Headphones through Time

  The Best of Dark Horse 1976-1989 does a pretty good job of presenting an overview of George Harrison's post-Apple career. The Quiet Beatle only did one studio album after this and I daresay if you have All Things Must Pass and this one, you will have most of what you need from George Harrison. Having said that, what the world really needs is a three disc retrospective of his entire career. He's not quite consitently good enough in my book to justify buying all his albums, but there are some good songs that are missing from this and the later (but compressed and bad-sounding) compilation Let It Roll: The Best of George Harrison. He deserves better, but I figure that anything Dhani Harrison is going to compressed to hell and not worth listening to anyway. 4/5 I bought this because the more complete Let It Roll sounds bad in my opinion: compressed and undynamic. This doesnt have the best sound in the world either, but it won't hurt your ears with headphones! C oming Up: All ...

  Berlin, Lou Reed's third solo album,  is probably his crowning achievement, an album so relentlessly dark that a Rolling Stone critic, in a review that aged like year old milk, wrote that if he saw Lou Reed in the street, he was going to attack him on sight.  But time has been kind to this unflinching look at the seedier side of life: domestic abuse, excessive drug use, lost souls in pain, abandoned children,   suicide -- this album explores all these themes and more. Probably doesn't sound very appealing to you,  but Reed's songwriting was never sharper and, indeed, perhaps because of the beating this took from the critics at the time, he never really was this good again.  A brilliant album and maybe my favorite album from 1972. 5/5 I had the remastered version as part of the Original Album Series box set and it sounded terrible. So I sprang (sprung?) for an older version from the eighties that retains the wonderful dynamics.  C oming Up: All This U...

Begin here is the debut album from the English "beat" band The Zombie, whose second album, Odyssey & Oracle is one of the great psychedelic pop albums.  Begin Here is a lot more conventional British beat stuff, with the usual mix of originals and covers of blues or Motown songs. They stand out a bit from the likes of, say,  by having a couple of singers, including the awesome Colin Blunstone and by the fact that their lead instrument is Rod Argent's electric piano, which is stellar. There's something good and snappy about their drummer, too.  Overall, this is a pretty ordinary mid-sixties English beat album, though. My copy has, like, 20 bonus tracks, mostly non-album singles and B-sides and EP cuts or BBC performances. This actually really enhances the album. In the end, I prefer just making a playlist of the original songs from the bonus tracks and the album proper and jetissoning the covers, which are all right, but largely unremarkable. 3.3/5 C oming Up: All T...

Beggar's Banquet was The Rolling Stones' first post-psychedelic album, in which they went back to their roots as a blues rock band, a place which they have decided never to leave again, perhaps due to the disastrous reception of Their Satanic Majesties Request. A pity, in my opinion, but this is not the place to go into it. It's also probably the last great gasp of original guitarist/multi-instrumentalist colorist Brian Jones, although he would play on a few songs on the next album, he was rapidly descending in a tragic downward spiral.  Personally I prefer the rissks the 1965-1967 era Stones took to the Blues Rock phase (though with the addition of Mick Taylor they definitely recorded a pair of their finest albums) and I find the relentless roots rock of  Beggar's Banquet to be a tad bit disappointing. Like, where are the harpsichords, horns, dulcimers and sitars of yesteryear?  Having said that, there are definitely no bad songs here: no ten minute long jams or lame M...

  Anybody who knows me well, knows of my unabashed and intense passion for both Neil And Tim Finn's music. I honestly think that the only reason they aren't gigantic stars is the fact that, being from New Zealand, they have basically had a rough time getting North Americans on board iwth their music in general.  On Before & After , Tim Finn, smarting from his break up with actress Greta Scaatchi,  bounced back from his short-lived stint as co-leader the of brother Neil's band's Crowded House. The album they made together, Woodface , was probably the band's most successful (everywhere but the US, that is)  but the chemistry wasn't right onstage and Tim left the band after only a few months.   Before & After  is a bit of a hodge-podge: there are four songs recorded with English sophisti-pop producers Langer & Winstanley, two songs produced by Crowded House cohort Mark Hart, some Finn Brothers songs (rejects from Woodface) featuring the breth...

  Despite the fact that  Become What You Are   reminds me of a rather dreary time in my life -- the year and a half or so when I came back to Springfield Missouri after college to live -- I think this is one of my favorite albums of 1993 -- and 1993 was a really good year for my taste in music.  Juliana Hatfield has a way of telling stories and fleshing out ver complex characters and defining complex emotions in amazingly simple terms, with a few lyrics as possible -- she's sort of, like, the Hemmingway of singer/songwriters. And that's a compliment. But to be clear, this music is not one woman alone with an acoustic guitar; this is a real rock band and Juliana Hatfield herself is quite a formidable hard rock guitarist. This is kind of in the grunge era; I wouldn't call it grunge, but it's from  the brief period of time when singer songwriters could rock in this way that was somewhere between The Stooges, Kiss, and Big Star. See also some of Aimee Mann's cu...

  I think in light of Belinda Carlisle's massive pop success in the late eighties and early nineties (especially in the UK) it's easy to overlook the fact that Beauty And The Beat was one of the finest and most enoyable debut albums to come out of the New Wave.  Just the fact that they were an all-girl rock band who played their own instruments (and well -- at least on record) and wrote their own songs was refreshing at the time, I'm sure. And they had the songs on Beauty And The Beat to really make it live up to the hype.  It's interesting that this brand of New Wave rock -- taut and snappy, packed with hooks and guitar based is often forgotten by many eighties nostalgia merchants. You'd think it was all synth pop, heavily made up men and drum machines and English sensibilities. But Beauty And The Beat demonstrates that there was more going on there than popular culture seems to remember: thi is the pop surface of what was really a deeper trend in American altern...

Beauty AndSadness was an EP released in 1983 by New Jersey band The Smithereens, who would eventually flirt briefly with "alternative stardom in the late 80s.  Beauty And Sadness shows us all the pop rock band's strengths: good tunes, unique vocals, relateable guy/chick classic sixties style arrangements wedded to a rather seventies hard rock aesthetic and slight punky edge, delivered with a bit of retro-hip eighties humor and a bit of 12-string jangle. Anybody who likes The Smithereens will like it. I like it. My one problem with The Smithereens is they never really developed into something truly unique. So maybe they don't stand out as especially noteworthy and they basically seem like a much much better than average bar band.  But I'm not sure that's a weakness.  Their songs are so solid that you don't care when you're listening. 4/5 I used to have this album on cassette back in the 80s; now I have an iTunes version. I don't think this has veen remas...