THIS YEAR:

1)Jefferson Airplane, Long John Silver: The final Airplane album from their original run is possibly the strongest of the post-Surrealistic Pillow Airplane albums, but that’s not saying a hell of a lot and it’s still not a great album. Weirdly, it’s also the post-Pillow album with the least identity, following an acid-trip mess, an apocalyptic mess, a political-protest mess and an art mess, the main thing I’m going to remember about this album is that Marty Balin was gone leaving Grace Slick, and to a lesser extent, Paul Kantner, to rant and rave and bitch a lot. It has “Aerie (Gang Of Eagles),” a bitter minor-key barn-burner that counts as the best Airplane song that isn’t on SP, a song the band thought so much of that they pretty much immediately repeat it towards the end of the album with the painfully similar “Easter?” which features the then-33-year-old Grace Slick sneering “Ahhhhh, stupid Christiannnnn!!!” in way that made even Lester Bangs cringe in the original RS review. I also like “Alexander The Great” and the bizarre food rant “Eat Starch Mom” towards the end of the album, and there’s no embarrassing songs on the album, but this adds up to one more mediocre JA platter. I hope I still like the debut album, which I will be doing again shortly, because if I do that’ll be the only other good album they did.

2)The Slits, Cut: I only think this album is decent overall, but it’s really very remarkable the more you read up on it and it’s honestly a legitimate landmark, and not just for some all-female-band identity-politics reason. If they really couldn’t play their instruments when they started, and Ari Up really was just 16 and didn’t speak English as her first language (she was German), then they must have had some serious talent to make this album at all. I mean, they’re doing punk-inflected reggae rock, but the reggae influence doesn’t amount to them aping Bob Marley or any other major figure, the style really does seem to be their own, artistically speaking, particularly the yelping vocals, which sounds like Ari Up making up her own language. The other thing is that this album has probably aged better than....well, just about anything from the punk movement–it sounds like it could just as easily have come out in, say, the 1990s. All I really remembered from the first time around was “So Tough,” because it had a rising “disco octave” bass line in part of it, and that’s still the best song, but there’s nothing wrong with “Instant Hit,” “Spend, Spend, Spend,” “FM,” “Newtown, “Shoplifting,” or the Cobain favorite “Typical Girls,” either. Sheez, I kind of missed the boat on this one the first time around. And it’s only 30 minutes long!

3)Buffalo Springfield, Buffalo Springfield: Barring S. F. Sorrow, this might be the most-improved album I’ve heard during this entire relistening project–it sounds like an edgier, less Dylan-y Byrds album (say what you will about Starostin but he was about right to say “if the Byrds hadn’t heard any Dylan they’d be Buffalo Springfield”) but it’s almost as good as the Byrds’ best work. We all know “For What It’s Worth” and I’ve listened to “Flying On The Ground Is Wrong” a lot over the years (partially because it was obviously nicked for the Replacements’ “Swingin’ Party”–and by the way, I disagree that it sounded worse with Richie Furay singing it instead of Neil Young, who wrote it) but somehow I forgot a lot of terrific janglers–“Go And Say Goodbye,” “Sit Down I Think I Love You,” “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing,” “Out Of My Mind,” “Leave,” “Pay The Price,” “Do I Have To Come Right Out And Say It.” That’s quite an album, remember this was 1966 when most good bands still couldn’t put together a great album now could they? Stills and Young could write fine when they were 21 (or 24, for Stills–I’ve seen both 1942 and 1945 given as his birthdate)–gee, if only Stills could have written CSN songs this good after 1970! I’ll have to pick a copy of this fucker up and eagerly await relistening to the second BS album which I remember as being even better.

4)Queen, Queen II: Queen’s second album kind of sucks, actually. A long time ago I said that their first album, from 1973, was hugely underrated, their best album overall, and the only one I thought was better than okay (this would be after hearing the rest of their catalogue in 2020.) After relistening to this second album, which I initially gave as good a rating as Sheer Heart Attack (which held up fine in my last review post), I’m beginning to wonder if that opinion would hold at all. That first album sold poorly so Queen went back into the studio and made their first really bombastic, heavily overdubbed glam-fest, and from the song titles (“Ogre Battle,” “Father To Son,” “Nevermore,” “The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke,” “March Of The Black Queen,” “White Queen (As It Began,” “Seven Seas Of Rhye”) you’d think you were in for a prog-rock album, but almost none of these songs are complicated at all, they’re just mediocre glam rock for the most part, and worse still, they don’t have very memorable melodies. I always loved “Father To Son” and to a lesser extent “Nevermore,” but aside from that the only rediscoveries were the cutesy “Funny How Love Is” and “Seven Seas Of Rhye” at the very end. So that means of Queen’s 70s run all I really like are the debut album and SHA (I already know that A Night At The Opera and A Day At The Races kind of suck too, so there’s that.) God dammit Queen, why couldn’t you be better than your fuckin’ hits!! (which weren’t on this album!)

5)Beck, Odelay (Deluxe Edition): I’m a pretty big Beck fan–I adore Sea Change and Mellow Gold and think most of the rest of his albums are quite strong, and I think he’s a really smart and fascinating guy. Yet his most famous moment struck me, listening about 15 years ago, as being probably his weakest album, and I thought it had to do with the whole hipster, funk-rap, postmodern-collage, sample-heavy Dust Brothers style of the thing–I just thought that wasn’t the Beck for me. But when I did the rest of his catalogue last year I liked it just fine when he revisited the whole stylistic thing when he was past the age of 30 on albums like Guero, The Information, Colors, etc. So what was the deal with this album? Was it his youth that was the problem? Couldn’t be–he was a kid when he made Mellow Gold. I don’t know–I just think that the whole novelty of the postmodern collage thing in 1996, and the subsequent critics’ embrace of Beck, masked that some of this stuff probably wasn’t all that hard to do, maybe? I always loved “Ramshackle,” but that’s a beautiful dreary sleepy acoustic ballad thing, not a hipster song. There’s “Jack-Ass,” which was gorgeous as hell and which I was really glad to revisit because I’d forgotten it completely, and there’s “The New Pollution,” a great 70s collage in spite of pretty much all of it being stolen (“Taxman” bassline, “Tomorrow Never Knows” drumbeat, 70s music sampled from somewhere I forget). “Derelict” was kind of a cool Middle Eastern psychedelic thing, I s’pose, and I guess I don’t mind the hits “Devil’s Haircut” and “Where It’s At” while they’re playing, but I won’t play them outside the album to save my life, and I’m pretty glad that the far catchier “Loser” has replaced the latter as his most played song. But the rest…someone want to tell me what was so great about “Novacane,” or “Hotwax,” or “Sissyneck,” or “Readymade”? “High 5 (Rock The Catskills” got stuck in my head, but for annoying and stupid reasons, like the precursor to Smash Mouth or some shit. I completely understand how the critics fell for it–it SEEMS like he’s doing this shit really skillfully, doesn’t it? (And hey, wasn’t 1996 the year grunge was officially done for, and critics had to find someone new to crown as the vanguard of “alternative”?) I guess I have no big explanation for why I got into it far more later from 2005 onwards. BONUS TRACKS: there were 20 of them on the expanded edition, and I definitely wish the pleasant “Deadweight,” the epic “Inferno,” the ballad “Brother” and “Strange Invitation,” and “Gold Chains” (great sample: “Gina–and Tammy!”) were on the album instead of some of the collage junk–there’s a lot there, but check ‘em out if you like Beck at all, I’m glad I did.

FROM 2004:

6)Gong, Camembert Electrique: When George (was it?) gave this a 13 and posted the songs to the “BABBLETRON” playlist 20 years ago, I had not heard the first two Soft Machine albums, and didn’t know that Daevid Allen had been a founding SM member. Now I very much have and very much do, and it’s pretty damn weird to think of this album being released in 1971, which was about the last possible time something like it had a chance of being profitable or even getting noticed. It sounds like the first two Soft Machine albums alright, but with a lot more marijuana (or whatever these people were on–I’m not looking it up) and a really impish, child-like sense of humor. It REALLY should have come out in 1969 at the latest. Coming out in 1971, it sounds like the End Of Crazy Hippie Shit. It’s also not that great, but “I Am Your Fantasy” is UNBELIEVABLE–a totally dreamy psychedelic soundscape and showcase for Gilli Smyth (whose vocals can be either amazing or really annoying, depending on what kind of song she turns up in) that can’t be compared to anything I can easily think of from the psych era, barring maybe the VU’s “Sunday Morning” or the “I Get Up I Get Down” section of “Close To The Edge.” Don’t know how I forgot that one! “Tried So Hard” has some of that too, and if you want jazzy hippie rock epics, there’s “You Can’t Kill Me” where Allen moaning the song’s title contrasts weirdly with the wormy, driving jazz-rock of the song, and a spacier version of the same style for “Fohat Digs Holes In Space,” which I remembered as being the best song, but only by name–I hadn’t heard it in 20 years!! (In fact, the thing I remembered best were the silly link tracks with people muttering things like “tu vas camembert? Camemberrrrt”…why?!?) I think I’d stop with those four songs though–if it sounds like I’m lauding the album, that’s all I really liked from it. “Tropical Fish: Selene” and “Dynamite/I Am Your Animal” are both pretty annoying failures and “I’ve Bin Stone Before” is mostly notable for Allen’s intro to the song. I never heard anything else by Gong but if you people would like to recommend something I would not be entirely opposed to taking the suggestion.

7)Tangerine Dream, Phaedra: I’ve periodically dug up “Mysterious Semblance At The Strand Of Nightmares” and listened all the way through but that’s easily explained: it’s nine fuckin’ minutes of sad Mellotron swooshes, which of course I’d go ape shit for. And it’s still great. What I’d stupidly forgotten was the 17 minute title track, which I moronically misremembered as being 17 minutes of “bopping loops.” Bopping loops there are, but this epic is remarkably well put together–shifting between loops and speeds and space-moods to form a driving classic that ought to be as historically well-regarded as “Hallogallo” or “Autobahn,” and hey, those synths still sound pretty good don’t they? Too good that I just relistened to Tortoise’s “Djed,” too, which actually owes a LOT to “Phaedra”–listen to ‘em back to back if you don’t believe me! The other two tracks don’t really improve on anything from the first two, with “Movements Of A Visionary” sounding like stuff left over from “Phaedra,” but with tinklier, icicl-ier synth tones. I’ll have to relisten to that title track more!