Flippin' thru The Record Rack

There's a thread that's been kicking around these parts on and off since 2018. The premise was simple: Make a single album recommendation and post it without comment, without fuss. The result is a list of great albums, many of them classics and old friends.

The thread you're reading now uses the older thread as its basis, but it isn't as pure or minimalistic. I'll be writing a short monologue on each album, kind of review-ish in nature, indexed here in the first post. The comments will reflect my own tastes, which are themselves a function of my age and background. That said, I believe that beauty and truth can be found in most styles and in unexpected corners.

You're invited to take part in whatever way you see fit: Engage in banter about the albums; Reminisce about concerts you've been to; Dissect song lyrics; Post gifs critiquing my comments; Heck, you can even employ Schenkerian analysis to trace a song's harmonic structure back to its Ursatz. Whatever floats your boat.

At the time of writing there are over 180 recommendations on the list, 180 albums in the record rack. This could take some time. Check back in every week or see to what's spinning.

Index
Talking Heads - Stop Making Sense
Jeff Beck - Blow by Blow
Opeth - Ghost Reveries
Pink Floyd - Animals
Chicago - Chicago II


Credits
Based on an original concept from the mind of @Philimon
Indebted to @AllanMarcus and his original thread of SBAF album recommendations
With gratitude to all those who contributed album suggestions
Derivative? You got it!


PLEASE DO NOT POST YOUR RECOMMENDATION/S HERE. If you want to recommend an album use the original thread, following the original guidelines. I'd encourage you to do this provided you haven't already.

 

Epic endeavor to listen and write about all the "one" albums. I plan to follow along and listen to each album myself as well. I'll comment if I have anything interesting to add but expect that'll be a rare situation. I hope others do the same. Should be an educational and fun journey.

I ask with each "response" you ping the person who originally recommended the album so they may enjoy your critique and perhaps offer their reason for why they chose their "one" album.

Do you know what order you're going to follow? For example will it be by earliest posted or by alphabetical? Id suggest the former because the alphabetical order will change as more people add their recommended albums to @AllanMarcus 's thread. Or will there not be any particular order so you can skip to certain albums at your leisure? I think if you maintained a strict order then youd be forced to face albums sooner that are perhaps outside your comfort zone or preference which would be entertaining to read about too Im sure.

 

Here he is: The brains trust.

1. Good call on paging users when it's the turn of their album to be put under the microscope. Will do. I honestly am grateful for everyone contributing to the list as it gives me the chance to revisit some old favourites and exposes me to lots of music I've never encountered before.

2. I intended on loosely following the order in which the albums were originally posted. I'm part way through my first listen of the first album on the list: Talking Heads - Stop Making Sense. If an album is too challenging at a particular time I might leap-frog over it and come back later.

3. I'm aiming to review one album a week. We'll see how this timeline evolves.

Nathan

 

I can't believe it took nearly 5 years for this to happen
Any criteria for completing an album? Would it be to simply critically listen to the full album?

 

My favorite 2022 jazz album (at least by number of plays on Roon):

 

Thanks for making the recommendation: It's on my "listen to this" list.

One thing I didn't explain clearly in the original post is that this thread is not for making new recommendations. The thread you're reading now is me working my way through an ongoing list of recommendations made historically in another thread. Please move your recommendation there, following the guidelines @AllanMarcus set out. My apologies for not making this clearer.

I should really think of a more suitable thread title. [Edit: Done]

 

Talking Heads - Stop Making Sense
Recommended by @AllanMarcus

Don't listen to this album: It's the soundtrack to an 80 minute aerobic workout lead by an intravenous coffee user.

I grew up in the 80's, so I knew Talking Heads from their radio hits: "Burning Down the House", "And She Was", "Once in a Lifetime" etc. Fast forward to 2007 when I shelled out twenty bucks for a "greatest hits" compilation. I was mildly disappointed. All their songs seemed to be missing something. Just what this was, I didn't know. Now I do.

Don't listen to "Stop Making Sense". Watch it. It's performance art that engages more than one sense. All the pieces fall into place.



The vocal style of frontman, David Byrne, is sometimes declamatory, straddling that line between speech and song, but always expressive. He switches masks, varying his tone like a man possessed by the spirits of his songs. Speaking of possession, his dance moves remind me of a tribal village shaman with a style that's part seizure and part step-training.

Much like Byrne himself, the three other core members of talking heads (Chris Frantz on drums, Tina Weymouth on bass and Jerry Harrison alternating between guitar and keyboard) seem to form a unit that's all knees and elbows: Lean, sinewy points of perfect articulation.

Lean: There isn't much harmonic variety in the numbers on their set lists. Many of the songs are based around just two or three chords.

Perfectly Articulated: In this context I'm not talking about note attack and decay, although the band is generally pretty tight. Rather, the rhythm section is perfectly articulated in the same sense as a joint. They fit neatly together, each part combining with the others to form a wonderfully functioning whole. The bass guitar often syncopates cleanly and simultaneously with the bass of Frantz's kit while the rhythm guitar weaves short melodic fragments between the spaces. Like the warp and weft of a cloth, to use another illustration.

The pacing of the concert is also smart. The first number "psycho killer" is just Byrne with a guitar, a drum machine and an overdub (or offstage singer). Slowly the forces are marshaled onto the stage, one instrument added at a time and we can appreciate just how finely the show has been stage managed. By the end of the first set everyone's there. In addition to the core-four, we have two backing vocalists, a dedicated percussionist and another keyboard & guitar. Here we have some meat added to the bones with textural padding and sweet three-part harmony between Byrne and two lively lady soulful singers.



Highlights? Visually, it would have to be the yuppy sumo-suit Byrne managed to pry from his wardrobe. Musically, the second last song "Take Me to The River" took me just where I wanted to be: Gospel inspired song writing with an extended jam at the end.

I've awarded Talking Head's "Stop Making Sense" four exhausted monkeys and a ring master to keep them in line. If you want to know what this actually means, well, you're asking the wrong question. Don't let me tell you whether or not you'll like the album/concert: Go listen to it yourself. No. Sorry. Go watch it yourself.

 

^Thanks for this. I've only listened to the soundtrack album and enjoyed it; however, funny enough, never actually watched the film by Jonathan Demme.

Sometimes my inclination is to "listen" only the music. I need to explore more video performances, like this, or the Peter Jackson series on the Beatles, or musicals...or even classic music videos of yore.

 

lol. Well done and thanks @GuySmiley'sMonkey

Im so glad that I asked you to take on this project. My album impressions would've been short, shallow, under appreciative, and unfunny.:
Of course the video from the concert is far more interesting than the audio. The audio version I actually do not enjoy aside from the solo acoustic guitar "Psycho Killer". I dont enjoy because other than "Psycho Killer" I prefer the original versions of the songs from the studio albums which are generally more short and sweet. For watching a live performance I prefer Live in Rome 1980 because of the set list and the extra guitar wankery provided by King Crimson's Adrien Belew. I dont know if there is an official audio release but there's Youtube, here's a clip.:

My favorite website (other than pornhub of course) is Allmusic.com, here is their review of Stop Making Sense.

 

Jeff Beck - Blow by Blow
Recommended by @Jinxy245

Who was Jeff Beck and why are lots of classic rock artists celebrating his life and legacy? Heretical question? Maybe, but certainly not uncommon. Let's do what we can to remember him by spending a little time enjoying and talking about his best selling album.



If you're new to Blow by Blow, the overt jazz influences might make you wonder how it made platinum. However, the mid 70's was the first golden age of Jazz Fusion, with artists like Herbie Hancock and Weather Report sitting high in the tower that is the Billboard 200. Not only did music like this exist, it became popular becoming attached to a more mainstream name. For the sake of context, I've embedded the live performance of a track by Chic Corea / Return to Forever. In 1974 This album made it to No. 32 in the mainstream charts.

Return to Forever - Vulcan Worlds



An initial listen to Blow by Blow might also bring to mind Stevie Wonder as his signature instrument, the clavinet, makes a frequent appearance. In fact, we see Stevie's signature next to song writing credits on two of the tracks (Cause We've Ended as Lovers & Thelonius) and a cameo performance in the latter. Another obviously famous musician is attached to the project in the form of George Martin, who produced the album and made string arrangements for the side closers, Scatterbrain and Diamond Dust. Truly a confluence of greatness.

And onto the man himself, who served in the ranks of the Yardbirds before flying the coop. Jeff Beck was a sorcerer of guitar technique and an artist who made obscure colours part of the instrument's mainstream palette. Technique and colour are but nothing without musicality. This is harder to define than both, so let me put you in the direction of his music and give you a gentle push so that you can hear it for yourself.



I'm not going to give you a blow-by-blow account. Instead, I'm going to point out some highlights from a single track, Scatterbrain, that encompasses many of the musical concepts that are spread out across the other eight tracks.



After a short drum intro and a couple of bars of ominous synth we're taking straight into a riff that slowly climbs, with an anti-halo of murky strings. It jumps back down and repeats, this time doubled by the keyboard, building until the tension is broken by four sweeping chords (1:03).

This leads us into a more straight forward solo underpinned by the same chords from the unholy first section. But then, those four sweeping chords again, back into another solo: Once, twice... three times? Not yet (2:25)! That finger flinging riff makes a comeback, then the four sweeping chords and.... it's the keyboard's turn to solo with punctuation provided by Jeff. Four sweeping chords and George Martin lets those strings off the leash before the keys rudely interrupt.

Four sweeping chords; The opening, striving riff; Four sweeping chords; and then the rest of the damned (4:28)? Nope. We're off again (4:45) with something new. A new riff? A new direction? Beck's fooled us. A new riff maybe, but the strings can't help themselves. The opening torturer returns as all fades to black and Jeff is dragged back down into hell.

Wow. That description grew melodramatic even by my standards. My intent was to give an overall sense of structure before honing in on that opening, striving riff. In preparing this review one of the comments I read about Scatterbrain is that it grew from a warmup / technical exercise that Beck played from time to time. I don't know if it's the way things went down, but it certainly rings true as it has that sense of repetition and slow change so typical of the boredom imposed on me by my sadistic piano and trumpet teachers.

The riff has surprising rhythmic complexity despite its brevity. Tracing the pattern you can hear that it's repeated after nine frenetic pulses, but they're arranged in an unexpected manner. There's polyrhythimc stuff going on in here that's beyond this review to explain, but if anyone is interested I can expand on this separately.

Another compositional technique that Beck uses in this opening section is the "sequence", used a number of times in the album. It's how he achieves the "climbing" effect. The riff is repeated a number of times at one pitch level, before it moves up in pitch, step by step. It's a technique of composition used in a multitude of styles from Baroque music to Metal.

Let me finish with an anecdote about Beck's perfectionism taken from 17 Watts?: The Birth of British Rock Guitar (Foster & Cunningham). "Beck, fastidious about overdubs and often dissatisfied with his solos, often returned to AIR Studios until he was satisfied. A couple of months after the sessions had finished producer George Martin received a telephone call from Beck, who wanted to record a solo section again. Bemused, Martin replied: 'I'm sorry, Jeff, but the record is in the shops!'"

I'm giving this album five monkeys wearing berets and tie-dyed shirts. Figure that one out yourself.

 

As a little post script, here's a clip of Jeff performing She's a Woman so that you can see how he gets that cool Vocoder-style effect. It's actually a device called "The Bag" / Talkbox.

 

Opeth - Ghost Reveries
Recommended by @Erikdayo



My introduction to Opeth was through their 2011 album, Heritage, recommended to me by someone on SBAF. I was enthralled and quickly went searching for other good stuff in their calatogue. I gave up after a few hits and misses thanks to the nastiness of the death growl. For those who don't know what a "death growl" is, I'll bring in Elmo to demonstrate:



The death growl seems to me simultaneously evil and humorous, like a cross between Hitler and the Cookie Monster. Its use has formed a barrier between me and music that I'd otherwise enjoy. Case in point, Opeth's 2005 Ghost Reveries. I even half suspect that the intent of the death growl is at least in part a tool of cultural separation. There are those who "get it" and those who don't.

The first challenge in writing this review was to at least understand the growl, so I tried to think like an ethnomusicologist. How was the sound created? Has a similar vocal style been used in non-Western cultures? If so, did the style have any special meaning? Here are two examples of deep, guttural throat singing I came across.

Tuvan throat singing is practiced by a people group in Mongolia and is a combination of a number of styles that emphasise both overtones and undertones. The section reminding me of the death growl begins at about 0:30, a style within this tradition called "Kargyraa". Apparently it mimics the howling of wind and/or a mother camel crying for a lost calf. It would be an interesting area of study to examine connections between this style of singing and the animistic beliefs of the Tuvan people.



Buddhist monks in Tibet use a similar vocal technique to Kargyraa in their chants, as seen in the example below. I wonder whether the similarities are coincidental or the result of cultural contact in the past, despite the geographical separation. It appears that the monks consider the style of singing to be conducive to a meditative or contemplative state.



Does the death growl share a vocal technique with Kargyraan and Tibetan throat singing? I turned to the experimental method, shutting myself into a room for half an hour and attempting to reproduce all three styles. The only conclusions drawn were by my wife and children, who rushed to my rescue concerned for my mental well-being. In the end it doesn't really matter whether there's a unity in sound production. The important thing to note is the validity of singing styles beyond that which our western ears are accustomed to.

By this point I'd overcome my prejudice enough to appreciate some of the subtleties in Mikael Akerfeldt's singing, which takes considerable skill to do well and, I imagine, to do without tearing out your vocal chords. Truth be told, I was amazed by the complexity and variety I was hearing.

At its heart, Opeth is a metal band and uses many of the stylistic features you'd expect: Distorted guitars; power chords; an exhausting barrage of notes from dual bass drums (not easy to play well, believe me); heavy riffs using non-diatonic modes and scales; Doubling of melodic material on bass and electric guitar. This is all skillfully done, but it's the other cool stuff that, in my mind, distinguishes this band from a cliche.



The album's timbral paint box extends well beyond bass, distorted guitar and drums, even beyond the surprising grand piano and acoustic guitar, extending to the totally unexpected Mellotron (the keyboard instrument you hear at the start of The Beatles' Strawberry Fields) and tabla (a type of drum originating in Indian classical music and used here in The Grand Conjuration). Harmonically, material is drawn from classical tonality to extended jazz chords. A basic chord has three notes, simplistically described classical music can have up to four, but jazz frequently uses chords with five or six notes, sometimes even more. These additional pitches add spice to the sound, while also functioning to create expectation associated with dissonance and its resolution.

Marting Lopez draws deeply into the drummer's bag of tricks, even using a hemiola technique in the third track, Beneath The Mire. In this example he simultaneously subdivides a six pulse pattern in two ways. Firstly into three groups of two (on a ride cymbal) while at the same time using other parts of his kit to subdivide into two groups of three. This technique goes back at least as far as the Renaissance.

Yep. Ghost Reveries is a meal of many contrasting courses, a complexity of flavour, cultural fusion and the intelligent use of disparate ingredients. One of these is the "witchetty grub" of the death growl, which I haven't yet come to enjoy but which I gladly swallow to appreciate everything else on offer. I'm looking forward to returning to Opeth's restaurant as I go back through their Discography.

This album gets twelve gastronomically rounded monkeys.

 

Post Script

There's lots more stuff in this album than can be fully explained within the constraints of a review. Is there anything I raised you'd like to discuss more? Jazz chords? Comparisons to other metal albums? The use of hemiola through musical history? Please take your discussions in any direction you'd like.

 

Thanks for your in-depth write-up. It was interesting to hear more about the growls. Personally, I can’t stand them, so I like listening to Opeth’s “Heritage” (also it’s homage to classic rock styles).
We had Tibetan throat singers here at a WOMAD festival - it’s s bit weird.

 

I tried a couple times to sit patiently through Ghost Reveries. The rest of the composition is not worth the price of the vocals unlike say Rush or Primus. (I couldnt appreciate like you. I appreciate your teaching, maybe now Ill try again thanks.)

Death growl humorously.:

 

Just flying by to say if you like Opeth harmonically / compositionally but aren't a fan of the growls, the album Damnation is growl-less and a great listen, almost reminds me of Porcupine Tree in many ways.

 

Pink Floyd - Animals
Recommended by @GoodEnoughGear




Dear Sir

I wish to return my copy of Animals for a partial refund.

The album is quite dull and severely lacking in monkeys. Dogs, pigs (three kinds!) and sheep are all represented, but the track-listing reflects the lamentable paucity of primates in the recording industry.

May I suggest that instead of building a monstrous 24-track recording studio the money would have been better spent on hiring new personnel. Perhaps the artistic direction of Pink Floyd could be put into the hands of a troupe of card-carrying baboons of my acquaintance. In the meantime, I have invited them to join me in taking up residence inside Syd Barrett’s head.

For a lark I loaned my copy of the record to the ghost of George Orwell. When I told him that Animals hasn’t received any chart success, he replied with relief that this restored his faith in humanity. However, upon learning that I was pulling the wool over his eyes he fell into a rage, sold his soul to Penguin Paperbacks and has not been heard from since.

I look forward to a response at your earliest inconvenience.

GSM

 

No worries if you want monkeys (and I'll bet you do). Roger Waters was saving them for the last and they are on his solo album Amused to Death. Commanding subs and drifting out of range and all kinds of crazy shit.

This is the best album Pink Floyd never made, and one of a handful I use as a reference to evaluate audio systems of any kind. The Q Sound mastering is mind blowing.

The guy who designs Dartzeel amps thinks so too so I'm pretty sure I'm on the right track (no pun intended).

https://www.stereophile.com/content/dartzeel-nhb-108-model-two-power-amplifier

 

^
Don't take anything I write too seriously

 

No worries about that