don’t do the things you do/But we live round here too’ all the way to ‘It’s around the corner in Soho where other broken people go/Let’s go.’

I get a strange sense of righteous anger from these songs. They make me want to go out and change the world.

King Crimson: In the Court of the Crimson King

In the Court of the Crimson King

Best song: The Court of the Crimson King

Worst song: Moonchild

Overall grade: 7

Greg Lake’s voice blows me away. Even on 21^st Century Schizoid Man, where it’s so distorted you can barely make out what he’s saying, it’s just… wow. King Crimson were mighty inconsistent but they had a handful of outstanding albums with little to elevate one above another, so I’m not ashamed to say that it’s Greg Lake’s presence that pushes this one to the top of the pile for me. I reckon he just edges out Peter Gabriel for my favourite vocalist ever, and his best work can be found right here.

I could just write 500 words on the power and intensity and the hundreds of different emotions of Lake’s voice, but I want people to actually read this, so I won’t. Instead, I’ll talk about the other things that make it awesome! The album, that is, not his voice. There are just five songs, four of them are close to flawless, and put together they would make something that’s incredibly worthy of the title ‘first ever progressive rock album’, whether it’s completely true or not.

We kick things off with ‘21^st Century Schizoid Man’, which is still different to anything else I’ve ever heard, so I can only imagine what it was like in 1969. Then there’s ‘I Talk To The Wind’. King Crimson are generally thought of as being one of the heavier, more avant-garde of prog bands, but this song proves that they could do the other side of things just as well. It’s so light and floaty, led by Ian McDonald’s flute and light on the drums.

Closing off Side One is ‘Epitaph’, and listening to this makes it easy to see why the genre immediately got its reputation of being bombastic and pretentious – two traits which many people see as automatically negative, as when they’re done well (like here!) they can work. Although Lake’s voice is so far down in the mix here that I’m often straining to hear it and miss other details of the song.

‘Moonchild’ is the only one here that I don’t consider one of the four classics. The first two and a half minutes are another ‘I Talk To The Wind’-style ballad, only nowhere near as awesome, but it’s the following ten minutes that I’m going to complain about. That being said, though, I don’t have the strong reaction to it that most people do. I’ve heard it called unlistenable, but it doesn’t repulse me, more, it disappoints me. Up to this point every note of every song has felt like it was planned out and agonised over so that it would be exactly right, but here, it’s so aimless. It’s not even a proper instrumental jam – it’s more like everyone said ‘I think I’m just going to play three random notes, trail off and wait for someone else to do the same kind of thing…’ Why? Why, when you have a group of such obviously talented songwriters, would you waste ten minutes on that?

But it’s OK! We finish off with ‘The Court of the Crimson King’ and this, maybe this was the whole point. Robert Fripp and co. made us sit through all of ‘Moonchild’ just so that this epic would seem even better by comparison! Let me tell you, that moment around the 8 minute mark just after ‘The Dance of the Puppets’ when the whole band comes crashing back in – that makes it worth it, every single time. The whole song is stunning, powerful, and keeps me on the edge of my seat for the whole 9 minutes. Prog would get better than this, but not much.

(Fun game: listen to any other prog band and try to guess which of these five songs they were most inspired by.)

Pink Floyd: The Piper at the Gates of Dawn

The Piper at the Gates of Dawn

Best song: Interstellar Overdrive

Worst song: Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk

Overall grade: 7

Syd Barrett writing songs, back when he was very weird, but it wasn’t yet the disturbing kind of weird that made you realise his mental state was completely beyond repair. No, on Piper, I actually wouldn’t object to being inside the mind that came up with this.

At this point in Pink Floyd’s history, they were playing live shows pretty much every night, and these consisted mainly of long, instrumental, acid-rock jams, and this side of the band is represented in the group compositions; the best of these being Interstellar Overdrive – a brilliant headphones song that rivals the Grateful Dead and Hawkwind in making you feel like you’re taking an acid trip in outer space. The others in this style, Astronomy Domine and Pow R Toc H. are both excellent too, already hinting at the band’s later fascination with studio effects and gimmicks.

But the album is also packed with songs that show a side of the band you couldn’t find by going to their live shows – the three-minute psychedelic pop tracks, almost any of which could have been singles. My favourite of these is Lucifer Sam when taken overall – it’s a really cool bass-driven song with a great vocal hook and some funky instrument noises scattered through it. When looking at the lyrics, though, Flaming is the best; a tale of two kids playing hide and seek with some great imagery (Watching buttercups cup the light/Sleeping on a dandelion) and the classic childlike squeal of ‘Yippee! You can’t see me but I can you.’

The Barrett composition on here that most people bash is side 2’s Chapter 24, and while not as strong as many of the other songs, I really like the hypnotic quality of Syd’s voice – he’s almost detached as he recites the lyrics, which is appropriate considering they weren’t written by him but instead taken from the I-Ching (Chinese Book of Changes).

However, the other song that everyone complains about is the side one closer and sole Roger Waters composition, ‘Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk’, and that one’s justified. The lyrics are by far the worst he would ever write, and I can’t even remember the tune despite listening to it yesterday (does it even have one?)

The album finishes with ‘Bike’, which despite what some people say, is NOT a novelty song – come on, Syd Barrett was taking several tabs of LSD every day, I’m pretty sure that’s just what was in his head, including the minute-long sound collage at the end. The strange children’s-toy noises that make up this really sum up the mood of the whole album – fun and childlike on the surface, but with a lot of dark, spooky undertones.

Overall, I really consider this the first Floyd masterpiece, and on some days even the finest. On the later 70s albums, yes, the standard was ridiculously high, but everything was meticulously crafted – planned to create exactly the effect they wanted, while on here, everything’s so spontaneous. The Floyd were just trying to write regular songs, and they turned out this mind-blowing, and that’s really why giving a grade of 7 is such an obvious decision.