600. Guns n' Roses - Appetite For Destruction (1987)
















Track Listing

1. Welcome To The Jungle
2. It's So Easy
3. Nightrain
4. Out Ta Get Me
5. Mr. Brownstone
6. Paradise City
7. My Michelle
8. Think About You
9. Sweet Child O' Mine
10. You're Crazy
11. Anything Goes
12. Rocket Queen

Review

Ok, this is pretty crap but it is still a lot of fun. If you, like me, grew up with this it gains an inordinate amount of points for sheer nostalgia value. In fact that is pretty much all the value this album has.

Axl's voice is annoying, the playing is very good but very masturbatory, the lyrics are inane, and it is overall ridiculous. Still, it is fun, and contains what are the three best Guns tracks. The rest of the album really does not stand up to the epic ridicule and awesomeness of Paradise City, Welcome To The Jungle and Sweet Child O' Mine, so you are always kind of waiting for those highlights.

The exception if probably It's So Easy, a great track which sounds out of place in the album, it sounds like it belongs to a better album, maybe because Axl is mostly absent from the track. So, yeah I had fun with this, but I'll keep it out of my iPod, the times I listen to it by accident are quite enough.

Track Highlights

1. Sweet Child O' Mine
2. It's So Easy
3. Welcome To The Jungle
4. Paradise City

Final Grade

7/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

The album's original cover, based on the Robert Williams painting "Appetite for Destruction", depicted a robot rapist about to be punished by a metal avenger. After several music retailers refused to stock the album, they compromised and put the controversial cover art inside, replacing it with a cover depicting a cross and skulls of the five band members (designed by William White, originally as a tattoo), each skull representing one member of the band: Izzy Stradlin, top skull; Duff McKagan, left skull; Axl Rose, center skull; Steven Adler, right skull; and Slash, bottom skull. The photographs used for the back of the album and liner notes were taken by Robert John (photographer).

Sweet child O' Mine, look at Axl dance!:

599. The Smiths - Strangeways, Here We Come (1987)
















Track Listing

1. Rush And A Push And The Land Is Ours
2. I Started Something I Couldn't Finish
3. Death Of A Disco Dancer
4. Girlfriend In A Coma
5. Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before
6. Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me
7. Unhappy Birthday
8. Paint A Vulgar Picture
9. Death At One's Elbow
10. I Won't Share You

Review

Well this wasn't as bad as Meat Is Murder or as good as The Queen Is Dead, it is somewhere in the middle, leading me towards disliking it, but I have to admit I have a more open mind about the whole Smiths thing.

There are some pretty good tracks here, my favourite being Death Of A Disco Dancer, which doesn't seem to be anybody else's favourite, oh well. People seem to like crap like Girlfriend in a Coma which is one of the more annoying Morrisey wankfests.

The good thing about Smiths albums post Meat Is Murder, is the fact that they started to be a bit more humorous about the whole thing, you really wouldn't be able to sustain the preachy quality of their earlier efforts for any longer. In that sense there are some not bad self-digs here. So, listenable but not that great.

Track Highlights

1. Death Of A Disco Dancer
2. Unhappy Birthday
3. Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before
4. Paint A Vulgar Picture

Final Grade

7/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Strangeways, Here We Come may be The Smiths' last album, but it does not feature their last-ever recordings, as a final two songs were recorded in May 1987 to provide B-sides for the album's lead single, "Girlfriend in a Coma" (see the entry on "I Keep Mine Hidden", B-side for this single and the last song The Smiths recorded). Two more singles were taken off Strangeways, Here We Come; they were supplemented on their B-sides by archive recordings.

Death Of a Disco Dancer, and I'll spare you Morrissey's dancing:

598. Astor Piazzolla and Gary Burton - The New Tango (1987)
















Track Listing

1. Milonga Is Coming
2. Vibraphonissimo
3. Little Italy 1930
4. Nuevo Tango
5. Laura's Dream
6. Operation Tango
7. Muerta del Angel

Review

About 10 years ago I was talking to my wife to be (we were just friends then) online, and I told her I was listening to some tango. She laughed and said that that was something I'd never get her in to. So I sent her an mp3 of Libertango, one of Piazzolla's most famous tracks. She was convinced.

Many things 10 years later start sounding worse and worse, and there is a lot I liked then that I don't now, or that I am at least indifferent to. Piazzolla is not one of them, even with the overuse of his music by bands like Gotan Project and their ubiquitous presence everywhere for the past few years, Piazzolla "unplugged" has never diminished in my view.

Part of the reason for this is the fact that he died (in 1992 but he had been severely debilitated since 1990) at the height of his powers as a musician and composer. He is also tellingly the only artist which is both on this list and on the Classical Recordings list, this is a tribute to how undefinable his music is. It is based on a folk tradition of Tango in Argentina, but it is very much not danceable, it has mass popular appeal but it is also very complex in compositional terms. It is beautiful and strange and pervaded with a deep longing feeling. It is the music that always reminds me of Lisbon, because of that sad longing of not being there and it works when I am there with the wide sea and the white houses, taking a train with the headphones on. It can also be energetic and exciting but it is always amazing.

This live recording is a particularly good one because to the bandoneon of Piazzolla and the strings of his band you add the vibraphone of Burton, and that is another of my favourite instruments, the deep resounding sound of the vibraphone complements this New Tango perfectly. If you don't know Piazzolla there is no time like the present to start doing so.

Track Highlights

1. Milonga Is Coming
2. Vibraphonissimo
3. Laura's Dream
4. Nuevo Tango

Final Grade

10/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

He began to play the bandoneon after his father, nostalgic for his homeland, spotted one in a New York pawn shop. At the age of 13, he met Carlos Gardel, another great figure of tango, who invited the young prodigy to join him on his current tour. Much to his dismay, Piazzolla's father deemed that he was too young to go along. Nevertheless he played a young paper boy in Gardel’s movie El día que me quieras. This early disappointment proved a blessing in disguise, as it was on this tour that Gardel and his entire band perished in a plane crash. In later years, Piazzolla made light of this near miss, joking that had his father not been so careful, he wouldn't be playing the bandoneon — he'd be playing the harp.

Muerte Del Angel from the Concert that this album is taken from:

597. Butthole Surfers - Locust Abortion Technician (1987)

















Track Listing

1. Sweat Loaf
2. Graveyard (1)
3. Graveyard (2)
4. Pittsburgh To Lebanon
5. Weber
6. Hay
7. Human Cannonball
8. USSA
9. O Men
10. Kuntz
11. Twenty Two Going On Twenty Three

Review

Welcome to the review of one of the most infantile, louder, weird and freaky albums on the list. But it is also a pretty great album. The whole thing sounds like a very bad acid trip, but it is infused with a great sense of humour and sound.

On the childish side look at Kuntz, a song which is simply the re-working of a traditional Thai recording in order to emphasise the use of a word which sounds curiously like a profanity. Now, this isn't particularly smart, and it is not particularly funny, but it is a use of world music that would never have crossed the mind of Paul Simon or Peter Gabriel, and it ends up being one of the highlights of the album.

Then take the other songs on the album, distorted, noisy and nightmarish they create a whole sonic universe, and that is one of the hardest things for a band to do. To create music so individual, so unique that it creates its own little world. Let me warn you that this is certainly not to everyone's taste, not something you would play in polite company but I like it.

Track Highlights

1. Kuntz
2. Sweet Leaf
3. 22 Going On 23
4. USSA

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Arguably the Surfers' heaviest album, Locust Abortion Technician is also considered by many critics and fans to be one of the band's best, harnessing aspects of punk, heavy metal, and psychedelia into a then-unique sound that could be considered noise rock. With its marriage of punk and metal producing a number of grinding, slower-paced songs, the album might also be seen as an early precursor of grunge. "Sweat Loaf" utilizes the verse riff from the Black Sabbath song "Sweet Leaf". Not all of the tracks are guitar-oriented, though; the song "Kuntz" was created by remixing an original Eastern recording by a Thai artist.

Brilliant interview with the Buttholes, notice the beat finger snapping at the end:

596. Hüsker Dü - Warehouse: Songs And Stories (1987)
















Track Listing

1. These Important Years
2. Charity Chastity Prudence And Hope
3. Standing In The Rain
4. Back From Somewhere
5. Ice Cold Ice
6. You're A Soldier
7. Could You Be The One
8. Too Much Spice
9. Friend You've Got To Fall
10. She Floated Away
11. Bed Of Nails
12. Tell You Why Tomorrow
13. It's Not Peculiar
14. Actual Condition
15. No Reservations
16. Turn It Around
17. She's A Woman
18. Up In The Air
19. You Can Live At Home

Review

Strangely enough this is the first Hüsker Dü album on the list, while it is certainly a deserving album, and possibly the most deserving, the absence if Zen Arcade is actually quite inexcusable. Zen Arcade was an album with such a wide ranging influence in the indie music world that it leaves a noticeable gap in this list.

But lets turn to the album at hand, Warehouse is actually quite a bit more listenable than Zen Arcade and that is a good thing. It is a double album so there is plenty to like here, 19 tracks that range from good to great. This is, however, an album to take in slowly, and it is certainly one which my three days of listening to it did not do it complete justice. There are so many layers here, the noise, the melody and the lyrics all very well fleshed out throughout.

This means that this is an album that I certainly want to listen to again. Hüsker Dü might easily be compared to R.E.M. and the influence was mutual, in the case of bands like Dinosaur Jr. or the Pixies, they were very much learning from Hüsker Dü. Of course this album and the previous one are the ultimate betrayal of indie principles being recorder by Warner, but hey, we all like money.

Track Highlights

1. Too Much Spice
2. Could You Be The One?
3. She's A Woman (And Now He Is A Man)
4. Visionary

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

The band dissolved following the tour in support of its release, in part due to disagreements between song-writers Bob Mould and Grant Hart over the latter's drug use. This album, along with Candy Apple Grey, showcases the increasing maturity of Mould and Hart's writing—a change which alienated some long-time fans.


Could You Be The One?: