The first two BÖC albums are interchangable IMO (I’m not as big into Secret Treaties). Tyranny I got at a thrift shop and it has a really cool cover and packaging concept so I may be overrating it. But it’s a good album and actually my favorite of theirs. Why are you rankine the fourth album higher (that’s the one with “Don’t Fear the Reaper”, right?)? It’s boringly more diverse and doesn’t have that many good songs on it.

Sparks – I haven’t heard anything after Ingmar Bergman (or, for that matter, that album itself; I think I stopped with Exotic Creatures but there may be one after it and before Bergman). I’ve got to hear their newer stuff, but it’s not a priority. One thing about the “glam” is that I used that label for their debut (is it really that much different from Mott the Hoople or T. Rex?) and some nattering nabobs countered that it’s not glam at all, but new wave in 1971. There’s very little new wave about it, and it sounds like a questionable take received by the WRC (now that Denning is dead, do we still need that term?) as conventional wisdom on the basis of a single amateur review. Whatever.

Funnily, the CCR debut is my favorite of theirs and, probably not coincidentally, the first I heard (also from a thrift shop; I think I still have the album on vinyl in addition to my pirated copy). The other albums have crappy shit filler but the debut rocks. It doesn’t have the CCR bangers like “Born on the Bayou” but it doesn’t have the crap, either; I agree that if they had put out maybe a single and a double, it would have been much better than six short albums (they’re all like 30min, right?) over two or three years, yeah. But since all CCR pretty much sounds the same, I guess more CCR is better CCR?

On the Third Day is I think the only ’70s ELO album I’ve never heard. I’m not particularly eager to fix that.

Never liked the Airplane (or the Starship, save for Knee-Deeep in the Hoopla, and that as a very guilty pleasure) or Neil Young.

The Ballad of Todd Rundgren is one of his best IMO, certainly better than the plain Runt. but the next three smoke it, and Something/Anything? sounds a lot like this album with more diversity (and good diversity) added, but that doesn’t mean Today! is on the level of Pet Sounds. I was stupid and overeager and ripped my vinyl albums to replace my (pirated) digital copies. What I gained in legitimacy I lost in sound quality, meaning at some point I need to get on Soulseek and download the Rush and Genesis albums which, by the way, are really fun to collect on vinyl. In ripping Foxtrot I did cut up “Supper’s Ready* into its constituent parts as separate tracks. Vinyl is pretty stupid but that’s most of what I buy that’s not from the $1.99 classical clearance CD purchases.