373. Electric Light Orchestra - Out Of The Blue (1977)
















Track Listing

1. Turn To Stone
2. It's Over
3. Sweet Talkin' Woman
4. Across The Border
5. Night In The City
6. Starlight
7. Jungle
8. Believe Me Now
9. Steppin' Out
10. Standin' In The Rain (Concerto For A Rainy Day)
11. Big Wheels
12. Summer And Lightning
13. Mr Blue Sky
14. Sweet Is The Night
15. Whale
16. Birmingham Blues
17. Wild West Hero

Review

ELO bring us a strange album, it is at the same time a little bit of Beatles and Beach Boys, but also Bee Gees and Queen, but with vocoders. So just like the bands that influenced them there are good and bad things. The Abbey Road type influence together with Beach Boys harmonies is quite good, but the tacky showmanship of Queen with the disco antics of the Bee Gees kind of fuck it up in the end making the album hang slightly on the tacky side.

Still this is one of those phenomena like Billy Joel's album, it is fun throughout and even tough it is a double album it doesn't feel stretched. The compositions use something in the area of 7,546,181 instruments each which is fun, the semi robotic attempts with vocoders give it a sheen of kitsch which is also good and the songs are catchy enough to make you pay attention.

ELO does fall in that camp of people who would like to be the new Mozarts and Dylans of this world but fail, there is ambition completely unrealised, but fun. So good album overall and Mr. Blue Sky and Sweet Talking Woman are great songs.

Track Highlights

1. Mr. Blue Sky
2. Sweet Talking Woman
3. Steppin' Out
4. It's Over

Final Grade

8/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:


* JTLA 823 L2 which is featured on the shuttle arriving at the space station is the original catalog numbers for the album Out of the Blue

* A sixth single was released from the album in February 2007, "Latitude 88 North" written in 1977 and previously incomplete and left off the track list.

* The inclement weather effects heard on "Concerto for a Rainy Day" were real and recorded by Jeff Lynne during a very rainy summer in Munich 1977.

* Instrumental song "The Whale" was composed by Lynne after watching a documentary about the slaughter of whales.

* The title of "Birmingham Blues" is a pun based on Jeff Lynne's home Football Team Birmingham City FC who's nickname are "The Blues".

* Cellist Melvyn Gale played piano on the track "Wild West Hero".

* Tarzan can be heard on the track "Jungle" voiced by Jeff Lynne.

* At the conclusion of "Mr. Blue Sky" a heavily vocoded voice says "Please turn me over." This occurred at the end of side three of the vinyl record, asking the listener to flip to side four.

* It has been noted that every song on the album has the word "Blue" in it at least once. This relates to not only the title of the album, but also the mood of most of the songs.

* The string riff in Birmingham Blues is borrowed from George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.

Puppet sings Mr. Blue Sky:

372. Bob Marley & The Wailers - Exodus (1977)

















Track Listing

1. Natural Mystic
2. So Much Things To Say
3. Guiltiness
4. Heathen
5. Exodus
6. Jammin'
7. Waiting In Vain
8. Turn Your Lights Down Low
9. Three Little Birds
10. One Love/People Get Ready

Review

If you don't know at least half the tracks in this album you've been living under a rock for the past 30 years. This is probably Marley's most famous album and for good reason. He doesn't put a foot wrong here, it is an infectious piece of Reggae and sounds almost like a Bob Marley greatest hits album.

Of course some could say that his is produced for a European/ North-American audience and tailored to their tastes, but this is not a fair assessment. Marley was as influenced by the music scene as anyone else, he didn't live in a cave and just because he was Jamaican it doesn't mean that he owed anyone some kind of primeval music. Marley makes Reggae into some perfect pop tracks.

Of course other people did it after him, and the words UB40 come to mind, but obviously they never reached the level of quality that you hear here. This is the founding Daddy of the popularisation of Reggae around the world developing his skill. And the political message is still there as is the whole Rastafarian outlook. An essential album.

Track Highlights

1. Three Little Birds
2. Waiting In Vain
3. Exodus
4. One Love/People Get Ready

Final Grade

10/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Much of Exodus was recorded in London, while Marley recuperated from an assassination attempt. It is widely considered to be one of Marley's best albums.

"Jamming," "Waiting in Vain" and "One Love/People Get Ready" were all huge international hits. Exodus peaked at #20 on Billboard's Pop Albums chart, and #15 on the Black Albums chart. Other stand-outs include "Natural Mystic" and "The Heathen," which excel both musically and lyrically.

In 1998, TIME magazine named Exodus the best music album of the 20th century. In 2001, the TV network VH1 named it the 26th greatest album of all time. In 2003, the album was ranked number 169 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time

The 80's visually interprets Marley for America with this video for Three Little Birds... what's with the hula girls? And it is clearly America because the girl is trying to bounce a football (yes football not soccer ball or whatever you heathens call it):

371. Billy Joel - The Stranger (1977)
















Track Listing

1. Moving Out
2. Just The Way You Are
3. Scenes From An Italian Restaurant
4. Vienna
5. Stranger
6. Only The Good Die Young
7. She's Always A Woman
8. Get It Right The First Time
9. Everybody Has A Dream

Review

Imagine Meat Loaf and Rufus Wainwright had a bastard love-child who did Broadway shows. If you can then you are not far off the content of this album. I can really see a lot of people loving this album, and I can see it being a guilty pleasure of people who should know better.

Joel is infectious, he is fun and his songs have all the catchiness of said Broadway shows. This is not to say that just like those shows it isn't a bit crap. It is. Joel lyrics have all the emotional maturity of a 12 year old kid with a severe case of misogyny, his songs are sometime trite but never unexciting.

IF there is one good thing that can be said about this album is that it is never boring, either you are marveling at the over-the-top that Scenes from An Italian Restaurant is, or being offended by the fact that he doesn't like clever women in Just The Way You Are, or equating women with bitches in She's Always A Woman, you are never left indifferent. This is a good thing, but it sometimes comes about due to bad reasons, Joel's incompetence as a writer mainly. Still a good bit of fun by someone who would have loved to be a good composer and has pretentions to do it but in the end fails miserably, yet entertainingly.

Track Highlights

1. Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)
2. Scenes From An Italian Restaurant
3. Only The Good Die Young
4. The Stranger

Final Grade

7/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Singles released from the album include "Just the Way You Are" (which won the Grammy for Record of the Year), the acoustic ballad "She's Always A Woman," the mildly controversial "Only the Good Die Young," and "Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)," which later lent its title to Movin' Out, an acclaimed hit Broadway musical based on Billy Joel's songs.

Movin' Out (Anthony's Song) at the Old Grey Whistle Test:

370. Kraftwerk - Trans-Europa Express (1977)



















Track Listing

1. Europa Endlos
2. Spiegelsaal
3. Schaufensterpuppen
4. Trans Europa Express
5. Metall Auf Metall
6. Abzug
7. Franz Schubert
8. Endlos Endlos

Review

I am making a slight adjustment to the 1001 albums list by reviewing this album in its German version rather than in the English version. Kraftwerk are German after all and the songs were thought of in German and they sound better in German. Actually the robotic industrial sound of Kraftwerk's music works much better with the German language, and what you lose from not understanding the lyrics is highly repaid by the alien feeling that you get from it. The same will happen with Man-Machine when we get there.

This is a great album, if Autobahn was more abstract and instrumental Trans-Europa Express is much more accessible but in no way worse. There is an almost pop (as much as any Kraftwerk can be pop) feel to the first half of the album and in the second half there is a kind of suite taking a train journey as a theme, much like the Autobahn was the theme of that album.

The music is astonishing, it shouldn't work as well as it does, it could have sounded like Jean-Michel Jarre, but there is an hypnotic quality to this beyond the faculties of any other electronic performers. This albums transports you somewhere, I don't know where but it is weird and wonderful. Not many albums do this and therefore this is something to be treasured. This is Kraftwerk at their peak, but there are more Kraftwerk goodies to come on the list.

Track Highlight

1. Trans Europa Express
2. Schaufensterpuppen
3. Metall Auf Metall
4. Spiegelsaal

Final Grade

10/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

The title track in particular was an impressive fusion of electronic percussion rhythms and very strong melody, tied together with a lyrical concept. (Tracing its development through live bootlegs, it appears to have ultimately derived from "Ruckzuck", which opened the original Kraftwerk album.) The concept behind this track harks back to 1974's Autobahn, which recreated a journey on the German motorway network: Trans-Europe Express was intended to evoke a trip on one of the TEE rail services that were operating at the time of its writing.

‘The culture of Mitteleuropa was cut off in the Thirties, and many of the intellectuals went to the USA or France, or they were eliminated. We [Kraftwerk] are picking it up again where it left off, continuing this culture of the Thirties, and we are doing it spiritually.’

— Ralf Hütter


Schaufensterpuppen:



Bill Bailey tribute:

369. Brian Eno - Before And After Science (1977)
















Track Listing

1. No One Receiving
2. Backwater
3. Kurt's Rejoinder
4. Energy Fools The Magician
5. King's Lead Hat
6. Here He Comes
7. Julie With...
8. By This River
9. Through Hollow Lands
10. Spider And I

Review

Here we start a new year, a great year full of interesting pop, punk and other music. This album definitely fits in "other". It is very hard for me to decide on a favourite Brian Eno album, I love them all so much, or at least the ones that are here on the list plus a couple, that I really don't know what my favourite is. This album probably does have the best balance of my favourite elements of Eno, it has the great mellow ambient music as well as his more outrageous pop.

On the realm of outrageous pop you have the amazing King's Lead Hat, a non-stop tribute to Talking Heads who he was producing at the time, on the other spectrum you have two amazing pop-ambient tracks in By This River and Spider And I. All these songs are perfection, but so is the rest of the album.

There is no failure here, there is no track beneath the level of genius and this is how you want your Eno. Doing something new and different but at the same time totally exhilarating. This album is probably the best introduction you can have to Eno, if you like the first half go get Here Come The Warm Jets or Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy, if you like the second half get Discreet Music, Another Green World or Music For Airports and his other ambient compositions. The thing is Eno is an expert on both forms and it is a shame that this is his last album with actual lyrics until his most recent album which really isn't up to this standard.

Track Highlight

1. By This River
2. Spider And I
3. King's Lead Hat
4. Kurt's Rejoinder

Final Grade

10/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:


* The song "Kurt's Rejoinder" features a sample of Dada artist Kurt Schwitters performing his Ursonate.

* "King's Lead Hat" is an anagram of Talking Heads, and the song is indeed a Talking Heads pastiche. Eno's intention was to record the song with members of the band but that could not be arranged. It was covered by Ultravox as a live B-side on the 12" version of their single "Passing Strangers" in 1980, and by The Dirtbombs as a limited-edition bonus track on their album Dangerous Magical Noise in 2003.

* "Through Hollow Lands" is dedicated to Harold Budd. Various internet sites, including Fred Frith's own discography page claim that co-musician 'Shirley Williams' on this track is a pseudonym of Robert Wyatt. In fact, Wyatt himself admitted to as much on 2003's BBC Radio 2 documentary "A Quantity of Stuff - The Brian Eno Story".

* The song "By This River" features in the Italian film The Son's Room and the Mexican film Y Tu Mama Tambien.

* Martin Gore of Depeche Mode covered "By This River" in his solo album Counterfeit² in 2003.

* Supposedly 109 tracks were recorded for the album, the majority of which remain unheard.

By This River: