392. Iggy Pop - Lust For Life (1977)

















Track Listing

1. Lust For Life
2. Sixteen
3. Some Weird Sin
4. Passenger
5. Tonight
6. Success
7. Turn Blue
8. Neighbourhood Threat
9. Fall In Love With Me

Review

So if Iggy made a big change from his Stooges days with The Idiot, he seems to be balancing the shift with this album. This is definitely half-way between the Bowieness of The Idiot and the raw power of Raw Power. This makes this a very Bowie influenced album but very recognizably an Iggy Pop album. You get more the sense of Bowie helping as opposed to masterminding this.

This makes Lust For Life an even better album than The Idiot, each single track is great showing a new focus from Iggy, which is kind of represented by the picture on the cover of the album. The kid is clean, but he is definitely the same old devil.

The songs here are harder and catchier than in The Idiot and probably than any other Iggy album, just the title track and The Passenger are definitely worth the price of admission and everything else is high quality topping in a great cake. If you like Iggy this is the essential album for you to get, and you definitely will not regret it. Now we say goodbye to Iggy Pop (and Bowie which is here as a producer) for ever. I get teary eyed.

Track Highlights

1. The Passenger
2. Lust For Life
3. Some Weird Sin
4. Sixteen

Final Grade

10/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

David Bowie, Iggy Pop and engineer Colin Thurston produced the album under the pseudonym "Bewlay Bros." (name via the final track on Bowie’s Hunky Dory). Recording took place at Hansa Studios in Berlin and featured Ricky Gardiner and Carlos Alomar on guitars with Hunt and Tony Sales on drums and bass, respectively. Trivia buffs have noted that, with Bowie’s presence on keyboards and backing vocals, the band included three-quarters of the future Tin Machine line-up, missing only Reeves Gabrels; in fact it was the Sales brothers’ hard-rocking contribution to this album that led Bowie to invite them to join Tin Machine twelve years later ("Check out Lust For Life," Bowie told Gabrels, "I’ve found the rhythm section!").

Here you go 7.30 minutes of The Passager live at the Manchester Apollo in 77:

391. Elvis Costello - My Aim Is True (1977)
















Track Listing

1. Welcome to the Working Week
2. Miracle Man
3. No Dancing
4. Blame It on Cain
5. Alison
6. Sneaky Feelings
7. (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes
8. Less Than Zero
9. Mystery Dance
10. Pay It Back
11. I'm Not Angry
12. Waiting for the End of the World

Review

This album is usually filed under punk, but it must be one of the least punkish punk albums ever. Of course there are elements, this is the UK in 77 after all, Elvis has the lyrics, which are actually better and smarter than the average punk, and he has some of the delivery, but musically it is very much inspired in 50's music. So you'd consider it punk because of the lyrics and the sparseness of production, and that is about it.

All that said an album doesn't need to be punk to be good. And this is pretty great, of course Elvis would continue to explore this sound to exhaustion and he really hasn't made much of it for a few years now, but here it is fresh and it sounds fresh while still sounding like 50's inspired.

It sounds kind of like the music from a bizarro world 50's diner. Covering right-wing politics, sex and frustration with very sparse production so it reminds me more of stuff like The Sonics (although not as raucous) than anything else in the punk scene at this time. That actually makes it good. So definitely recommended.

Track Highlights

1. I'm Not Angry
2. Welcome To The Working Week
3. Alison
4. Blame It On Cain

Final Grade

8/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Costello called in sick to his day job (as a data-entry clerk) in order to rehearse and record the album with Clover, which was cut in a series of six four-hour sessions for about £1,000.

Costello stayed at his day job as the first two singles, "Less Than Zero" and "Alison", were pre-released without much success. Finally, the label decided to release the album in the summer of 1977, and he was asked to quit his job and become a professional musician.

Costello's first TV appearence with Alison :

390. Meat Loaf - Bat Out Of Hell (1977)
















Track Listing

1. Bat Out Of Hell
2. You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth
3. Heaven Can Wait
4. All Revved Up With No Place To Go
5. Two Out Of Three Ain't Bad
6. Paradise By The Dashboard Light
7. For Crying Out Loud

Review

There are two kinds of people in the world, those who get Bat Out Of Hell as the joke that it is and those who don't. Those who don't usually sport mullets and wife-beaters under studded leather jackets, or are under 15, or never paid any attention to the album. Everyone else does.

This is the most ridiculous piece of rock ever committed to vinyl, and is self-conscious enough to do it right. It is just carefully treading that thin line that makes sure some people will take it seriously, which other bands like The Darkness for example fail to do.

Come on Meat Loaf, just his name is funny, he was famous by 77 due to his part in the Rocky Horror Picture Show in 75 and much like that this is also supposed to be the music for a musical. Actually this would work pretty niftily as a musical, it is epic enough, with big shades of Springsteen, it is particularly easy to connect the title song with Thunder Road for example. Only while Springsteen is writing about working class escapism, Loaf is writing about pre-pubescent obsession.

So it is funny, but it is in the end a novelty album and like most novelty albums it stops being as funny with repeated listenings, the music isn't good enough to sustain it, the joke stops being as funny by the third time you listen to it, but it is still a great piece of entertainment.

P.S.- I got autographs by Peter Hook and Stephen Morris of Joy Division today... I was smoking a cigarette outside the Cornerhouse and they were coming in for the Press viewing of Control. Gladly I had a notebook with me.

Track Highlights

1. Bat Out Of Hell
2. You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth
3. Paradise By The Dashboard Light
4. Heaven Can Wait

Final Grade

8/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Its musical style is influenced by Steinman's appreciation of Richard Wagner, Phil Spector and Bruce Springsteen.

Although not an immediate hit, the album has become one of the biggest selling of all time. It sells about 200,000 copies per year and has sold an estimated 34 million copies worldwide. Rolling Stone magazine ranked it at number 343 on their list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.

Steinman produced a sequel in 1993 called Bat out of Hell II: Back into Hell, which includes the hit single "I'd Do Anything for Love (but I Won't Do That)". A second sequel, Bat out of Hell III: The Monster Is Loose, released in October 2006, featured seven songs written by Steinman.

Bat Out Of Hell:

389. Television - Marquee Moon (1977)

















Track Listing

1. See No Evil
2. Venus
3. Friction
4. Marquee Moon
5. Elevation
6. Guiding Light
7. Prove It
8. Torn Curtain

Review

This is an absolutely amazing album. This has been quite a bunch of albums we have been having lately. Tomorrow we may break away from the 9 and 10's, but not today. This can and usually is considered Punk, but it is a very different kettle of fish from The Clash or Sex Pistols. Television are so immersed in earlier kinds of music mainly psychadelia that they have a whole different feel to them.

This is actually what makes them individual and pretty great. There is this whole kind of psychadelic sound to the guitars that have actually made me want to buy a Fender Jaguar and move from Reviewer to actual player. Now I only need to steal £1000 from someone, if anyone is interested in donating I'll take cash or a Jaguar you have lying around somewhere. Thanks.

The title track is nothing short of epic and probably one of the very few punk tracks to go over the 10 minute mark, it involves some of the best guitar playing of the whole decade in one of the best solos ever. So you join literate lyrics with a punk delivery with great fucking playing and composition and you can't go wrong, in fact you can't get much better than this. Unlike most punk this appeals to much more than the sheer visceral level, this appeals to the thinker and the music lover as well as the gut. Get it now!

Track Highlights

1. Marquee Moon
2. Venus
3. Torn Curtain
4. Friction

Final Grade

10/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

According to the liner notes of the 2003 reissue, Television originally wanted to record Marquee Moon with veteran jazz recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder (John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, most of the classic Blue Note Records catalog) at his legendary Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey recording studio.

The album cover features a portrait of the band taken by Robert Mapplethorpe, who also took the cover of fellow CBGB rocker Patti Smith's Horses album.

There is a passing reference to Marquee Moon in the Spanish group Amaral's song Moriría por vos. In the song's lyrics, while listing various reasons that the vocalist is falling for someone, she mentions that it might have something to do with the fact that the album is playing.

A cover version of the title track was recorded in 1990 by the Kronos Quartet for the compilation album Rubáiyát.

The song "Marquee Moon" was done in one take; drummer Billy Ficca thought that they were rehearsing.

Alternate Take of Marquee Moon:

Hey, I'll be quite busy and out of the house for the next few days and I am having my parents staying at my house for most of this week. Therefore album reviews will be seldom until Sunday, but expect at least a couple before then.