1001Albums

Louis Prima is probably best known as the voice of King Louis in The Jungle Book, but this album from 1956 is equally joyous. The album was recorded as live in the studio with an excellent group of jazz musicians, who are clearly having a ball, as well as Prima’s wife Keely Smith who provides a cool counterbalance to his wild flights of fancy. It’s a brisk 30 minutes of fun and one of the rare albums where I listened twice. Highlight is opener Just a Gigolo!

Well, this was a lot of fun. Female fronted pop punk, with fuzzed out guitars and even more fuzzed out vocals, tracing a direct line from bands like the Pretenders and Siouxie and the Banshees. It’s not revolutionary or going to change the world in any way, but sometimes you just want something that hits all of the right notes without trying too hard. The highlight for me was the song No, No, No which is very appropriate for the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs.

The conceit of MTV Unplugged is simple - get a big rock band to come in and play an acoustic set of their greatest hits. Nirvana approached the challenge differently, picking deep cuts and covers over hits, and featuring The Meat Puppets as special guests. Cobain sounds a little nervous at the start and also uses some amplification and effects in places. He passed away 5 months after this recording, lending it a poignant air, especially on Come As You Are.

Many of the best musicians in the world are to be found strumming away in dusty bars and concert halls, playing to a handful of local fans. In 1996 Ry Cooder went to Havana to record an album with some musicians from Mali, and for various reasons ending up recording an album of traditional Cuban music with a diverse group of local musicians instead. Everyone involved had a great time and the end result is an absolute joy to listen to. Soncubanotastic!

This album was exactly what I needed this morning. Queer French hyper-pop, performed with Gallic elan by lead singer Chris. Unusually, this is a double album with the same songs presented in English and French, and on balance I think I preferred the French ones which gave my schoolboy French a workout. This would go down a storm on Eurovision and I mean that in the nicest way possible. It’s accessible, engaging and fun, and I will seek out more! Eurotastic!

I’m always intrigued when I get a band that I haven’t heard of on this project. This album starts out as fairly low key shoegazey indie before picking up with some nice 60s style psychedelia. Nothing world changing or revolutionary, but well done and good to listen to. The highlight for me is the Byrds-esque Memory Boy, dealing with the fallibility of nostalgia. A solid 3 stars for this.

From the name, I was expecting a bit of country music, but instead got something that sounded like a cross between Coldplay and Ed Sheeran, from a man whose idea of a big romantic gesture is putting his phone on vibrate. This is so inoffensive you could play it at a dinner party for maiden aunts, nervous vicars and people with heart problems with no risk of upsetting anyone. The only edgy thing here is the cover where he is holding a longsword by the blade. Do not want.

After leaving Genesis, Peter Gabriel put out four quirky, experimental albums titled Peter Gabriel 1-4. His record company asked for a more marketable name for his fifth album, so he called it ‘So’. I wasn’t keen on this album at the time - a combination of the mawkish ‘Don’t Give Up’ and the MTV earworm of ‘Sledgehammer’ put me off. Revisiting it reveals some gems though, especially ‘This is the Picture’ with Laurie Anderson and opener ‘Red Rain’. Sotastic!

Alternative bands from the 90s with one word names tend to blend into one for me and I initially struggled to remember anything from this one apart from Stupid Girl. However, I was pleasantly surprised by some of the more down tempo tracks on this that edged into shoegaze/trip hop territory, with the highlight for me being A Stroke of Luck with Shirley Manson’s voice flowing like warm honey. Lovely stuff.

This live album opens with what sounds like a band tuning up at a sound check, then bit by bit they all start noodling around a theme, someone randomly starts singing and before you know it twenty minutes have passed. I always thought that the Grateful Dead were a rock band, but this is closer to free jazz with extended improvisations. I can see the attraction of following them around to listen to this while getting stoned in a field somewhere. Hippytastic!

The extraordinary musicianship on this can’t be denied but it has to be tempered by knowing that Mingus was a angry man, prone to violent outbursts. He once punched a fellow musician in the face so hard it permanently damaged their ability to play the trombone. His anger is reflected in the music here - aggressive hard bop with diversions into blues and classical guitar. Apparently this was originally written as a ballet which is something that I want to see

Apparently Peter Buck from REM once asked producer John Wood how he captured the intimate sound on this album. Wood replied that Nick Drake had simply sat in front of a single microphone and played his guitar. It really is a captivating performance that was sadly to be Drake’s last as he passed away at the age of 26. I can start to understand why Robert Smith and Michael Stipe were so worried about passing thirty now.

This is another album inspired by turning thirty, although with REM their songs tend to the wistful and abstruse rather than gloominess. The opening track Drive sets the tone for the album with sparse acoustic guitars blossoming into a stunning string arrangement from John Paul Jones from Led Zeppelin. The remastered atmos mix also shines here, sounding intimate and epic at the same time. The highlight is still Stipe’s Elvis impression on Man in the Moon.

I only really knew the guitar/drums garage rock stuff from the White Stripes so this album was a bit of revelation with a wider range of instruments on offer, adding piano, marimba and mandolin to the mix. There are also some variations in style too, and I particularly enjoyed the country feel on Little Ghost and the blues rock of Instinct Blue. Nice to hear Meg singing too. True confession - I always thought they were siblings but turns out they’re married!

Apparently Robert Smith had a bit of a crisis of confidence approaching his 30th birthday, thinking that he would soon be past his creative peak. He wrote most of the material for this album on his own, working through his feelings of despair and the band added musical gloomscapes to them. The end result is oddly uplifting, when you remember that Bob is now happily in his sixties and still collaborating with bands who are less than half his age. Gothtastic!

The second album from 1983 this week and it’s a complete contrast. I remember enjoying this at the time but it hasn’t aged particularly well. It’s po-faced and preachy, and you get the feeling that no one involved had any fun at all while they were making it. I can’t imagine U2 busking outside a Pretenders gig and getting invited to be the support act for a night. Knocking off a star from the 1001 albums rating until they start paying their taxes.

There comes a time in every band’s career when someone mentions the C word - the concept album. For a punk band known for three minute pop bangers this is a risky move. However the opening salvo of American Idiot still hits home, relevant today just by changing one word. The album looks American society at the turn of the millennium but not much has changed. Jesus of Suburbia sends shivers down my spine with the final ‘Are you leaving home?’. A punk classic.

If you’d asked me to guess the year and genre of this album from the title, then acoustic folk punk from 1983 is probably the last thing I’d have gone for. This turns out to actually be a lot of fun, written by an 18 year old high school student called Gordon Gano, mixing punky Lou Reed style vocals with bouncy acoustic guitars and lively drums. The highlight is the first track Blister in the Sun which I recognised from the Xbox Rock Band soundtrack.

How 80s could this album be? None. The answer is none more 80s. This is where Duran Duran changed from fay Sci Fi nerd New Romantics into archetypal shoulder padded yuppie icons, with an era defining series of music videos backed up with some great music. Admittedly, Simon LeBon wasn’t the world’s greatest vocalist, but the rest of the band held it together with the standout being John Taylor’s phenomenal bass lines punching through the mix. Yacht-tastic!

I know this album off by heart and not through choice. When I was at university, the guy next door in the halls blew all his grant money on a cd player and only had enough left over to buy this, so he played it on repeat for weeks. I quite like Knopfler’s steel guitar on The Man’s Too Strong, but the rest of the album suffers from that overly bright 80s digital production, it’s way too long and the homophobic slurs in Money for Nothing can get in the bin.

This was the album that came out after Brian Wilson had to give up touring for health reasons, but a year before Pet Sounds. It’s an ok collection of pop tunes with two bangers (Do You Wanna Dance and Help Me Ronda) but a lot of filler for an album that’s less than 30 minutes. The worst bit is the last track which is just two minutes of studio chatter. I initially thought this was a special feature, but it’s on the original release. Lazy, lazy Beach Boys.

A self-aware, sample heavy NYC rock/rap trio, popular with white kids - it’s the Beastie Boys, right? NOT!!! It’s the Fun Lovin’ Criminals (with the all important apostrophe). I actually enjoyed this quite a bit more than I was expecting, particularly when they slowed things down a little and cut back on the samples. The highlight for me was a delicious cover of John Barry’s We Have All the Time in the World.

This is the transitional album where Brian Eno came on board as a producer, turning Talking Heads from an arty NYC proto punk band into something that you could dance to. I haven’t listened to this album as much as some of the others - not because it’s not good, but because the live versions of some of these songs on Stop Making Sense (notably their cover of Al Green’s Take Me to the River) are even better than the ones here.

This is album that requires listening to on headphones - the extraordinary number of MFPH and the toe curlingly explicit references to sex, violence and drugs make this extremely NSFW. Headphones also show off the dense soundscapes of dialogue, jokes, samples, music and rap. You could almost see this as an elaborate satire of a gangsta whose idea of luxury is being able to afford both Sega and Nintendo at the same time, but Biggie was dead by 24. Sheesh.

When I was a kid growing up in the 80s a new song (and video) from the ‘Nutty Boys’ was always a treat, but I’ve never listened to a whole album. On this, their fourth album, they find a different tone, delving into nostalgia for childhood and family life, and tackling darker topics like depression and the aftermath of the Falklands War. This was originally a concept album but it drifted slightly (and let’s not mention the misstep of New Delhi and the cover)

This is a heartbreaking classic of an album. While Nothing Compares 2 U is the best known song, other tracks have an equal or greater impact with howls of despair and anger, as well as more upbeat and joyful numbers. The only misstep is ‘Black Boys on Mopeds’ which is a clunking protest song about Margaret Thatcher, but it was 1990 so we can probably let this one slide.

This was supposedly the album that marked the transition from fay electro pop dweebs to stadium friendly behemoths, but it’s not quite there for me. There’s nothing that grabs me in quite the same way as Enjoy the Silence or Personal Jesus on their later album Violater. The best track is probably the opener “Never Let Me Down” but the rest of the album doesn’t quite live up to this.

This album does exactly what it says on the tin. It starts with an ominous voiceover (“I have tasted maggots in the mind of the universe”) before setting off on a musical journey spanning acid rock, funk, soul, prog and even a bit of gospel in case y’all need churchin’ up. The highlights are the title track and the closing ‘Wars of Armageddon’ both clocking in around 10 minutes. Truly funkadelic!

Some cities have a distinctive sound, and Athens, Georgia is one of them. REM were one of the bands that defined that sound - solid bass, punchy drums, jangly guitars and laconic vocals with lyrics ranging from the esoteric to the surreal. Michael Stipe has said that he still doesn’t know what Pilgrimage is about and he wrote it. Highlight is Radio Free Europe which one of my Athens friends sent me on a mix tape of local music back in the day.

When the Beatles started going weird, someone at NBC television had the bright idea of creating a family friendly boy band from scratch for a tv show, and maybe put out some records as well. The Monkees were duly assembled and released two albums, before rising up and seizing the means of production to record their own songs. This album is mostly harmless, but not particularly memorable. Highlight is a snarky song about the Beatles called “Randy Scouse Git”.

Romantic meal, candles lit, now for some music. Whatever you do, don’t put this album on. It starts with a song about a child custody battle and goes on to anger, jealousy, self pity and the unfairness of paying attorney fees. After a bitter divorce, Gaye was contractually obliged to produce an album and give his ex 50% - he delivered this, which takes petty revenge to a whole new level. Save this for if you get dumped and want to know how not to respond.

It never ceases to amaze me that an album released 50 years ago, recorded using instruments made from spare electronics and tin foil, held together with string and duct tape, still sounds fresh and startlingly modern. The highlight is the title track, recreating a trip on an Autobahn through the medium of motorik beats and painstakingly crafted sound effects. This is a genre defining album, influencing artists from Gary Numan to Afrika Bambaataa. Stunning

For a couple of hours this morning, I felt like I was in a 1960s Mad Men style Manhattan appartment, drinking a martini and listening to this box set on my Radiogram. Some of the best classic songs of the early to mid 20th century, sung by one of the very best vocalists, ranging from ragtime to jazz with a touch of soul thrown in. Apparently the original deluxe edition of this came in a wooden box for $100 (well over $1000 now). Totally worth it.