Albums for Eternity with Bottle, the Curmudgeon

The first George Harrison solo album, the first solo album by a member of the Beatles, the first album published by Apple Records, the thing that Oasis song is actually about, the soundtrack for a film called Wonderwall. The film is about a man spying on his neighbor through a peephole. Two different worlds separated by a physical barrier. The album is a literal autobiographical metaphor for George Harrison's infatuation for Indian music, culture, and religion. The tracks are a mix of Indian and Western instrumentation, and it's a very deliberate attempt at creating "world music." This is what Harrison was doing while John and Paul were making Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour. This is a wonderful album of creative pieces by a serious composer, but it's not a cerebrally cathartic album for me. I find it quite mentally taxing. Partly that's because i don't really like George Harrison's compositional style, and partly because it inhabits the s...

I don't understand this album. Who are The Rascals? Looking at Freedom Suite, i think they're an obscure proto-punk band and this is a massive politically motivated concept album. Let's go down the basic wikipedia checklist. Rock band? No. Hit songs? I don't know any of them by title. People involved? Nope, don't know any of them either. Lester Bangs called it excessive. No, sounds normal to me. Someone else called it psychedelic. No. It's not "trippy" or "outside the box" or experimental at all. Again, what the hell am i listening to? This is R&B/Soul. Not "blue eyed soul," straight Soul (doesn't matter that they're white or that there are moments of Baroque Pop). The songs are vague, but they are real songs. But, this is a double album, and the whole second record is instrumental. The instrumental half is quite fun with a happy birthday jam, a huge jazz inspired drum solo (a good one at that). A 15 minute jazz-...

I'm on a mission. That mission is to learn to like Their Satanic Majesties Request by The Rolling Stones. I think i can do it. One, this album is a self made monstrosity because they were completely drugged up to the point of getting arrested, their manager actually quit and Bill Wyman was close to that point, they had absolutely no one to tell them anything was too much or too dumb, and it was anybody's guess who would show up every day and how many superfluous hangers on they might bring with them. So the way it sounds is off the table. Two, it's a complete rip off of Sgt. Pepper and the band unanimously agreed it was a disaster, then abandoned psychedelic experimentation all together afterward. About a month before the intended release they freaked out and just bashed everything together as best as possible. I can totally respect that. The songs aren't about anything, so there's no need to actually analyze the lyrics. This is just pure studio improvisatio...

I finally own a copy of Thomas Dolby's first album, The Golden Age of Wireless. Believe it or not, there a 5 different versions of this thing, and i have the US version of the original. The cover is different from the UK original, they swapped an instrumental track for both sides of his post album single, and used an alternate version of "Radio Silence." These pre "She Blinded Me with Science" versions were never released on CD, i have the mini LP anyway, and i'll never find the UK original, so i'm fine with it. I talked a lot about him in my previous post, so we can just skip to the album itself. Not surprisingly, it's an album about technology. More specifically, it's about the merging of technology with our lives. Dolby consciously pairs electronic and acoustic instruments, and sings about how we actively use technology in our modern lives, what that does to our mental state, and how we might love or loathe it at a subconscious level. Th...

So, what did Bob Geldof and The Boomtown Rats think about America in 1979? Not a lot of positive things, it turns out. With 2 UK hit albums under their belt, they spent quite a bit of time over here trying to gain some international notoriety, and then they wrote an album about that experience. It's called The Fine Art of Surfacing, and damned if we just don't even bother. We're lunatics. It's hot, it's freezing, we kill ourselves, and kill kids at school, gossip, play dress up to pretend we aren't miserable, and the only thing we know about all the drugs we take is what color the pills are before we swallow handfuls of them. None of it ever f-ing stops. Just being here is enough to drive you insane. Back to Ireland and some fresh air for us! He's not wrong. Granted, i was literally a sperm while they were exploring our bounteous insane asylum, but it hasn't gotten any better now has it? Make no mistake, this is a concept album. The concept is Am...

Let's explore the more overtly political side of Industrial. The first two SPK albums are real industrial noise, but their third album is  industrial synthpop. Industrial music has a few characteristic traditions: the heart of a band is usually a guy with a sequencer, acronyms are intentionally undefined (coming up with funny interpretations is actually part of the fun), and there's very little indication if any particular idea or topic is serious or ironic. SPK is New Zealand musician Graeme Revell's journey from industrial noise, through political/philosophical synth pop dance music, to a further career in film scoring (and you have definitely heard his music if you've seen a movie in the last 20 years. Machine Age Voodoo is the first completely synth-pop oriented album, intentionally commercial but built on a definite industrial foundation. Lyrically, you might feel very uncomfortable with the overtly socialist/communist mindset, and that's actually the p...

Nowadays we associate "new wave" with the synthy, jerky pop/rock of the late 70s and 80s, but at the start it was indistinguishable from punk (especially in the UK). Real punk wasn't an actual musical genre, it was an attitude. That attitude was "this urban/suburban world our parents created is crap." That attitude evolved along two distinct lines, synth pop and alternative rock. The former simply abandoned to whole issue and reveled in the electronic inhumanity of commercial pop (whether escapist or critical, it's meant to be highly refined popular dance music) while the latter delved even deeper into the reason being outcast and miserable isn't fun at all. Boomtown Rats are the start of that alternative rock lineage, but they cross over into the Kinks, Cars, Blondie world on occasion. They are an Irish rock band, and Bob Geldof is their vocalist/songwriter. He's much more famous for his charity work (Band Aid, Live Aid, etc.), but his band was ...