Album of the Day 8/4/11

Every day, our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues all the way to #1. Thursday’s album is #544:

Pulp – Separations

The best British band of the 90s made a bunch of great albums. This one, from 1992, is their most theatrical. There’s a distinct A-side and a B-side, the first an update on noir 60s American pop, the second a cruelly deadpan parody of the era’s computerized disco music. Love Is Blind and Don’t You Want Me Anymore are Jarvis Cocker at his most glammy and sarcastic; She’s Dead, the title track and the absolutely creepy Down by the River aren’t particularly subtle, but they’re troubling nonetheless (Cocker has always dealt with death and tragedy by exposing others’ callousness and obliviousness to it, and these are prime examples). Side 2 is just plain funny, even if the joke starts to get old by the time they reach the end, with eight mindlessly throbbing minutes of This House Is Condemned. Leading up to it are the moronically repetitive Countdown, the catchy synth-pop of My Legendary Girlfriend and Death II, which revisits the morbid vibe of side one. Here’s a random torrent.

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Album of the Day 6/18/11

Every day, our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues all the way to #1. Saturday’s album is #591:

Black Box Recorder – Passionoia

Possibly the most witheringly cynical album ever recorded. Bandleader Luke Haines (also of the Auteurs – see #744 on this list) has said innocuously that this 1999 release was his adventure in exploring keyboard textures, but it sounds suspiciously like a parody of 90s British dance-pop, albeit with better tunes and artsy flourishes. Frontwoman Sarah Nixey delivers Haines’ corrosive lyrics in an ice-goddess whisper over the glossy sheen. The School Song does double duty as Eurovision satire (a moment that will return again with a vengeance on When Britain Refused to Sing) and knowing chronicle of the kind of torture schoolkids have to endure. GSOH QED is an early satire of internet dating; British Racing Green quietly and cruelly alludes to Britain’s fall from first world power to third world irrelevance. Although much of this is a period piece, the songs stand the test of time – The New Diana mocks the Princess Diana cult, but it’s a brutally insightful look at the cult of celebrity, as is Andrew Ridgeley, the funniest song here, a reference to the guy in Wham who wasn’t George Michael. Being Number One, These Are the Things and Girls Guide for the Modern Diva are savage sendups of yuppie narcissism. The album ends on a surprisingly poignant, haunting note with I Ran All the Way Home, a gorgeously apprehensive omnichord-driven art-pop song straight out of the ELO catalog, told from the point of view of an abused little girl. All the songs are streamable at myspace, but wait fifteen seconds before you put your earphones on, AND refresh the page after each listen or else you’ll be assaulted by a loud audio ad. Won’t it be a good day when myspace finally dies? Otherwise, here’s a random torrent.

Album of the Day 5/4/11

Every day, our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues all the way to #1. Wednesday’s album is #636:

The Jesus & Mary Chain – Darklands

Angst-ridden atheist post-Velvets powerpop from 1986. It’s the only really solid album the band ever did, a template they tried to fit into many times afterward without nearly as much success. Much as the idea of putting an album by a rock band propelled by a drum machine on this list is pretty abhorrent, it’s hard to argue with the catchy death-obsessed title track, or the stark, gorgeously bitter defiance of Deep One Perfect Morning, the strongest song here. There’s also the hook-driven, overcast goth-pop of Happy When It Rains and April Skies; the brisk, stomping Down on Me; the Stoogoid garage-punk of Fall; the poppiest number here, Cherry Came Too and a couple of impressively successful attempts at ethereal grandeur, Nine Million Rainy Days and About You. Here’s a random torrent.

Album of the Day 3/22/11

Every day, our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues all the way to #1. Tuesday’s album is #679:

Echobelly – On

Ferocious, fearless, sultry UK punk-pop from 1993. One of the most stunningly powerful voices in recent decades, Echobelly frontwoman Sonya Aurora Madan belts and wails over the roar and crunch of Glen Johansson and Debbie Smith’s guitars, through a mix of mostly upbeat, catchy songs lit up by the occasional George Harrisonesque lead line. Defiantly alluring, Madan romps through the irresistibly catchy, scorching Car Fiction, the similarly stomping King of the Kerb – a cynical tale of a pimp and his hookers – the unstoppable optimism of Great Things, the dismissive Go Away, the feminist-stoked Natural Animal and Pantyhose and Roses, and the sarcastic but swoony Something Hot in a Cold Country. Four Letter Word nicks an idea from the Sonic Youth playbook; the absolute classic here is the slowly simmering, psychedelic nocturne Dark Therapy, which winds up with an unreal crescendo delivered by steel guitarist BJ Cole, in what might be his best-ever cameo. There’s also the distantly X-influenced Nobody Like You and In the Year as well as the morbidly quiet, mostly acoustic closing cut. The band’s 1991 debut is also worth a spin. Here’s a random torrent.

Album of the Day 3/17/11

Like everyone else around the world with an internet connection, we’ve been glued to the web trying to figure out what’s happening in Japan. If you are there, our thoughts are with you, and please get out if there is any conceivable way that you can: in case you haven’t been keeping up, there’s been a slow meltdown going on in three reactors there, possibly for the past three days. In the meantime, we’ll be continuing all our regular features on this blog as we typically do unless we are no longer able to on this side of the world. So, as we do every day, our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues all the way to #1. Thursday’s album is #684:

Blur – The Great Escape

We were going to go with something festive in honor of St. Paddy’s day, but we’ve already done the Pogues, and besides, it’s pretty much impossible to be very festive right now. So instead we give you this ruthless, brutally sarcastic 1997 art-rock concept album that mocks the shallowness and vapidity of Tony Blair/Bill Clinton era yuppies – it was a similar kind of greed, after all, that built those Japanese reactors. Damon Albarn wastes no time getting going with Stereotypes, followed by the even harsher Country House, the sardonic Best Days and brutal Charmless Man. The blandness of yuppie status-grubbing gets excoriated in Fade Away, Mr. Robinson’s Quango and He Thought of Cars; the deathlike boredom in Ernold Same and It Could Be You; the fascism in Top Man and ultimately, death, personified in the lush, towering, epic The Universal. Blur made catchier albums – Modern Life Is Rubbish and Parklife are both full of killer tunes – but both of them also include a bunch of duds. Download this before the US military shuts down blogspot and wordpress (and maybe mediafire too; after all, you can upload videos of horror in Japan to that site too); here’s a random torrent.

Song of the Day 8/25/09

Every day, our top 666 songs of alltime countdown gets one step closer to #1. Tuesday’s song is 337:

Oasis – Rock n Roll Star

Many of you will want to smack us for including this one, but here it is anyway. It’s the first track the band ever released, from 1994’s Definitely Maybe, and it’s the best – you could say it was all downhill from there, although they did have a decent run until late in the decade as a boisterous, less amusing version of the Rutles. The link above is the studio version; here’s a drunken, coked-out trainwreck of a live take which in its way is absolutely brilliant.

Concert Review: The Gotham 4 at Club Midway, NYC 7/31/07

You have to wonder why these guys do it. Is it the money? They brought a good crowd, but let’s face it, if everybody in the band got to bring home fifty bucks apiece they would have been lucky.

Is it the fame? Hardly. Everybody in this loud, nebulously 90s, two-guitar unit has been around the block a few times, and as we all know, you don’t get signed to a record label these days unless your parents arrange for it, or you’re college-age and cute. These guys’ frontman was once in a band with one of the Psychedelic Furs that came thisclose to getting signed; the bass player is a ubiquitous type who had the good sense to catch on with a couple of other acts (Randi Russo and Erica Smith, to be specific) who seem to be right on the verge. Otherwise, the Gotham 4 are barely distinguishable from the literally hundreds of acts playing this town in any given week.

Maybe it’s that they’re clearly having fun, at least that’s how it seemed tonight. Their lead singer/lead guitarist has become something of a belter lately, and it served him well, giving the songs a welcome edge. The bass player was bobbing and weaving around a corner of the stage in Spinal Tap mode, the rhythm player delivering a steady blast of chordal fury, the drummer having fun throwing in some neat rolls and fills to keep everyone on their toes. And the audience loved it. They opened with a brief number that pretty much encapsulates what they do, totally early 90s anthemic Britrock with more than a nod and a wink to Led Zeppelin, especially where the solos are concerned. But they’re far more melodic than, say, the Verve or Ride or early Radiohead, more like Oasis without all the stolen Beatles licks.

The high point of the night was a long, flamenco-colored number called 3001, building from a White Rabbit-style, staccato verse to an explosive chorus, to a long solo where the lead player got to stretch out while the bass player did his best John Paul Jones imitation. Later songs gave off echoes of U2, the Furs (big surprise), the Who circa Who’s Next and (sorry, guys) Oasis in their prime. Their lone cover was an attempt to rock out the Stones country classic Dead Flowers. One can only wonder how many other unsung bands tonight gave it their all and received as warm a response from such an unlikely large, enthusiastic crowd.