I started my day with a classic double album:
(# 592) The Clash –
London Calling (1979)
Bookended by two mighty singles, the title track and unlisted
Train In Vain, this is generally regarded as the best punk album ever
released. Now don’t get me wrong, this
is a superb album, but it’s Sandinista! I keep playing in preference. I figure it this way; The Clash were an
English band that generally saw the world through English eyes. Lyrically speaking that’s largely the case
here too but, in some cases, this gets lost in arrangements that sound like the
band has back tracked on its instincts in favour of seducing the United States
by producing the great sprawling American rock album. Examples: Brand New Cadillac and its
rockabilly fervour; The Right Profile with its hard rock attack and references
to Montgomery Cliff; Koka Kola; even London Calling with lyrics that appear to
be referencing Three Mile Island - when
these moments come they jar and makes me wonder whether the band actually
believed in their sloganeering. It’s a
minor point, to be sure, but enough to sway me in favour of its underrated successor. Still it’s a brilliant listen, Hateful,
Clampdown, The Guns Of Brixton, The Card Cheat, I’m Not Down and Revolution
Rock providing the back bone of what could have been the best British album ever released.
(# 593) Nirvana –
Nevermind (1991)
It’s the album that certainly help save rock in the early
1990s by encouraging a generation of fans, men and women, to pick up
guitars. It also help the underground to
become the mainstream albeit for a little while by opening the eyes of the
musical establishment to the wealth of talent that existed in unlikely
locations, if they were prepared to look.
But these are statements about its significance and, truth be told, it is almost
the perfect album. A couple of factors
hurt it just a little in my eyes. First,
is the clean, pristine, state of the art production which, although it works
beautifully on the sublime Come As You Are, Polly or Something In The Way, is
simply too much for tracks of such brutal power as Smells Like Teen Spirit,
Breed, Territorial and Stay Away. These
are tracks that seriously require some “dirtying up” along the lines of what was
achieved on In Utero, an album I distinctly prefer. Whenever I hear that terrifyingly roar that accompanies
the opening of that album’s Scentless Apprentice, I think back to some of the tracks
on Nevermind and wonder what could have been.
Also, when you have an album that ends on as magnificent a note as
Something In The Way, there is absolutely no excuse for the hidden Endless
Nameless that follows. Only The Beatles’
placement of Her Majesty at the end of Abbey Road is a greater crime.
(# 594) Radiohead –
OK Computer (1997)
These days this is the album that is most likely to top a
best ever poll voted for by Brits. Once
again it’s a damn fine album but I distinctively prefer the albums either side
of it – the straight ahead indie rock on The Bends and the absolutely fearless,
expectation defying Kid A. It is filled
with highlights such as the monumental, Pink Floydish Paronoid Android, the delicate
Lucky and the glorious The Tourist.
(Listen to the last 60 seconds or so of the latter and you can hear the first
stirrings of the sound MUSE were going to master.) But I suspect the band were
already looking far ahead; the album highlight for me is the grandiose No
Surprises, the ironically titled track that foreshadows the direction they were
to move into. Put another way, what I
saying is that ever since Kid A came out and in view of the albums that have followed
that album, OK Computer is clearly the band’s transitional album in which they take
their first, albeit confident, steps to their brave new world. How such an album can be regarded as one of
the best ever, when it doesn’t even have that function in the band’s own
catalogue, is beyond me.
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