Headphones through Time

  Releaesd at the tail end of 1964 by an exhausted band  that had been running all year to meet contractual obligations, Beatles For Sale is often dismissed as full of filler and lacklustre compared to the great A Hard Day's Night. But for some reason it's one of my most enjoyed albums, and I'd argue one of the most forward looking albums they recorded: by falling back on their natural strengths as a country-ish rock and rockabilly band, and taking a lesson or two from their new toke buddy Bobby D. , The Beatles ended up making music that sounds a lot like what would dominate the airwaves of 1965: folk rock.  I also think there are more high points on Beatles For Sale than on AHDN and I find the following album Help! onf o the most overrated albums they did.  There's a sense of fun about Beatles For Sale and songs like "No Reply", "Baby's In Black" and "I Don't Want to Spoil the Pary" are all sparkling gems in their catalogue. ...

  At one time I would have counted  The White Album as my favorite album of all time. I spent hours and hours in doobie-struck paralysis  listening to this magnificent puzzle of an album, trying to figure our what it all meant, and if it meant nothing, well, what did nothing mean, dude?  Nowadays I have to say that there are an amazing amount of crap half-written songs and unsuccessful experiments on this album, yet somehow the way they sequenced it makes it all sound beautiful and right, as if there is a purpose in all this chaos. I can see now how The Beatles basically took something from everything that was going on around them all year in 1968 and tried to see if they can do it themselves: reggae, blues rock, Donovan-esque folk-pop, the dying vestiges of psychedelic rock. They wisely kept away from Band/style roots rock, but fuck if if they wouldn't be trying to do that by 1969.  I don't know. It still might be in my Top 10 Albums of all time: it's certainly...

  Early Belle And Sebastian didn't really play many live shows -- various reasons for that, ranging from Stuart Murdoch's struggle with Chronic Fatigue syndrome, to Isobel's hatred of the road, to to the fact that nobody in the band really knew what they were doing: their shows were legendarily a mess "shambolic" is the word most often used for the ramshackle band -- and you can kind of hear that sort of seat-of-your-pants energy in their early records. So   The BBC Sessions  i s all the more valuable a document, capturing as it does several performances from the earliest (and best) period, some songs even pre-dating the release of Tigermilk. There are a handful of songs that are exclusive to the song and all but one of them are pretty much essential for big fans like me. Stevie sings a surprisingly amount of songs, and even more surprisingly he sings on key and in tune for hte most part and we even get treated to a whispery whisker of a vocal by Isoble.  They...