Comment on January 23rd, 2007.
I love all the Beefheart I've been exposed to (not much, but more than just Trout Mask Replica), and this song is beautiful. I love the science-fictiony bloopy noises that show up from time to time. And your fanciful descriptions.
Comment on January 23rd, 2007.
So what do you think is the best Costello album? I quite agree about "My aim is true". I think I would go for "King of America" or possibly "Get Happy".
Comment on January 23rd, 2007.
I love the bloopy noises too. That's probably Eric Drew Feldman, keyboardist.
Comment on January 23rd, 2007.
My Costello rankings go more or less like this:
superb:
excellent:
quite good:
mixtures of excellent songs and bad songs:
and then everything else.
Comment on January 23rd, 2007.
If the first R.E.M. album I'd heard had been "Automatic for the People" I'd not have bothered any further; it felt every bit as mechanical as the title suggested.
Comment on January 23rd, 2007.
Me too.
The nervously fair part of me feels compelled to note that some people whose taste I respect a lot think it's a great album, so I'm sure I'm just missing whatever it is. But I can't hear it at all, and I try anew every couple years. I hear a few decent songs, but when the album's over I just shrug.
Comment on January 23rd, 2007.
can't wait to read your Elvis rankings. "Armed Forces" will always be my favorite, I think.
Comment on January 23rd, 2007.
Armed Forces is awesome, not a single misstep.
Comment on January 23rd, 2007.
I'm not a huge fan of 90's R.E.M. pretty much full stop, so it's easy to agree with you about Automatic for the People. Not that they aren't good anymore, exactly, but the 80's material is just a different order of being.
Strong artists usually have (in my mind) not one greatest album, but a shortlist of greatest records that can be legitimately argued as their finest work. I'd stop short of an assertion that Sgt. Pepper is definitely The Beatles greatest record - I like Revolver as much as the next person. But "nowhere near" seems a little strong. It's at least in the running with Rubber Soul for No. 2. Similar with Surfer Rosa -- I wouldn't personally list it at No. 1, but I can't say it's so far down as to not be arguable.
I like your Costello breakdown, though I'm no longer as enamored of Imperial Bedroom as much as I once was.
Comment on January 23rd, 2007.
Right. To be careful I ought to say, "nowhere near in my ears". I have to accept that Surfer Rosa and Sgt Pepper are great albums; a lot of smart people think so. And I ought to mistrust my feeling that in both cases a lot of it has to do with the context in which they initially appeared: because of course we all look for objective justifications for our reactions. But in both cases, I am speaking truly when I say that for my taste they aren't near the artist's best; that I can't hear anything to make me think otherwise. In the case of the Beatles, I am this crazy: I think Magical Mystery Tour is a better album -- or at least, a better collection of songs.
Regarding later R.E.M.: have you given Up much of a chance? It grew on me slowly but relentlessly, and it now challenges for my favorite spot.
Comment on January 23rd, 2007.
Great Beefheart track. Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) may be my favorite Beefheart album, too, now that you mention it. I've still yet to hear Decals (I have it on vinyl, but no working turntable), and I've always had a hard time listening to Trout Mask Replica straight through in one sitting. Though full of some great stuff, it always tires me out. I love Safe As Milk.... etc.
I'm always surprised when people say that Doolittle is the best Pixies album (which I see more often), when clearly it's Surfer Rosa. Ahem. Also, the Beatles? For me it's Beatles for Sale or A Hard Day's Night....
(Now here's hoping I got the tags in this comment...)
Comment on January 23rd, 2007.
Heh. Doolittle is my favorite, though Bossanova and Trompe le Monde have taken turns as my favorite -- it's like trying to choose among the first three Eno albums -- and I'll never understand why people write off Trompe le Monde just because it's supposedly a breakup catchall. Surfer Rosa I can only understand as a product of encountering it first (you'll probably tell me now that you encountered the Pixies as retrospectively as I did), because there just aren't as many great songs and the great songs aren't as great: it doesn't measure up to the subsequent albums either in consistency or in its peaks (in my goddamned opinion). Piling bafflement upon bafflement for me: Come On Pilgrim really is consistently terrific in a way Surfer Rosa isn't; so why wasn't Surfer Rosa a disappointment? Not to be unduly difficult, but "Caribou", "I've Been Tired", "Levitate Me", those are great songs. When I make a single-disc Pixes mix, the only Surfer Rosa song that makes the cut is "Where Is My Mind?" (though yeah "Bone Machine" doesn't miss by much). Nothing on the album is bad, but.... well.
Comment on January 24th, 2007.
Doolittle=Love. Surfer Rosa=Medicine. I guess that's a little extreme, but still: I'll listen to Doolittle anytime, anywhere, in any context. Surfer Rosa, sometimes I'll feel like I need it, but not often.
Comment on January 24th, 2007.
Ah. You remind me that I haven't listened to Armed Forces in years. I have it on vinyl somewhere in the cellar. Will dig it out.
Comment on January 24th, 2007.
Ha! (It was apparent that my "clearly" was in jest, right?) As it happens, I did indeed encounter the Pixies retrospectively AND Surfer Rosa was the first album I heard, and I fell in love with it. For me, I suppose, it may come down to the respective albums' sounds ("production"). Surfer Rosa is, to my ears, one of the best-sounding rock albums of all time, whereas Doolittle, as great as the songs are, has somehow always sounded flattened out by comparison (and Bossanova thin and distant). And I did, in fact, have a tendency to treat Trompe le Monde as a last gasp, "breakup catchall" as you put it. But it surprises me every time I listen to it, so that now it's probably my second favorite. I actually don't listen to the Pixies all that much anymore, but maybe it's time to go back and actually compare the albums more closely...
One guess as to why people didn't think Surfer Rosa was a disappoinment after Come on Pilgrim (aside from the fact that many people no doubt simply like it better), is that maybe it wasn't as widely available before Surfer Rosa appeared, given that they were originally on 4AD, whose releases were often hard to come by (for example, the first Throwing Muses album was never released in the US, until Ryko included it on the In a Doghouse collection)...
Comment on January 24th, 2007.
It's funny that you mention the production, because I was thinking last night that that was the only explanation that made sense to me. I rarely care that much about the production sound (unless it's deliberately bad, as in lo-fi fetishism). Surfer Rosa sounds rawer, and I can understand how people would prefer that to the clean sound of the next two albums. But my god, the songs on Doolittle.... and then I shake my head in incomprehension again.
And funny that you mention Throwing Muses, since I considered putting them on the list because the first album is so often thought of as their only great album; but I decided that though I disagree with that assessment, it's still a damned good album.
Comment on January 24th, 2007.
I agree about Throwing Muses. I think they were pretty consistently awesome throughout their career... The only one I've tended to think of as a dog has been Hunkpapa, and yet I was listening to it last week and it's not bad at all, if not as good as any of the others, I think.
I was pretty obsessed with them for a while there. People seem to rate either the first one or The Real Ramona as the best, or maybe House Tornado, but I've always been partial to University and Limbo. Naturally, the former was the first one I ever heard, so... etc.
Comment on January 24th, 2007.
The first one I heard was Hunkpapa, and it made me a fan, but I agree it's the least of their albums. I used to waver between House Tornado and The Real Ramona -- the former is a perfectly consistent album with a good stark sound, while the latter has higher peaks -- "Counting Backwards" and "Two Step" especially, but also the two Tanya Donnelly songs ("Honeychain" and "Not Too Soon") are the best work she did in Throwing Muses.
I like Red Heaven and University well enough, but then Limbo came along, and that was the great album I'd been waiting for. You're the first other person I've known who puts it up at the top. I think its reputation may have suffered because it's backloaded: the latter half is one great song after another.
Comment on January 24th, 2007.
I think Throwing Muses are the most underrated band of the eighties. No one sounds like Kristin Hersh as a songwriter. The downside of that is that a lot of people just can't stand her sound.
Comment on January 25th, 2007.
Whoa, who thinks only the first Throwing Muses album is good? I'd say Kristin Hersh is probably the single most consistent artist I've ever come across. I personally own pretty much every album I've heard of her being involved in (with Throwing Muses and 50 Foot Wave, and solo), and have heard the ones I don't own (with the exception of her new solo album that came out a few days ago), and the few that aren't straight-up masterpieces are pretty damn close. She's an important part of my state pride as a Rhode Islander, and probably on my top five list of favorite human beings ever.
Comment on January 25th, 2007.
Bwah! On the topic of KH, I just discovered where "nigh on worthy of rejoicing over" comes from. Hilarious.
Comment on January 25th, 2007.
Have you heard the original, Zappa-produced, version of Bat Chain Puller, before the album was rerecorded? It used to be available for download from Beefheart.com , but that was in 1998, so god knows if the site even exists now...
Personally my favourite Beefheart is the very early stuff, when there was still the possibility of some sort of commercial success without too much compromise - Strictly Personal and Safe As Milk are still shockingly original albums...
Agreed about Automatic (though I like it) and Pepper is to me a challenger for the Beatles' *worst* album, jockeying for position with Yellow Submarine and Let It Be...
Comment on January 25th, 2007.
Ethan: You'll get no argument from me about Hersh.
Andrew: I've never heard that; I gather it was deep-sixed due to a dispute with Zappa's manager? Something like that.
Comment on January 25th, 2007.
Several years ago, I ordered a back-issue of The Wire that had the cover story "50 records that set the world on fire" or something, expecting it to be something like the top 50 albums of all time, from their perspective. Instead, it was a weird primer of sorts covering all kinds of albums or songs, some of which were well known, others barely even released. The original recording of Bat Chain Puller was on it--one of those annoyingly tantalizing things, like "wow, if only this were released, music would have changed, forever!" It gave the impression that the released version was this tepid, worthless thing. It was quite a while before I bought it for myself and heard how awesome it is (in truth, it's not that easy to come by in record shops, so it wasn't like I spurned it over and over, but still). I also have a cd, the title of which escapes me, which is supposedly demos or the like from the same sessions... (also, I've also never heard Strictly Personal, which I have seen many times but not bought, in part because it's fairly expensive...)
Ethan: as such a big Muses/Hersh fan in the Northeast, did you make it to the first Gut Pageant meet and greet/reunion, in Cambridge, Mass? I actually drove from DC to it, so deep was I into my Hersh obsession at the time (2000, I think).
Also, to continue this needlessly long comment, I think a reason the Muses and Hersh are less popular than, say, the Pixies is that the latter, as awesome as they are, are sort of conventional by comparison, or, rather, their sound was more repeatable. While it's true that many people think the first Muses album is their great one, I think you'll find that for most people, if they only own one Muses album, it will be The Real Ramona, which I think is their most conventional album (which is not to say it isn't great), their "alterna-hit". (I wonder idly if its success had anything to do with Tanya Donelly's later success with Belly.)
Comment on January 25th, 2007.
I think the Pixies were a radical development, one of the rare bands that changed the ground of rock music; not imitable so much (though Modest Mouse did a great job with "Bury Me With It") as having a lot of new lessons to teach. Throwing Muses were more insular; they sound more like one person's psyche than something that's extendable to other people's music. A lot of female songwriters -- this sentence would really irritate Hersh if she read it -- seem to me to have that stark individuality that often burrows further and further inward, becoming an intense cult for fans and incomprehensible to outsiders, starting with a leg in popular music but abandoning hooks and catchy melody in favor of moods and musical paintings. Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro, Kate Bush, Jane Siberry (though she started out weird), Tori Amos, Hersh.... I have a hard time thinking of male songwriters who are so much into intensely exploring their own sound and to hell with conventional songs. Sufjan Stevens seems like one.
I think I'll break this out into its own post.
Comment on January 25th, 2007.
Somehow it's hard for me to hear the radical development in the Pixies, but I won't argue the point. Perhaps they seem superficially more conventional. Or, perhaps their "development" has been so absorbed into rock that it's hard to notice.
Maybe it's easier for me to identify their various antecedents than it is for Throwing Muses...
Interesting that you mention Modest Mouse. I thought of the Pixies A LOT when I first started listening to them (on This is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About), but not at all by the time of "Bury Me With It"... Curious.
Comment on January 25th, 2007.
Huh! "Bury Me With It" sounds so much like a Pixies pastiche that I'd be genuinely astonished to hear it wasn't deliberate. In the early days of Modest Mouse, I thought they wanted to be Built to Spill. They've come a long way. (Not that there's anything wrong with Built to Spill.) I thought Good News for People Who Love Bad News was saturated in Tom Waits and the Pixies, and that is all right with me.
The Pixies had songs that could have been done before them (though not the way they did them, usually); but there are some Pixies songs that to me say "this is the Pixies and could not have been anyone before them": "Tame" for example, or "I Bleed".
Comment on January 25th, 2007.
Richard, I didn't go to the meet & greet thang, sadly, though I did see them play Lupo's (RIP) in Providence, and that was incredible. I also only know who Clem Snide are because they opened, so that was good, too.
No, the closest I've come to meeting Kristin Hersh is, after seeing her play outdoors at a RI musicians festival (with, I think, Belly's drummer as her bass player), I hung out behind where the stage was set up and stared at her for a while trying to work up the nerve to approach her. Just as I was about to, her children (or, you know, two of the seventy thousand that she has) ran up and she started playing with them, which sent me back into nervousness and I kept staring at her. Eventually, of course, she noticed and kind of bundled her children up and ran away.
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