Blog Project 2009 : Every Album (Part 13)
Ohai LiveJournal. Filling yet another lengthy content-gap, and diverting a bit of time away from the utterly awesome comics idea I'm currently attempting to script, have some more album-blogging. See what I mean about the run of excellent "F"-titled albums continuing? "G"'s got some decent stuff, as well, despite containing significantly fewer. Anyway...
95. Nick Drake - Five Leaves Left (1969)
An absolutely beautiful album, flitting between charming pleasantness (“Man in a Shed”, “Time Has Told Me”) and heartbreaking yet oddly appealing melancholy (“Way to Blue”, “Fruit Tree”). It’s achingly fragile, but also quite deceptively so - because there’s something quite confident about the songwriting and arrangement, even though Drake himself doesn’t sound so, and the pure songwriting is incredibly deft. It’s got a perfect introspective tone without ever feeling self-indulgently maudlin, and is just endlessly listenable if you’re in a certain frame of mind.
96. Buzzcocks - Flat Pack Philosophy (2006)
A disappointing follow-up to the self-titled album - there’s nothing particularly bad about this, and it has a quite decent, beefy sound, but it’s just all very formulaic. Despite the odd decent bit of tunery, there’s no real reason to listen to this rather than one of the three albums they did in the ‘70s.
97. Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes (2008)
I’ve tried with this, but I suspect I haven’t tried quite often enough to really click with it the way a lot of people have. I absolutely love the harmonics - what I like a little less is the inherent folky-ness of the voice when the main guy is singing solo. Some lovely moments here, though, and I suspect it’ll be a grower. Certainly a pleasant thing to put on in the background, just not a record where a particular track or moment has grabbed me just yet. Although, actually, the more I think about it, I realise that “The Protector” is threatening to do just that.
98. They Might Be Giants - Flood (1990)
Still, for me, the archetypal TMBG album. This’ll have something to do with having actually heard it at the time of release, whereas I didn’t really hear anything else of theirs for years afterwards - this can lay an honest claim to being one of my most formative listening experiences. Beyond the obviousness of the singles - and “Birdhouse In Your Soul” really is an indisputably perfect pop song - there’s some terrific and diverse material here, from “Lucky Ball & Chain” to “Road Movie To Berlin” to the magnificent “Dead”. I can see how people might find it a bit “cutesy” or “novelty”, but I love it.
99. Beirut - The Flying Club Cup (2007)
Another one I’ve got my sister to thank for - she badgered and badgered and badgered me to listen to this, and finally I did. And what do you know - I adore it. Superb, multi-layered, instrument-drenched Eastern European folk-influenced baroque pop, driven by the truly magnificent voice of Zach Condon. It’s not dissimilar to what Fleet Foxes do, actually, but I think it’s the European (rather than US country) sound that elevates it. The whole thing is a superb listening experience as a whole, but of particular note is “Forks and Knives (La Fete)”, one of my most listened-to tracks over the last six months or so and an absolutely spellbinding piece of work. If you like that, try “Guyamas Sonora” and “Nantes”, but really, it’s not one for individual tracks - just listen to the whole thing through.
100. Belle & Sebastian - Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like A Peasant (2000)
Why do I have the less good B&S albums? I should really get some of the earlier ones, shouldn’t I? I think I picked this up because I was trying to get into more stuff around the time it came out, and figured I should be buying B&S records, so did so. It’s got its moments (particularly the quite superb opener “I Fought In A War”), but it’s a little wrapped up in its own moroseness. There’s a nice sound to the whole thing, but the songs are just a bit too dull too much of the way through.
101. Half Man Half Biscuit - Four Lads Who Shook The Wirral (1998)
Close to being my favourite Biscuit album, but that’s a nebulous term at the best of times (at any given time, any of the last three albums could also claim that title). But this one hangs together well, and contains two of the most towering - although vastly different - achievements of Blackwell’s songwriting: the awe-inspiring, bass-driven spoken word rant “A Country Practice” (“Opinionated weather forecasters telling me it’s going to be a miserable day. Miserable to who? I quite like a bit of drizzle, so stick to the facts!”), and the utterly wonderful acoustic ditty “Keeping Two Chevrons Apart” (I’m in the middle of an article for NTS where I talk about the incredibly concise brilliance of the lyrics of that song, so I won’t say much more, except that in my view “They say ‘plenty more fish’, I say ‘Amoco Cadiz’” is one of the greatest single lyrics of all time).
102. The Get Up Kids - Four Minute Mile (1999)
All kinds of completely brilliant, basically. Fairly simple, and short, and doesn’t really do anything that nobody had ever done before - but it’s pretty much the pinnacle of the mid-late ‘90s “second-wave emo” movement (even though we can’t use the e-word to describe the likes of TGUK and Jimmy Eat World any more) - Something to Write Home About is probably a better album overall, but is also a bit poppier and lacking in the raw energy of this. It's a record that I'm not sure you could call objectively genius, or anything, it either really strikes a chord with you or doesn't. And it’s got genuinely great tunes - “Don’t Hate Me”, “No Love”, “Stay Gold, Ponyboy”, classics one and all. Hard to believe it’s ten years old, mind.
103. Elliott Smith - From A Basement On The Hill (2004)
For something supposedly thrown together posthumously by people who didn’t have a clue what Elliott actually wanted to do with the record, this is really rather terrific. I know it’s not the most popular of his albums with a lot of his fans, but I love it - it’s dark and brooding from the outset, but tracks like “Coast to Coast”, “Kings Crossing” and “A Distorted Reality Is Now A Necessity To Be Free” feel like him finally finding a proper place for the dense, multi-instrumental sound that he’d been developing since XO. And he retained his capacity to break your heart right to the last - the fragile “Last Hour” and the gut-wrenching power of “Pretty (Ugly Before)” get to me as much as anything else in his catalogue. If he’d lived to oversee its construction as the intended double-album, it may well have ended up being his best record of all (and at least it wouldn’t have the pointless “Ostriches and Chirping” on it) - but the fact that it’s still so good even in its Frankenstein-esque form shows just how fantastic he was. I just wish we could have had “From The Poison Well” and “Suicide Machine” on it, though.
104. The Thermals - Fuckin A (2004)
The album that establishes the rule - stuck to by their most recent album - that even-numbered Thermals records are a pale shadow of the genius of the odd-numbered pair. There are decent tunes on here, and a couple of really great tracks (I really like “Let Your Earth Quake, Baby” and “Every Stitch”) but the album simply doesn’t have a hook in the way that More Parts Per Million (brilliantly raw and energetic “no-fi”) and The Body, The Blood, The Machine (speaker-shattering religion-themed concept album) do. It’s still well worth a listen if you get on with what they’ve done elsewhere, but it’s not the album I’d use to try and convince you of their greatness.
105. of Montreal - The Gay Parade (1999)
More than anything else, this is the album that really sparked my love for of Montreal. It’s not for everyone - it’s almost excessively whimsical and cheesy in its aesthetic, a gentle and somewhat twee-cum-psychedelic concept album on which each song is a lyrical vignette about a different imaginary character. For some reason (and I’m only partly putting it down to the fact that I was reading a load of them at the same time as first getting into the record, really) a number of the characters’ names and stories put me in mind of Roald Dahl short stories - especially the likes of “Jacques Lamure”. There’s a sense of almost childlike wonder about its approach to relatively mundane situations - exemplified by the utterly wonderful “My Favorite Boxer” (a cautionary tale about how you should never meet your heroes) and the almost storybook feel of the multi-character-voiced closer “Nickee Coco and the Invisible Tree”. It’s honestly difficult to believe that these songs were written by the guy that wrote “Beware Our Nubile Miscreants” (which, don’t get me wrong, I also love, even though I’m generally not as keen on Kevin Barnes’ current trashdiscoelectroglamwhore phase, but we’ll get to that at the relevant time), and it’s a truly unique record - I’ve never heard anything like it before or since.
95. Nick Drake - Five Leaves Left (1969)
An absolutely beautiful album, flitting between charming pleasantness (“Man in a Shed”, “Time Has Told Me”) and heartbreaking yet oddly appealing melancholy (“Way to Blue”, “Fruit Tree”). It’s achingly fragile, but also quite deceptively so - because there’s something quite confident about the songwriting and arrangement, even though Drake himself doesn’t sound so, and the pure songwriting is incredibly deft. It’s got a perfect introspective tone without ever feeling self-indulgently maudlin, and is just endlessly listenable if you’re in a certain frame of mind.
96. Buzzcocks - Flat Pack Philosophy (2006)
A disappointing follow-up to the self-titled album - there’s nothing particularly bad about this, and it has a quite decent, beefy sound, but it’s just all very formulaic. Despite the odd decent bit of tunery, there’s no real reason to listen to this rather than one of the three albums they did in the ‘70s.
97. Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes (2008)
I’ve tried with this, but I suspect I haven’t tried quite often enough to really click with it the way a lot of people have. I absolutely love the harmonics - what I like a little less is the inherent folky-ness of the voice when the main guy is singing solo. Some lovely moments here, though, and I suspect it’ll be a grower. Certainly a pleasant thing to put on in the background, just not a record where a particular track or moment has grabbed me just yet. Although, actually, the more I think about it, I realise that “The Protector” is threatening to do just that.
98. They Might Be Giants - Flood (1990)
Still, for me, the archetypal TMBG album. This’ll have something to do with having actually heard it at the time of release, whereas I didn’t really hear anything else of theirs for years afterwards - this can lay an honest claim to being one of my most formative listening experiences. Beyond the obviousness of the singles - and “Birdhouse In Your Soul” really is an indisputably perfect pop song - there’s some terrific and diverse material here, from “Lucky Ball & Chain” to “Road Movie To Berlin” to the magnificent “Dead”. I can see how people might find it a bit “cutesy” or “novelty”, but I love it.
99. Beirut - The Flying Club Cup (2007)
Another one I’ve got my sister to thank for - she badgered and badgered and badgered me to listen to this, and finally I did. And what do you know - I adore it. Superb, multi-layered, instrument-drenched Eastern European folk-influenced baroque pop, driven by the truly magnificent voice of Zach Condon. It’s not dissimilar to what Fleet Foxes do, actually, but I think it’s the European (rather than US country) sound that elevates it. The whole thing is a superb listening experience as a whole, but of particular note is “Forks and Knives (La Fete)”, one of my most listened-to tracks over the last six months or so and an absolutely spellbinding piece of work. If you like that, try “Guyamas Sonora” and “Nantes”, but really, it’s not one for individual tracks - just listen to the whole thing through.
100. Belle & Sebastian - Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like A Peasant (2000)
Why do I have the less good B&S albums? I should really get some of the earlier ones, shouldn’t I? I think I picked this up because I was trying to get into more stuff around the time it came out, and figured I should be buying B&S records, so did so. It’s got its moments (particularly the quite superb opener “I Fought In A War”), but it’s a little wrapped up in its own moroseness. There’s a nice sound to the whole thing, but the songs are just a bit too dull too much of the way through.
101. Half Man Half Biscuit - Four Lads Who Shook The Wirral (1998)
Close to being my favourite Biscuit album, but that’s a nebulous term at the best of times (at any given time, any of the last three albums could also claim that title). But this one hangs together well, and contains two of the most towering - although vastly different - achievements of Blackwell’s songwriting: the awe-inspiring, bass-driven spoken word rant “A Country Practice” (“Opinionated weather forecasters telling me it’s going to be a miserable day. Miserable to who? I quite like a bit of drizzle, so stick to the facts!”), and the utterly wonderful acoustic ditty “Keeping Two Chevrons Apart” (I’m in the middle of an article for NTS where I talk about the incredibly concise brilliance of the lyrics of that song, so I won’t say much more, except that in my view “They say ‘plenty more fish’, I say ‘Amoco Cadiz’” is one of the greatest single lyrics of all time).
102. The Get Up Kids - Four Minute Mile (1999)
All kinds of completely brilliant, basically. Fairly simple, and short, and doesn’t really do anything that nobody had ever done before - but it’s pretty much the pinnacle of the mid-late ‘90s “second-wave emo” movement (even though we can’t use the e-word to describe the likes of TGUK and Jimmy Eat World any more) - Something to Write Home About is probably a better album overall, but is also a bit poppier and lacking in the raw energy of this. It's a record that I'm not sure you could call objectively genius, or anything, it either really strikes a chord with you or doesn't. And it’s got genuinely great tunes - “Don’t Hate Me”, “No Love”, “Stay Gold, Ponyboy”, classics one and all. Hard to believe it’s ten years old, mind.
103. Elliott Smith - From A Basement On The Hill (2004)
For something supposedly thrown together posthumously by people who didn’t have a clue what Elliott actually wanted to do with the record, this is really rather terrific. I know it’s not the most popular of his albums with a lot of his fans, but I love it - it’s dark and brooding from the outset, but tracks like “Coast to Coast”, “Kings Crossing” and “A Distorted Reality Is Now A Necessity To Be Free” feel like him finally finding a proper place for the dense, multi-instrumental sound that he’d been developing since XO. And he retained his capacity to break your heart right to the last - the fragile “Last Hour” and the gut-wrenching power of “Pretty (Ugly Before)” get to me as much as anything else in his catalogue. If he’d lived to oversee its construction as the intended double-album, it may well have ended up being his best record of all (and at least it wouldn’t have the pointless “Ostriches and Chirping” on it) - but the fact that it’s still so good even in its Frankenstein-esque form shows just how fantastic he was. I just wish we could have had “From The Poison Well” and “Suicide Machine” on it, though.
104. The Thermals - Fuckin A (2004)
The album that establishes the rule - stuck to by their most recent album - that even-numbered Thermals records are a pale shadow of the genius of the odd-numbered pair. There are decent tunes on here, and a couple of really great tracks (I really like “Let Your Earth Quake, Baby” and “Every Stitch”) but the album simply doesn’t have a hook in the way that More Parts Per Million (brilliantly raw and energetic “no-fi”) and The Body, The Blood, The Machine (speaker-shattering religion-themed concept album) do. It’s still well worth a listen if you get on with what they’ve done elsewhere, but it’s not the album I’d use to try and convince you of their greatness.
105. of Montreal - The Gay Parade (1999)
More than anything else, this is the album that really sparked my love for of Montreal. It’s not for everyone - it’s almost excessively whimsical and cheesy in its aesthetic, a gentle and somewhat twee-cum-psychedelic concept album on which each song is a lyrical vignette about a different imaginary character. For some reason (and I’m only partly putting it down to the fact that I was reading a load of them at the same time as first getting into the record, really) a number of the characters’ names and stories put me in mind of Roald Dahl short stories - especially the likes of “Jacques Lamure”. There’s a sense of almost childlike wonder about its approach to relatively mundane situations - exemplified by the utterly wonderful “My Favorite Boxer” (a cautionary tale about how you should never meet your heroes) and the almost storybook feel of the multi-character-voiced closer “Nickee Coco and the Invisible Tree”. It’s honestly difficult to believe that these songs were written by the guy that wrote “Beware Our Nubile Miscreants” (which, don’t get me wrong, I also love, even though I’m generally not as keen on Kevin Barnes’ current trashdiscoelectroglamwhore phase, but we’ll get to that at the relevant time), and it’s a truly unique record - I’ve never heard anything like it before or since.