353. Boston - Boston (1976)

















Track Listing

1. More Than A Feeling
2. Peace Of Mind
3. Foreplay (Long Time)
4. Rock 'n' Roll Band
5. Smokin'
6. Hitch A Ride
7. Something About You
8. Let Me Take You Home Tonight

Review

Firstly let me state for the record that I fucking love More Than A Feeling. Now I have a very particular reason for that and that reason is called Guitar Hero, it is one of the funnest songs to play in that game. Now that that is out of the way this album is a bit shit really.

Hey I'll admit even More Than A Feeling is shit, but I still love it. It's the kind of mindless AOR that you can actually enjoy until you start thinking about it. If you think about it you are ashamed. The whole album is a bit like More Than A Feeling only none of the other tracks are as catchy.

In the end it boils down to nothing more than pompous over played crap-rock. It is a bit like Queen with no sense of humour, like Spinal Tap for over 40's, and still you can enjoy it in a very kitsch way. Unlike the next few albums on the list. It's fun, but it is funny unintentionally, and therefore crap. Still, enjoyable crap.

Track Highlights

1. More Than A Feeling
2. Peace Of Mind
3. Let Me Take You Home Tonight
4. Foreplay (A Long Time)

Final Grade

6/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Scholz was satisfied with the demos to the point that he wanted to use them as a final album, but Epic said no. "The material had to be recorded in a 'professional' studio in exactly the same way!" Scholz later wrote. Scholz insisted on doing the rerecording in his basement. Epic producer John Boylan (produced Little River Band among many others) made a deal with Scholz. Boylan would have the rest of the makeshift band record some studio arrangements in Los Angeles, Delp and Sib Hashian (with Barry Goudreau joining toward the end) to "create a diversion" while Scholz made his multitrack recordings at home.

Most of the guitar, bass, and keyboards were performed by Scholz and recorded at his basement studio. Most of Delp's vocals were recorded in Los Angeles with Boylan. Only two tracks include all the musicians who ultimately toured under the name of Boston, "Foreplay/Long Time" and "Let Me Take You Home Tonight."

More Than A Feeling:

352. Joni Mitchell - Hejira (1976)
















Track Listing

1. Coyote
2. Amelia
3. Furry Sings The Blues
4. Strange Boy
5. Hejira
6. Song For Sharon
7. Black Crow
8. Blue Motel Room
9. Refuge Of The Roads

Review

Yet another Joni Mitchell album, and this is no bad thing, just wait and see the next few albums coming up and you'll understand what I mean. Still, Joni never surpassed herself in Blue and this is unfortunate. I actually like this a little more than Hissing Of Summer Lawns but I am still not blown away from it.

The lyrics are great as always but the music seems a bit samey, near Court and Spark really, and even tough Hissing was a departure it doesn't seem to have been that formative because she is going back to her old self here.

So if you are a great big fan of Joni this is another perfectly competent album, it is not Blue or Court and Spark but it's slightly better than Hissing. So get it if you are a fan, if not there are other places you should start with. It is still Joni so it will always be a very good album, just not excellent.

Track Highlights

1. Coyote
2. Hejira
3. Song For Sharon
4. Amelia

Final Grade

8/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

* Neil Young plays harmonica on "Furry Sings the Blues." The song is inspired by a meeting that occurred between Mitchell and the blues guitarist and singer Furry Lewis in New Orleans in 1975. After the release of the song, Lewis complained that Mitchell had exploited the circumstances of the meeting; but the song has contributed to awareness of Lewis.

* David Sedaris named one of his stories in his collection "Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim" after this record. In the story, Mr. Sedaris is thrown out of the house for supposedly subversive behaviour, including over-indulgence in listening to Joni Mitchell.

Sorry about the not very good sound quality on this video of Coyote:

351. David Bowie - Station To Station (1976)
















Track Listing

1. Station To Station
2. Golden Years
3. Word On A Wing
4. TVC 15
5. Stay
6. Wild Is The Wind

Review

If you've been following this list from the beginning of the 70's at least you will already know how big a fan of Bowie I am. And again he doesn't disappoint here. There was a certain shift to R&B with Young Americans, but that was really a transition album to the much superior work that is Station To Station. Young Americans wasn't big on innovation, but here everything changes.

This is the soul and R&B album that you would expect Bowie to do, it is weird and wonderful and it is prefiguring the whole New Wave movement, his "thin white duke" character was a part of what he was doing here, a "soulless soul album". And it sounds strangely mechanical with song titles like TVC 15 while trying to stay in some kind of soul music genre.

Of course the soul music label is very loosely applied here, this is something new, it sounds like a very good album from the 80's yet it is form 1976. This is again an example of Bowie inventing a genre all his own. He had done the same in Hunky Dory and Ziggy and will again do it with Heroes and Low. This album much likeHunky Dory, Ziggy and Aladdin Sane should always be seen as a part of a trypthic in my opinion, with the other Berlin albums, I am taking Lodger out of the equation because I don't think it is nearly as good. Essential.

Track Highlights

1. Wild is The Wind
2. Golden Years
3. TVC 15
4. Station To Station

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

According to biographer David Buckley, Bowie, based in Los Angeles, fuelled by an "astronomic" cocaine habit and subsisting on a diet of peppers and milk, spent much of 1975-76 "in a state of psychic terror".Stories – mostly from one interview, pieces of which found their way into Playboy and Rolling Stone – circulated of the singer living in a house full of Egyptian artefacts, burning black candles, seeing bodies fall past his window, having his semen stolen by witches, receiving secret messages from The Rolling Stones, and living in morbid fear of fellow Aleister Crowley aficionado Jimmy Page. Bowie would later say of LA, "The fucking place should be wiped off the face of the earth".

Despite the noise of a train in the opening moments, Bowie claims that the title refers not so much to railway stations as to the Stations of the Cross, while the line "From Kether to Malkuth" namechecks mystical places in the Kabbalah, mixing Christian and Jewish allusions. Fixation with the occult was further evident in such phrases as "white stains", the name of a book of poetry by Aleister Crowley. The lyrics also gave notice of Bowie's recent drug use ("It's not the side effects of the cocaine / I'm thinking that it must be love"). With its Krautrock influence, it was the album's clearest foretaste of Bowie's subsequent 'Berlin Trilogy'.

YAY Crowley!

Golden Years:

350. The Modern Lovers - The Modern Lovers (1976)
















Track Listing

1. Roadrunner
2. Astral Plane
3. Old World
4. Pablo Picasso
5. I'm Straight
6. Dignified and Old
7. She Cracked
8. Hospital
9. Someone I Care About
10. Girl Friend
11. Modern World
12. Government Center

Review

This is a particularly great album, not only because the music is pretty amazing but also because it is actually not an album from 1976 at all, it is actually a compilation of recording from 1973. And if you think of this as being from 1973 it sounds even more ahead of its time than otherwise. Thing was no one wanted to put their album out until 76.

This is some pretty amazing music, the inspiration of the Velvet Underground is very obvious here, but so is the particular slant put on it by Jonathan Richman. Imagine if the Velvets were writing short rock songs with a snarl and a great sense of humour. That is what you get here. The tracks are all great and pretty funny and curiously it sounds more like much more recent music, like The Strokes or The Coral for example than anything else going around in the 70's. There is an element of proto-punk here but it goes beyond that.

The influence of The Modern Lovers can hardly be over-emphasised, and you will probably know versions of tracks of this album which are covers by other bands. Pablo Picasso is a particular example of a very covered song, and you don't really need to have listened to other people covering them to realise just how influential they were and how modern they sound. I am really loving this album and it is going straight into my Mp3 player so you people get it too!

Track Highlights

1. Pablo Picasso
2. I'm Straight
3. Hospital
4. Roadrunner

Final Grade

10/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

In 2003, the album was ranked number 381 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.

Roadrunner:

349. Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers - Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers (1976)

















Track Listing

1. Rockin' Around With You
2. Breakdown
3. Hometown
4. The Wild One
5. Forever
6. Anything That's Rock 'N' Roll
7. Strangered In The Night
8. Fooled Again (I Don't Like It)
9. Mystery Man
10. Luna
11. American Girl

Review

If you only know Tom Petty for his later days antics like Free Falling or Learning To Fly or Into The Great Wide Open, you are actually missing a pretty good musician. A pattern that I have noticed is that very few artists go untouched by the 80's virus, if they started doing music before the 80's they often get some kind of pervading illness. Most good 80's acts are contained in the 80's or go on to the 90's, rarely are good acts of the 60's or 70's still good in the 80's. Tom Petty is an example.

This album is actually pretty great. There is a self-conscious attempt to mix the Byrds with the Stones, and that is clearly present here, but the time is different, it is now 1976 and there is a little tiny bit of punk creeping into here, the first track for example has about 5 second snippets of punk in the chorus and the music goes on with a certain attitude which was hard to find before the mid-70's bringing a fresh perspective to the Stones and Byrds as well as creating something quite different and fun.

I was therefore pleasantly surprised with this album, I really didn't rate Tom Petty that highly and now I do. The standout track here is the last one, and it is the most famous track in the album for a good reason, American Girl is a perfect 3 minute track of pop-rock whose guitar riff was the direct inspiration to the Strokes' Last Nite. Get this album.

Track Highlights

1. American Girl
2. Rockin' Around With You
3. Anything That's Rock 'N' Roll
4. Breakdown

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Initially following its release, it received little attention in the United States. Following a British tour, it climbed to the UK's top 30. After a full year and many positive UK reviews, the album reached the American charts, where it climbed to No. 55 and eventually went gold. The song "Anything That's Rock & Roll" became a hit single in the UK, "Breakdown" achieved top 40 success, and "American Girl" became a radio staple which can still be heard today.

Elliot Reid is an American Girl: