865. Fatboy Slim - You've Come a Long Way Baby (1998)

Track Listing

1. Right Here Right Now
2. Rockafeller Skank
3. Fucking In Heaven
4. Gangster Trippin'
5. Build It Up Tear It Down
6. Kalifornia
7. Soul Surfing
8. You're Not From Brighton
9. Praise You
10. Love Island
11. Acid 8000

Review

With this album Fatboy Slim finally gets the balance right between mass appeal and Big Beat music. This is an album which can be enjoyed not just in a dance music context but generally.

The result of this is the fact that the album has become so popular that very little in it feels actually new. The singles have all been played to exhaustion and you've probably heard most other tracks in a variety of contexts, from adverts to the dancefloor.

That being said the album clearly deserves its popularity within the context where it was born. It is one of the most immediately appealing if not the most immediately appealing of any big beat album. And the sampling is pretty fluid and great never getting boring, one of the major faults of other albums in the genre.

Track Highlights

1. Praise You
2. Rockafeller Skank
3. Right Here, Right Now
4. Fucking In Heaven.

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

The title of the album is a marketing slogan for Virginia Slims cigarettes, similar to Fatboy Slim's first album which borrowed DuPont's Better Living Through Chemistry tagline for its title.

Praise You:

864. Turbonegro - Apocalypse Dudes (1998)

Track Listing

1. The Age Of Pamparius
2. Selfdestructo Bust
3. Get It On
4. Rock Against Ass
5. Don't Say Motherfucker, Motherfucker
6. Rendezvous With Anus
7. Zillion Dollar Sadist
8. Prince Of The Rodeo
9. Back To Dungaree High
10. Are You Ready (For Some Darkness)
11. Monkey On Your Back
12. Humiliation Street
13. Good Head

Review

When you first look at the description of this album and this band, before having listened to it, you get pretty puzzled. A Norwegian gay Punk-Metal band with titles like Rendezvous with Anus which draws comparisons to Spinal Tap but is also universally loved by critics and has a truly impressive fan-base.

Then you listen to the album and you get it. This is probably the most interesting metal album since Black Sabbath, drawing as much from the Dictators and New York Dolls as from any metal band. In the end the name they gave their own music, deathpunk, seems to fit them perfectly.

This album is anything but boring, each track lives on its own and in the album as a little burst of anger, fun and entertainment. Frankly I loved this and I highly recommend it. Their influence is more than obvious on other Nordic punk bands such as The Hives but Turbonegro's sense of what makes Rock great, its ridiculousness, over the topyness and sheet fun makes them stand out as truly great.

Track Highlights

1. Get It On
2. Prince of the Rodeo
3. Don't Say Motherfucker, Motherfucker
4. The Age of Pamparius

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Moshable magazine commented: "Apocalypse Dudes is the perfect mix of classic 70's US punk / rock'n'roll like The Dictators, The Heartbreakers & The Ramones... every tune on this release is fucking brilliant". Even Jello Biafra was quoted as saying, "the new Turbonegro record is possibly the most important European record ever."

Get It On:

863. Billy Bragg and Wilco - Mermaid Avenue (1998)

Track Listing

1. Walt Whitman's Niece
2. California Stars
3. Way Over Yonder In The Minor Key
4. Birds And Ships
5. Hoodoo Voodoo
6. She Came Along To Me
7. At My Window Sad And Lonely
8. Ingrid Bergman
9. Christ For President
10. I Guess I Planted
11. One By One
12. Eisler On The Go
13. Hesitating Beauty
14. Another Man's Done Gone
15. The Unwelcome Guest

Review

I am not a particular fan of Billy Bragg or Wilco, both of which have already been on this list. I must, therefore, presume that it is the Woody Guthrie element that brought this up in my consideration.

Bragg and Wilco collect a number of new Guthrie songs, so if you know his back catalogue you might not be familiar with these and they are well worth listening to. Some songs are better than other of course... I don't like Hoodoo Voodoo for example, but it is overall a great selection.

The songs run through a variety of styles and the arrangements done by Bragg and Wilco work pretty well, even if they are sometimes more reminiscent of The Band than they really should be. However, Guthrie was also an influence on The Band and particularly Bob Dylan, so this might just be a tribute. Great Stuff.

Track Highlights

1. Eisler on the Go
2. California Stars
3. Walt Withman's Niece
4. At My Window Sad and Lonely

Final Grade

9/10


Trivia

From Wikipedia:

During the spring of 1995, Woody Guthrie's daughter Nora contacted English singer-songwriter Billy Bragg about writing music for a selection of completed Guthrie lyrics. Her father had left behind over a thousand sets of complete lyrics written between 1939 and 1967; none of these lyrics had any music other than a vague stylistic notation.

According to Bob Dylan's autobiography, Chronicles, Woody Guthrie offered his unpublished songs to Dylan, but the young singer was unable to get them from Guthrie's family (he tells a story about a reluctant babysitter).

Nora Guthrie's liner notes in Mermaid Avenue indicate that it was her intention that the songs be given to a new generation of musicians who would be able to make the songs relevant to a younger generation. Nora Guthrie contacted Bragg, who in turn approached Wilco and asked them to participate in the project as well.

Wilco agreed, and in addition to recording with Bragg in Ireland, they were given their own share of songs to finish.

Eisler on the Go:

862. Manu Chao - Clandestino (1998)

Track Listing

1. Clandestino
2. Desaparecido
3. Bongo Bong
4. Je Ne T'Aime Plus
5. Mentira...
6. Lagrimas de Oro
7. Mama Call
8. Luna y Sol
9. Por el Suelo
10. Welcome to Tijuana
11. Dia Lina... Dia Pena
12. Malegria
13. Vie a
14. Minha Galera
15. Despedida
16. Viento

Review

Oh man, this album annoys me. It is quite musically competent, even if not linguistically: the song Minha Galera is a pitiful display of Portuguese. I cannot, however, get over the fact that this is a French-Spanish guy pretending to be South American.

Cultural appropriation always gets on my tits. This is no exception. Beyond this there is a surfeit of extremely annoying songs here, particularly Bongo Bong. I really get annoyed at this album.

Novelty ethnic music annoys me. I'm annoyed.

Track Highlights

1. Je Ne T'aime Plus
2. Dia Luna... Dia Pena
3. Desaparecido
4. Luna Y Sol

Final Grade

7/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

The album contains many soundbites throughout, two of which are bits of a speech by Subcomandante Marcos.

Clandestino:

861. Bob Dylan - Live 1966 (1998)

Track Listing

CD 1

1. She Belongs To Me
2. Fourth Time Around
3. Visions Of Johanna
4. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue
5. Desolation Row
6. Just Like A Woman
7. Mr. Tambourine Man

CD 2

1. Tell Me, Momma
2. I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)
3. Baby, Let Me Follow You Down
4. Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues
5. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat
6. One Too Many Mornings
7. Ballad Of A Thin Man
8. Like A Rolling Stone

Review

In 1966 Bob Dylan performed a concert in Manchester that went down in history. In it a Mancunian famously screamed out Judas after Ballad of a Thin Man accusing Dylan of having sold out by going electric.

This recording captures that moment, the birth pangs of folk-rock in all their glory. The event has become part of Manchester's mythology, and even if it may now seem ridiculous to us, Dylan's move seeming perfectly natural, it sends us back to a time where people were invested in their music, in this case folk, with a strength that is rare these days. They were wrong, of course.

This recording is also particularly great because of Dylan's defiant attitude throughout. He knew what to expect and he knew that his shift midway through the concert to electric would elicit the results that it did, the slow clapping and abuse. But he didn't give a shit and gave the concert of his life. The most important bootleg in history? Definitely.

Track Highlights

1. Like A Roling Stone
2. Tell Me Momma
3. 4th Time Around
4. Ballad of a Thin Man

Final Grade

10/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

The early bootleg LPs attributed the recording to one of Dylan's tour-closing concerts at London's Royal Albert Hall. However, Dylan's now-legendary confrontation with a heckler calling out "Judas" from the audience, clearly heard on the recording, was well-documented as having occurred at Manchester's Free Trade Hall on May 17, 1966. After "Judas!", there is clapping, followed by more heckles. One of those shouts, barely audible on the record, is a man shouting, "I'm never listening to you again, ever!" Dylan then says "I don't believe you", then after a long pause, "You're a liar." Then, Dylan can be faintly heard telling the band, "play it fuckin' loud", as they start to play "Like a Rolling Stone". At the end, the audience erupts into applause and Dylan says, "Thank you." After years of conflicting reports and speculation among Dylan discographers, the Manchester source was verified after the preliminary mix of a proposed Columbia edition was bootlegged in 1995 as Guitars Kissing & The Contemporary Fix. Dylan rejected that edition; three years later, he authorized a markedly different version for his second "Bootleg Series" release.

Like a Rolling Stone: