More Songs About Buildings And Food
Talking Heads
1978
Talking Heads’ debut album, Talking Heads: 77 had been very good, but it lacked a tiny something that would have pushed it to the next level. Luckily, for their second album, Talking Heads solved that problem by recruiting Brian Eno as producer. The pairing was nothing short of brilliant and set in place a creative partnership that would give the world three incomparable albums. With David Byrne’s nervous energy giving the songs the requisite weirdness that Eno would have usually provided on other albums, Eno is allowed to simply make sure everything sounds great. With an emphasis on Jerry Harrison’s keyboard and the band’s mutant, white-funk guitar style, More Songs is a natural and complete expansion on the themes and musical identities established on the Heads’ first album.
#9
Blood On The Tracks
Bob Dylan
1975
In 1975, the world was ready for a great Bob Dylan album. It had been some years since Dylan had released something that measured up to an artist of his legendary stature. His early 70s albums ranged from passable to downright appalling. So, the coherent, focused music on Blood On The Tracks was celebrated as a return to form of sorts. But few people were prepared from the seething pile of caustic emotions Dylan dropped on the world with this album. Written at a time when Dylan and his wife Sara were in the middle of separating, it’s impossible to not read Dylan’s personal pain into these ten intense songs, no matter how many times Dylan stubbornly denies that they’re autobiographical. It’s tempting to call these exquisite acoustic songs “beautiful,” but the emotions are so raw and honest that enjoying the album seems almost rude.
#8
Harvest
Neil Young
1972
Has Neil Young recorded better albums than Harvest? Yes. Has he recorded albums with more honesty, power and strength? I’ve already put two of them on this list. But Harvest is Neil Young’s most well-crafted album and for that, it remains my favorite. One of the most interesting facets of Neil Young’s personality is his constant shifting between bitter rocker and tender, straw-in-mouth hayseed folkie. Harvest sees Neil swinging completely towards the latter for the first time in his career, going all the way to Nashville and recording with top-notch session musicians to get that country sound just right. Even within those contexts, though, Neil’s grasp of melodies and natural tendency to inject strong emotions into his music shines through. Harvest may not be Neil Young’s best album, but it’s definitely his prettiest and I say that’s worth something.
#7
Berlin
Lou Reed
1973
Fresh off a complete career reinvention at the hands of David Bowie, Lou Reed could have seized the opportunity presented to him with his successful Transformer record and become a pop star. But that’s not what he chose to do. What he chose was to release Berlin and thus alienate every new fan the hip jazziness of “Walk On The Wild Side” had won over. After the winking glam fluffiness of Transformer, the brutal, sarcastic, almost operatic Berlin was a shocker. Loosely built around a story of doomed lovers grappling with drug addiction and depression in Germany’s infamous heroin capital, Berlin is a bombastic, unsettling work, far removed from anything Lou Reed had recorded up to that point (or since, for that matter).
#6
Another Green World
Brian Eno
1975
After a personality conflict led to him leaving Roxy Music in 1973, Brian Eno took a stab at a solo career. His first solo records were interesting, overtly artistic slabs of rock, with dark humor and wry sarcasm blended thoroughly through the mix. However, for his third solo album, Eno took things more than a few steps further. Embracing his unrelenting experimental musical urges, Eno boiled his music down to its purest essence, leaving only beautiful melodies, drifting electronics and the occasional, dream-like lyric. Another Green World doesn’t need many words to convey its point. The record is a stately, elegant piece of work, providing a perfect medium between Eno’s earlier, more rock-oriented material and the ambient experiments he would embrace later.
#5
The Idiot
Iggy Pop
1977
Iggy Pop had no business being alive in 1977. In and out of various rehab programs following the collapse of the Stooges, Iggy’s life had spiraled way out of control. He’d gone from being one of the most exciting figures in rock music to a disintegrating has-been. All that changed when he was fished out of Los Angeles by his friend David Bowie, who spirited him off to France and Germany, where Bowie was recording his own new material. United by a mutual desire to recover from years of substance abuse, Iggy and Bowie holed up in their European recording studios and created four masterful albums. Iggy’s highlight was The Idiot, his first solo record and the most left-field album Iggy has ever been involved in. Instead of the slobbering recklessness of the Stooges, The Idiot is as cold and grey as its cover. Co-writing songs with Bowie and his team of musicians, the album is far from a purely Iggy-oriented experience, but for the first time in his life, Iggy sounded focused and in-control.
#4
Marquee Moon
Television
1977
CBGB’s, that legendary New York rock club, is most famous for launching bands like Talking Heads, Blondie and, above all, the Ramones. However, long before any of those groups knew what they were doing, Television were the masters at CBGB’s. While Television were essential in opening the club’s doors to punk music, they themselves had almost nothing in common with either the Ramones' teenage fun or Talking Heads' twitchy edginess. What they had were two knockout guitarists. Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd practically performed choreographed dances with their guitars, throwing piercing, methodical riffs at each other until the song reached its eventual conclusion. In this sense, they had far more in common with those huge 70s rock bands than with the punks they got grouped in with. But Television were (and still are) surrounded by an undeniable aura of cool and that translates perfectly through their debut album, Marquee Moon. With Verlaine’s strained voice, elliptical lyrics and icy precision leading the charge, Television crafted one of the few guitar-oriented albums of the entire decade that isn’t a complete and utter bore to listen to.
#3
Fun House
The Stooges
1970
Ever since the very first riffs snuck away from Chuck Berry’s guitar, people have been calling rock-and-roll dangerous. But to modern ears, most of those once-vibrant records sound exactly like what they are: oldies. Not to take anything away from those classic songs, but the same cannot be said of Fun House. Forty years after its release, it still sounds like the most violent and brutal thing ever committed to tape. This album is the golden standard for what dangerous rock music should sound like. Made by four Detroit boys barely older than myself (ok, Ann Arbor, but Detroit sounds so much cooler), if there’s a reason this album sounds like a gang of hoodlums tearing through Los Angeles, it’s because that’s exactly what Dave Alexander, Ron and Scott Asheton and a former debate champion named James Osterberg, Jr. were doing. By the time the recording of Fun House was over, little Jim Osterberg had been transformed, by this fiery inferno of an album, into Iggy Pop.
#2
Low
David Bowie
1977
Low is practically two albums for the price on one. The first half features some of the sharpest, shortest and best pure rock songs of David Bowie’s entire career, from the rollicking “Be My Wife” to the moody, expansive “Always Crashing In The Same Car”. But then you’ve got the album’s second half, which is where Low really earns all the superlative accolades history has thrown at it. Four sprawling instrumentals make up the record’s B-side and even when listening on CD, it’s best to take a moment and pause before starting track 8, just so you get the full effect of switching between these two halves of the record. Those four songs, each one an attempt at abstractly representing the sights and sounds Bowie was experiencing around him in Berlin, are a window into the future of rock music. I cannot emphasize enough just how out-there this album was for the time. Chart-topping pop stars like Bowie weren’t supposed to record music this textured and intricate. Plus, Bowie had to go and do it in a way that made every modern composer, the people who were expected to be putting stuff like this together, look like absolute chumps. However, with fellow rock visionaries Brian Eno and Iggy Pop also working on the album, perhaps this shouldn’t be such a surprise. With that kind of artistic meeting-of-the-minds in place, featuring three of the decade’s greatest architects of music, how could anything less than Low have been created?
#1
Unknown Pleasures
Joy Division
1979
One of my strangest, most jarring pop-culture memories in recent years was walking through an Urban Outfitters and seeing this album’s cover printed on a series of pastel-colored girls t-shirts. Needless to say, seeing the iconic cover image of one of history’s most isolated, crushed albums reduced to an abstract pattern on bright shirts seemed a bit…inappropriate to me (for the record, the picture is a computer scan of a star going nova). But this is symptomatic of what Joy Division’s legacy has gone through in the past decade or so. Joy Division have become much more culturally visible, for whatever reason. It’s become almost cliché to be a Joy Division fan and if you say you like them, people immediately assume you’re a moody teenager. The subtleties and details of their music have been steamrolled under a legacy of being really, really unhappy. This saddens me, especially when I listen to Unknown Pleasures. Here is a record that is one of the most honest, intense testaments to personal expression I’ve ever heard. Is the record incredibly sad and depressing? Yes, but it’s a specific sadness, something that a listener shouldn’t really be able to relate to. Unless you’re in your early twenties, trying to deal with a very young marriage, a fledgling career as a rock artist and a severe case of epilepsy on top of all that, you really shouldn’t have any insight into the pain Ian Curtis is expressing here. The pain in Unknown Pleasures is not a pain that hormonal teenagers should be able to connect to. It represents the life of one man, who died far too shortly after this album’s release. Listening to this album shouldn’t be a celebration of your own sadness, but a recognition of a great musician who is no longer with us.
Of course, it’s worth pointing out that Joy Division’s members hated this album when they first heard it, mostly due to the production job crafted by their eccentric producer, Martin Hannett. However, anyone who’s heard early live clips of the band will understand just what a monumental decision Hannett made by producing the band this way. Utilizing tricks like turning the heat off in the studio and making Stephan Morris play his drums on the roof (supposedly), Hannett froze all of the punk energy out of the band, leaving a stark, crisp, skeletal sound than emphasized Peter Hook’s dominant bass, Morris’ human drum machine playing and, most of all, Curtis’ grave voice, echoing through the huge empty space of the record. In this respect, Unknown Pleasures is Hannett’s record as much as it is the band’s. Together, they worked to create this bleak, honest, uncomfortable landmark in music history, capturing a band and a songwriting talent that only comes along once in a very great while.
No comments:
Post a Comment