I swear, there’s probably only one more of these before I’m going to give them up.

1)AC/DC, Highway To Hell: This is okay, but I’m probably never going to be more than a passing fan of AC/DC (I wouldn’t really rate this a lot lower than Back In Black; if I were handing out number grades, they’d probably get the same score.) All I really remembered from my original playthrough is the title track, duh. “Girls Got Rhythm” KICKS ASS, though–I can’t believe I forgot that one!! Or “Night Prowler,” which Richard Ramirez was supposedly into? Good slow burn on that one. Elsewhere…well, I can still remember “Touch Too Much,” “If You Want Blood (You Got It),” and the slow but weirdly soulful “Love Hungry Man,” which Angus Young apparently hates (“I got drunk and had some pizza and then wrote that shitty song.”) No turds, though I’ll probably only revisit the three classics in the future. I think AC/DC’s best album that I know of is the American High Voltage, but that one could use a relisten too. I never heard Powerage, Let There Be Rock or the Australian High Voltage. Or, for that matter, any AC/DC album made after 1981.

2)The Church, Starfish: The band’s big commercial breakthrough, released in 1988 after a bunch of jangle/college/”neo-psych”/80s-underground-alternative albums that were mostly only noticed by critics, is almost certainly the best-selling album in their discography, because it contains the only Church song the public ever cared about, their big hit “Under The Milky Way.” It’s also probably the last album they ever made that was more good than bad; for whatever reason, following this commercial success, the Church began losing band members, AND putting out big, overlong, overproduced, sprawling albums one after the next, AND totally losing their whole “neo-psych”/”Australian R. E. M.” identity that they’d built up in the 1980s, AND becoming painfully mediocre. I wish they’d gotten to enjoy their commercial success given such a downfall, but the band members apparently hated coming to Los Angeles to record, and working with a slick producer (Waddy Wachtel) and a slick record label (Arista.) Sort of a shame–those first five records all have some pretty good stuff. This one? It’s got “Under The Milky Way,” with its Cure-like vibe, and the cool hammer-on dragger “North, South, East, West,” and the driving, uptempo “Reptile.” Those three are great, and I’ve listened to them a lot in the last few years, but forgot the rest and figured a relisten might be in order. I guess I like this a little better than before, but all the rediscoveries amounted to were the major-key dream-pop songs “A New Season” and “Lost,” maybe “Antenna” if I’m being nice. The opening track kind of sucks though and later on someone who isn’t Steve Kilbey sings “Spark” and that isn’t too good either. This band’s songwriting was always pretty hit-or-miss though and I definitely feel that their commercial breakthrough wiped out a lot of their identity. It’s better than anything after it though, for sure. I couldn’t bother with this band’s albums after 1999, and they kept cranking them out.

3)Liz Phair, Whip-Smart: It hasn’t been that long since I did Liz’s discography–about five years, after I found myself really, really starting to totally adore Exile In Guyville (partially because it got me through a bout of depression in 2018) but I found myself thinking that none of other stuff came anywhere close to being as good as Guyville; one of the highlights was the title track to this album, still its best song and an amusingly lazy chant based on Malcolm McLaren’s “Double Dutch” from the early 80s. That one I listened to lots and lots in the last few years, and it’s her best song that’s not on Guyville. The rest of this album I did not revisit, but I remembered the best songs - the mumbling, repetitive “Shane” and the beautiful “Nashville” and “Go West.” What’s notable about all four of these big highlights is that they continue the style of Guyville without obviously rehashing any of its songs. That can’t be said about the rest of the album, which is probably why I had to revisit it–about half of these songs play like Guyville B-sides, or rejects, seemingly most of them going for, weirdly enough, the vibe of “Stratford-On-Guy.” Yeah, yeah, “sophomore album syndrome” (and while Liz claims she wasn’t trying for another masterpiece with this album, she DID make the cover of Rolling Stone when it was released next to the ominous headline “A Rock Star Is Born”–God, do those guys at RS ever know how to hype or what!) There’s a couple more songs I’d save–“Cinco De Mayo” and the MTV rockers “Jealousy” and “Supernova,” but that’s it. That’s enough to push the album to an “okay” rating, but the odds of me ever purchasing a copy are now slim to none.

4)The Notwist, Neon Golden: If you remember the critical acclaim this German album got in 2002, you probably remember a lot of comparisons to, you guessed it, Kid A–someone sent me “Pick Up The Phone” on ICQ, telling me it sounded like a warmer, more accessible Kid A track indeed. Relistening to the album, I think comparisons to Bjork may have been a little more apt than comparisons to Radiohead, though the big culprits are “This Room” and “Solitaire,” the latter based around a combination of dark cellos and eerie electronic skitter-percussion, and the former based around similar skitter-cussion but with the singer’s vocals getting chopped up and pieced back together as a line of indecipherable blabber like “Idioteque.” The rest didn’t remind me of Radiohead much at all. The best songs are “Pilot,” which now sounds like a post-2000 update of a dark New Order song, the closer “Consequence,” a melancholy ballad that plays like a smarter version of Coldplay’s “The Scientist” (at least in terms of vibe–the band’s lead singer is one quiet dude) and in the middle the song that made me want to do this relisten the most, the wonderful “One With The Freaks,” which contrasts quiet electronic verses with a big happy blast of major key angsty guitar chords! Say hey! I think the rest is all listenable, too–hell, maybe I’ll have to hear the rest of these guys’ discs, as this one actually has improved! Did you like this disc, and if so did you hear any of the other Notwist albums, and were they good?

5)Derek And The Dominoes, Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs: I was pretty intimidated to relisten to this one, mostly due to the length–I haven’t gone near it since about 2002, when I listened due to the title track but found myself put off by all the lengthy blues jams. I still don’t care for those jams–“Key To The Highway,” “Have You Ever Loved A Woman?,” “Tell The Truth”…but hey, I don’t even much like 12-bar-blues jamming even when fuckin’ LED ZEPPELIN does it. The thing is, those only comprise maybe 15-20 minutes of the 70 minute album. Otherwise, there really were a LOT of rediscoveries here, mostly uptempo stuff like the luscious “Anyday” (sort of like a brighter “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking”), the pumping “Why Does Love Got To Be So Sad?”, the wistful opener “I Looked Away” (how did I forget THIS song?) and “Keep On Growing.” Put those on top of the epic songs I remembered and already did love from 22 years ago (“Bell Bottom Blues,” “Little Wing,” “Layla,” obviously, and the underrated “Thorn Tree In The Garden,” a really sad little acoustic ballad sung by the keyboard player) and you’ve got an album I like a lot more than I used to. His ex-Delaney & Bonnie bandmates are really strong and professional without being too showy (some people seem to hate Bobby Whitlock, but I don’t) and I think the Duane-Eric duels are pretty listenable too, not too wanky and legitimately full of, uh, “soul.” I think what’s best about coming to like this album is that, aside from Disraeli Gears and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” I am honestly NOT Mr. Eric Clapton, partially due to growing up with a lot of his crappier dinosaur records being played by my mom all the time, who liked him more than anyone barring possibly the Beatles. But I should’ve payed better attention to this one! (BTW, did you know that a lot of critics–not Christgau, but a lot of others–slagged this album off when it came out and it didn’t even CHART in the UK?)

20th Anniversary Relisten

Blur, 13: Gngngngngn. A super-weird, super-arty, super-trippy, super-messy CD-era-bloat-platter from a band that was dealing with band members turning 30 by going all over the place stylistically EXCEPT the Britpop that they made their name on (though I still don’t think, as with the 1997 s/t album, that they sound terribly “American,” due to the fact that, y’know, DAMON FUCKING ALBARN is their singer.) I always loved “Tender” and “Coffee & TV” and still do, those weren’t hard to still enjoy. What else, what else....oh yeah, “Trimm Trabb,” which is nice and nocturnal, a Beck parody that I wouldn’t have known was a Beck parody in 2004 because I hadn’t heard any Beck albums yet. “Trailerpark” is icky electronic psych, what a creepy opening to that one. They try some epic-length songs here–“Caramel” is a bore, but “Battle” is at least sort of memorably weird with Damon going “bat-TULL bat-TULL bat-TULLLLL” and dragging the song out to eight minutes until Graham comes in with a bunch of discordant, repetitive guitar squalls. I…KIND of like that one? “No Distance Left To Run” is an average ballad at the end, and I hadn’t forgotten “Optigan 1” at the end, a short keyboard demo that has an appealingly elegiac, church-bells-ringing mood to it. That’s enough to make this album more bearable than it isn’t, but a lot of the “psychedelic” shit you can throw out the window, overwrought shit like “Bugman” and “Mellow Song” and the boring atmospheric buildup “1992” which George correctly pointed out as a trick with a long long beard. Oh, I forgot “B. L. U. R. E. M. I.”, that’s a good novelty joke. Blur had a nice sense of humor, Oasis should’ve taken the hint. Still, I think I’ll pass on ever picking this up. It’s more good than bad but it’s kind of like an epic length art-novelty album.