197. Far - Water and Solutions

I listened to this album a lot when I was going through a “woe is me” phase. It wasn’t the lyrics that attracted me to the songs at first; it was Jonah Matranga’s voice. His vocals embodied exactly what I was feeling. He sounded tired and worn out. While that might not sound like a compliment, it worked for Jonah and for this album. His voice has such a rawness, such jagged edges that it comes off as imperfect and sometimes imperfection is just what you’re looking for.

I thought this would be one of those records I use up and put away after I’m done wringing my emotions out of it, but Water and Solutions stayed with me. When I dusted the self absorption of the “fuck my life” attitude off of me, I really, really listened to the songs. There’s a lot more here than I gave it credit for. There’s a positivity amongst all that woe, a few laughs between the tears, reconciliation after the anger. There are clever lyrics and a subtlety to the music that allows it to sort of sneak into your soul and before you know it, you are wrapped up in everything about it. Listening to Water and Solutions is like being wrapped in a warm blanket.

I came for the whining. I stayed for the warm fuzzies.

Listen: Waiting For Sunday

196. Hot Hot Heat - Make Up the Breakdown

I heard the song Bandages coming from my daughter’s room one day in late 2002 and I said “What is this? I must have it.” And I stole the CD from her. Don’t think I ever gave it back.

It’s very rare that I will instantly fall in love with an entire album, especially one from a band I never heard before. It usually takes many listens to accomplish that feeling of love. Does it work in the house, in the car, at work? Is it an album I’d play anywhere? Does it make me want to start it again as soon as it’s over? This one passed all the tests. It works everywhere. It’s driving music and working music, and it’s dancing music and thinking music. Make Up the Breakdown is what the Cure would sound like if Robert Smith took Prozac. It’s all 80’s post punk/new wave without the introspection of that genre.

This album is a restart button for my head. If I’m having a crappy day, I put this on and it feels like a fresh start. You can’t help but feel joy when you listen to this. In fact, this is what I was listening to one day when my coworker called me a “ray of fucking sunshine.” I had to think a bit about whether she really meant it or not, but it didn’t matter, because Oh, Goddamnit was on and it certainly was making me feel like a ray of fucking sunshine.

196. Five Satins - Greatest Hits

I’m trying to not include greatest hits collections in these reviews, but I don’t have any original Five Satins albums and I felt they deserved to be here somewhere.

This is the music I grew up listening to. While my parents were very into modern rock and roll, it was the music of the 50s, especially doo-wop, that was the constant soundtrack to our lives. I loved that sound and I still do; I don’t know if it’s the melodies and the music itself that warms my heart, or the memories attached to all of it.

Occasionally, when I need some comfort or a smile or just a reminder of less complicated times, I listen to In the Still of the Night. I close my eyes and I am in my parents backyard, about eight years old, wearing a yellow tank top and tan cotton shorts. It’s early evening and my parents have company over. They are scattered around the yard, sipping exotic drinks with fancy stirrers and smoking long cigarettes. I can smell the sweetness of the drinks, the smoke from someone’s cigar, the chlorine in the pool. There are fireflies flitting around the yard, and I’m running after them with another girl, the daughter of one of my parent’s guests. She smells of coconut suntan lotion and the beach. The radio, a little am/fm portable with a bent antenna is tuned to a 50’s “oldies but goodies” program. The DJ - he has a booming voice that seems to echo around the yard - announces the next song. “And now, here’s The Five Satins with In The Still of The Night.”

shoo do- shooby doo shoo do- shooby doo

The girl and I stop chasing fireflies. We stare at the grownups. They are all singing along, the women and the men with their funny drinks and half-drunk voices and some men are singing louder than the others and some of the women are giggling.

In the still, still of the night I held you, held you tight

They are swaying and crooning and it’s almost embarrassing, yet something about it is giving me goosebumps. My mom and dad are holding each other and dancing, and a lot of the other couples have started dancing and the men are all singing to their wives. They sing off key, their voices full of beer. But it’s oddly sweet and I stare at them for a minute before the girl I am playing with pokes me in the side and starts giggling.

The intensity of that memory, the very innocence of it, the way it makes me feel for a moment that I’m eight years old is a wonderful thing. But it’s the music as well that fills me with a sense of nostalgia, the sound and feel of all these songs. It’s sweet and soothing and so beautifully arranged. Do they even make music like this anymore? Something so simple and beautiful? No, it’s not just the memories here. This is just quality music.

194. Neutral Milk Hotel - In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

Someone requested I review this album. I had heard of it, but never heard it, so I figured what the hell, I could always use some new music. I listened to the title track and the Two-Headed Boy and on the basis of those songs, bought the album.

Back when I was a no-good teenager and used to do things like ingest chemicals that would alter my brain waves, I would spend some of that time just sitting in front of the mirror, with a candle between my reflection and myself. I’d put on some music - mostly Pink Floyd - and then watch the way the flickering of the flame changed my reflection. Someone - I think it was a long ago babysitter - told me that what you see in the mirror when you do this are all the people you were in past lives. So I’d stare and stare and be mesmerized by the appearance of my face melting and my eyes glowing and I’d wonder if maybe I was a skeleton in all my past lives.

Sometimes this experience was exhilarating, sometimes it was downright creepy and sometimes it was otherworldly. But always, it was fascinating.

And that’s exactly how I feel about In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. I don’t know if the music is the drugs, the candle or my reflection or a combination of all three, but this entire album makes me feel like I’m 16 years old and just ate an entire blotter sheet of acid and nothing is what it appears to be.

That’s a good thing.

193. Guns N’ Roses - Use Your Illusion I and II

[Some people see these as separate albums, some as one double album. Call it what you'd like. I'd prefer to just get these reviews over with in one shot. Also, I understand that my negative opinion of these albums is a minority opinion. Last time I wrote about these albums - and Axl - on an old blog, I got death threats. They were amusing and frightening at the same time]

My history with Axl and company is a long and complicated one. I imagine that most metal fans who hooked on to the early GnR bandwagon followed the same path I did. Think of the seven stages of grief in reverse. From acceptance (Appetite for Destruction = welcome to my record collection) to denial (I swear to you I never owned The Spaghetti Incident), we watched - and in some ways participated in - the slow death of a once great band. But it wasn’t their years of putting out head banging, fist pumping music that was the greatest show. No, it was watching Axl Rose trying in vain to raise the phoenix from the ashes that offered the most jaw dropping, car-wreck kind of entertainment this side of the November Rain video. But that’s another story and another review called Chinese Democracy.

I was looking forward to these albums. It had been about three years since Lies (which did not float my boat the way Appetite did). I think of each new album we wait for from a band we love is like the promise of hot, dirty sex after your partner has been away for a while. Well, my lust for the band kind of faded upon the release of these discs. It was then I realized that GnR was the equivalent of the girl who teases you with her perky breasts for years and when you finally manage to get under the hood, you grab hold of three inches of padded bra. All that music before Use Your Illusion was just a ruse to get us to this point. They gave us the good stuff first so they could later on sit back and make this pretentious, melodramatic drivel that they called art. There was nothing left to them. Empty D cups.

From the Harlequin romance of November Rain to trying-too-hard Civil War, the Illusion albums left me feeling frustrated and unfulfilled, which is not an easy thing to do when there are 30 songs to choose from. Bottom line is, my relationship with GnR boils down to a fabulous one night stand with Appetite, and a lot of too-drunk-to-fuck booty calls after that.

192. Rolling Stones - Some Girls

May, 1978. I was sitting outside the Mini Cinema in Uniondale, NY, probably waiting for the afternoon showing of Rocky Horror. We had a little portable radio with us, tuned to the local rock station (I’m guessing WNEW) and they were about to play the new Rolling Stones song. I was never a huge Stones fan, but I liked them enough that I was semi excited about some new Stones music. Their previous album, Black and Blue, pretty much sucked, so there was a lot of anticipation in regards to this one.

They played the first track. Miss You. I had the same reaction as when I first heard Kiss’s I Was Made for Loving You and The Grateful Dead’s Shakedown Street: “Oh my god. This sounds like disco.” The word disco was said with disdain and disgust, like you were spitting it out of your mouth. I was so horrified at this garbage coming out of my radio that I turned the station and vowed to not buy the album when it came out.

In June of 1978 I found my father singing along to Far Away Eyes and that was it. I cut myself off from the Stones.

As happens often in these reviews, I found myself many years later enjoying something I professed to hate at one point in my life. Like spinach and naps, the things I hated when I was younger became things I loved later on. And so it goes with Some Girls. I’ve learned to enjoy not only the Stones again, but some of the songs on Some Girls that made me cringe all those years ago. Shattered, Some Girls, Far Away Eyes, When the Whip Comes Down, I can listen to every single one of them without the bad taste of 1978 ruining it for me. And the song I hated upon first hearing, with it’s disco beat and hooky beat and it’s Puerto Rican girls just dyyyyying to meet you, has recently become one of my favorite tunes to sing in the car. By myself. Windows down.

191. Queens of the Stone Age - S/T

(Where QOTSA becomes the first band to have its entire studio catalog reviewed)

I heard about this album long before I actually heard it. I enjoyed Kyuss and was pretty much infatuated with Josh Homme, but for some reason I hesitated to buy this. Then my buddy at Mr. Cheapo’s records - who always seemed to know what I would like - talked me into buying the CD.

It was late fall, maybe early winter of 1998. Either there was some kind of meteor shower going on or I was just into stargazing late at night in the cold. I don’t know why I did this, I just remember I did. I took my CD Walkman and a blanket, went out to the backyard in the middle of the night and laid back on a lounge chair while I stared at the stars and listened to Queens of the Stone Age.

You know how if you stare at the night sky long enough, everything changes? You can see more stars, or single out stars or planets or see shapes in the stars other than the constellations. The sky is an ever changing canvas and what you make of the stars and planets and even airplanes is the art. That sky I was staring at was the perfect metaphor for what I was listening to.

I played it three times and each time I heard different things, different sounds. This was undefinable because it kept changing on me; the underlying feel was one of a rock album, but there were so many things within, all this spacey, robotic sound piled on top of melodies and riffs that were at turns soothing and then jolting. I’d focus on one sound, one bass line or drum beat and then it would be something else entirely, dragging in all the other sounds around it to make a cosmic constellation of music. The album was a rocket that took me on a ride through outer space, shooting through fiery galaxies and rotating planets and shooting stars.

I’m not saying I had an out of body experience listening to QOTSA. Maybe an out of mind experience, though.

190. Jesus Christ, Superstar (studio album)

There were a couple of versions of this; the original studio album, the movie soundtrack, and the original cast recording from the Broadway show (I’m sure there are others). This is the one I remember the most, and contains my favorite versions of the songs.

My mother gave to me this love of musicals. I loved the whole idea of telling a story through songs, of people bursting out into spontaneous song and dance. There was something very powerful to me about relaying a story through music. I remember listening to the Fiddler on the Roof album and being intrigued by the story within in a way I might not have been if it were simply told to me.

The same thing happened with Jesus Christ, Superstar. Mom had the album for a while - I distinctly remember the almost plain brown box it came in - and I guess she started playing it again when the movie came out in 1973. Up until that point, my religious education consisted of a one hour catechism class, once a week, for a couple of months each year. We colored pictures, we read parables, we prepared for communion. Every Sunday, mom sent us off to church where we were supposed to put the things we learned into play. Mostly, I just played this game with the scripture book where I would find the longest word I could and then spend the next 45 minutes making smaller words of it. Church did not interest me; catechism taught me nothing but how to color inside the lines.

While listening to Jesus Christ, Superstar didn’t teach me about religion, per se, it did give me a much clearer understanding of, and sympathy for, the main players in the crucifixion story. The album came with a lyric booklet and I read along with each song, taking it all and forming a much different opinion of the story than the opinion they were trying to make me have in church. I formed an opinion that stayed with me for a very long time, through years of religious education, then into Catholic high school - it was an opinion that I kept to myself because to say it loud to my parents or teachers or any relatives would surely end with me either being struck by lightning or ostracized. It wasn’t until I ended up in a Catholic college (St. John’s University) that I finally talked to someone about all of it. I ended up having an hours long talk with the professor of one of my religion classes, a priest. We talked about Jesus Christ, Superstar, at first about the music, then about the message and when I told him my feelings; that while I believe Jesus existed, I also believe that he was just a regular guy, just a man with a mission - albeit a good one - who got in over his head and believed his own hype, and went on a power trip which ultimately led to his eventual demise. We discussed Pontius Pilate, and how we both perceived Judas as a victim of the cult of Jesus. It felt so good to have someone - especially a priest - listen to me and mostly agree with me.

I went home that night and listened to this soundtrack again. I know it’s a rock opera, it’s a theatrical production and it’s not scripture by any means, but it fully encompasses my view and my opinion of the story; I still get emotional listening to it, and I do listen to it at least once a week. When people ask the question “What albums have had the most impact on your life?” I think of this one. Jesus Christ, Superstar made an eleven year old girl understand the complicated thoughts that went on in her head when the nuns were trying to give her a version of a story she didn’t believe. It made a 25 year old girl accept the fact that she was, at best, agnostic, and helped her explain to her family that just because she doesn’t believe in God, does not mean she doesn’t believe the teachings of Jesus are a good way to live your life, and it still makes this 46 year old very emotional to listen to it.

I promise, this will be the first/last time I write about religion in a music review.

189. Bill Nelson - Vistamix

The only thing I knew about Bill Nelson when I first heard the song Acceleration was that he had been in the band BeBop Deluxe. I liked the song enough that I had the import guy at the record store where I was working order the EP it was on (Chimera). For some reason, I never really listened to it. It wasn’t until a year later when we got in the Vistamix album (which was Chimera in its entirety, plus a few other songs) that I decided to give Nelson’s music a full listen.

Vistamix immediately worked its way into my brain and my very being. The way it attached itself to me was almost organic; the weird beats, the synthetic sounds and Bill Nelson’s odd voice formed together and grew out of that vinyl like twisted vines from exotic trees that wrapped themselves around me. The music enveloped me, became part of me and made me feel this connection with all the parts of musical sound in a way that I thought only a microdot of mescaline could show me. I was tripping without benefit of chemicals. I was tripping on this music.

I would spend hours upon hours in the months after that experiencing Vistamix in new ways; one night listening to nothing but Acceleration over and over and the next night doing the same thing with Flaming Desire or Another Day, Another Ray of Hope. I’d play with the equalizer settings on my stereo in an attempt to catch notes I may have missed. I listened on speaker, then the other. Vistamix was this huge musical experiment for me.

Later that year I had the pleasure of seeing Bill Nelson play at My Father’s Place in Roslyn, New York. His live performance matched every feeling I got from listening to the album. I remember being so completely blown away by the show that I thought at one point “I’m going to remember this forever.” And I did, right down to the blue light that bathed Nelson on the stage that was about two feet in front of me.

I still listen to this album every once in a while. It never loses that feeling of getting me lost inside the sounds.

188. Hüsker Dü - Flip Your Wig

Driving home from work one day last week, Makes No Sense At All was on the radio (Yes! Husker Du on the radio!). It was one of those March in New York days where it’s not quite warm out, but warmer than it’s been, so you squirm out of your jacket as you’re driving and open the window a bit, as if it were really spring.

This song - hell, this whole album - was made for a day like this. Flip Your Wig is spring. It’s that first breath of fresh air after a stale, dark winter. It’s melting snow and buds on trees and daydreaming about what to plant in the garden this year. It’s uplifting in a way that belies some of the lyrics, but is fully understood by the musical tone. There’s a freshness and crispness to Flip Your Wig that makes the world seemed bathed in a clean light.

That’s not to say the usual Hüsker Dü sentiments aren’t there. There’s still the anger and the passion and the quiet rage, but they’re delivered with a blast of spunk, which may be something like pop punk, but a bit harder. Flip Your Wig is a record that makes me want run through a field of flowers in a flowery dress and straw hat, with Divide and Conquer playing in the background, like some warped version of a Massengill commercial.

I may be the first person to use a feminine product analogy for a punk album. I hope I’m the last.