St. Vincent – The Strangers
St. Vincent
On her 2007 debut album, Marry Me, St. Vincent, also known as Annie Clark, finally took centre stage, having previously been a member of the Polyphonic Spree and toured with Sufjan Stevens as part of his band.
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Omar Rodriguez-Lopez – Old Money
Omar Rodriguez-Lopez
The line between genius and madness is very thin indeed. Mr Rodriguez-Lopez seems happy to keep one foot on either side.
The Bishops – For Now
The Bishops
On this, their second full-length effort, The Bishops have eschewed the garagey sound of the previous album in favour of a broader, mod-ish palate. This doesn’t work too well, unfortunately, and I found the album a disappointment on the whole.
Smashing Pumpkins – Mellon Collie & The Infinite Sadness
If Nirvana rescued rock music from the narcissistic clichés of 1980s Cock-Rock and opened the way for a new mentality, then Smashing Pumpkins liberated the 1990s from the ‘new’ generation of Grunge Gods who were starting to stagnate by 1995 like one of Martin Scorsese’s greedy mob bosses.
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Mansun – Six
Forget the “is human life superfluous?†question and face the essential one – how the Hell did Mansun attain the Brit-Pop tag in the mid-nineties when they had always set out to offer us capricious pop connoisseurs the best thing since time immemorial.
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Pink Floyd – The Division Bell
Nostalgic fans had one last chance to be horrified in 1994 as Pink Floyd heaved out a final death-defying album before eventually fading into apathy.
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Beatles – The White Album
The year is 1968. Like the dinosaurs before them, The Beatles rule the Earth. They are at their most personally fragmented, musically at their most self-referential (see Glass Onion: “I told you about the walrus and me-man/You know that we’re as close as can be-man/Well here’s another clue for you all/The walrus was Paulâ€), enlightened by spiritual escapades in the Indian sun and at the cusp of everything that followed, deaths, Wings and whinges.
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Big Brother & Holding Company – Cheap Thrills
Originally to be titled Dope, Sex and Cheap Thrills, this record by Big Brother & Holding Company is a real gem. A shining stone on a beach of back catalogue confusion. Spilling out onto the streets with the musty air of the San Fransisco acid-rock scene of the late 60s, Big Brother and Holding Company played the blues like no other band at the time.
The Who – Who’s Next?
The imminent arrival of a touring Who to these shores (their first dates since 2004) has seen me dusting down their 1971 classic, Who’s Next.
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Stone Roses – Second Coming
It’s an urban myth that the Stone Roses peaked with their first album, 1989’s Stone Roses. This may be controversial but, to me, their eponymous debut reads more like an early singles collection than an album proper. Yes, those singles were astounding, groundbreaking, excellent, but the capabilities of each Roses individual is pushed to the limit in a positive way on Second Coming.
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