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:

368. Peter Frampton - Frampton Comes Alive! (1976)

















Track Listing

1. Baby Something's Happening
2. Doobie Wah
3. Show Me The Way
4. It's A Plain Shame
5. All I Want To Be (Is By Your Side)
6. Wind Of Change
7. Baby I Love Your Way
8. I Wanna Go To The Sun
9. Penny For Your Thoughts
10. I'll Give You Money
11. Shine On
12. Jumpin' Jack Flash
13. Lines On My Face
14. Do You Feel Like We Do

Review

Here's Peter "fucking" Frampton. I can never think of him without reminding myself of High Fidelity: "Is That Peter Fucking Frampton?". That out of the way, you can see from the album picture that the man has a face that you really want to slap. After this you think: "Why is this the biggest selling live album in the history of live albums?". Then you think: "Man, people have poor taste indeed.".

The album is pretty terrible, it is dull, uninnovative (with the notable exception of the usage of talkbox) and dull. Had I said dull already? That's because it is. Oh and then it has as its great highlight Baby I Love Your Way... which is pretty bad.

It is paradoxical, however, that my favourite song of the album is also the longest one. The last track actually is a bit interesting, it has a pretty great bridge which lasts something like 10 minutes where Frampton makes extensive use of talkbox to the point where he gets to sound like Daft Punk... weird, I know. When the bridge ends and it kicks back into the main theme it is actually quite exhilarating. But an album doesn't live by just one song, and most other ones are bad... even tough there is also an interesting instrumental one there in the middle. Oh well, dispensable.

Track Highlights

1. Do You Feel Like We Do
2. Penny For Your Thoughts
3. Baby I Love Your way
4. Show Me The Way

Final Grade

6/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

* Referenced in Family Guy, season six, episode one. After being called a monster, Peter refers to the Frampton Comes Alive! album as being a monster.

* Referenced in Arrested Development, where a main character records an interracial Ventriloquism album, named Franklin Comes Alive.

* Appears in Wayne's World when Cassandra shows Wayne the old records that she has bought. When she asks Wayne if he's seen it before he claims to have been issued it as he lived in the suburbs, and that it came in the mail with samples of Tide.


Do You Feel Like We Do. Frampton does his best Daft Punk impression at around the 4 minute mark:

367. Stevie Wonder - Songs In The Key Of Life (1976)
















Track Listing

1 Love's in Need of Love Today
2 Have a Talk With God
3 Village Ghetto Land
4 Confusion
5 Sir Duke
6 I Wish
7 Knocks Me off My Feet
8 Pastime Paradise
9 Summer Soft
10 Ordinary Pain
11 Isn't She Lovely
12 Joy Inside My Tears
13 Black Man
14 Ngiculela-Es Una Historia-I Am Singing
15 If It's Magic
16 As
17 Another Star
18 Saturn
19 Ebony Eyes
20 All Day Sucker
21 Easy Goin' Evening (My Mama's Call)


Review

As you can see this is a long album and it is also the last truly great Stevie Wonder album in the "songs" format (Secret Life Of Plants is also quite good but mostly instrumental and some might say a bit too pretentious). So here we have a gigantic burst of great creativity by Wonder, and it is truly magnificent.

This album is magnificent not just because of its length of about 110 minutes but for the fact that there is not a bad song in the bunch. Some are obviously better than others but none is a dud, so if you put it next to the White Album it is truly amazing. This is possibly one of the best double albums of all time, up there with Blonde on Blonde and Lamb Lies Down On Broadway... so you can see how good that is and how diversified my music taste is... heh.

But it is not only the quality but the relentless pace of the album that makes it good. It never lets down for one single second, it is hard pumping soul all the way, even the slower tracks are only slow in comparison to the rest of the album, this is fun. This is a very fun, very political, very relentless and very good album. Impressive by its size and consistent quality calling this a masterpiece is no exageration. You will probably know many of the songs here from covers, well this is a testament to the influence of the album but it is also one of the problems with the album, maybe you are tired of Gangsta's Paradise (Pastime Paradise) or the George Michael and Mary J. Blige cover of As or even the song for Wild Wild West by Will Smith which is a reworking of I Wish. I can guarantee you however that the versions in this album are superior to any of the covers by astronomical magnitudes, so give them a chance.

Track Highlights

1. Sir Duke
2. As
3. Love's In Need Of Love Today
4. Knocks Me Off My Feet

Final Grade

10/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Songs in the Key of Life won a Grammy Award for Best Male Pop Vocal and Album of the Year. The album also topped Billboard's Pop Albums and Black Albums charts for a record breaking 14 weeks out its 44 week in the Top 40 alone, and was one of the first albums by a solo artist to debut at #1 in its first week of sales (Elton John released two albums in 1975 that entered the chart at #1). It has surpassed a total of 10 million units in the U.S. alone. It was voted as the best album of the year in The Village Voice's Pazz & Jop critics poll.

In 2003, the album was ranked number 56 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. Similarly, in 1998 Q magazine readers voted Songs in the Key of Life the 88th greatest album of all time; in 2001 the TV network VH1 placed it at number 7; in 2005 voters on the United Kingdom's Channel 4's poll placed it 74th.

A very short Sir Duke:

366. Peter Tosh - Legalize It (1976)
















Track Listing

1. Legalize It
2. Burial
3. What'cha Gonna Do?
4. No Sympathy
5. Why Must I Cry
6. Igziabeher (Let Jah Be Praised)
7. Ketchy Shuby
8. Till Your Well Runs Dry
9. Brand New Second Hand

Review

I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that no other Reggae acts are as good as Marley, and that he isn't famous just because. All other Reggae albums on the list until now have been quite disappointing.

This is another case of that, it is not bad music but it is quite dull, monotonous and uninspired. Peter Tosh is one of the founding members of the Wailers, and you can tell from the music that there is a lot of similarities with Marley. The thing is Tosh is the Haydn to Marley's Mozart, similar but without the spark of genius. (Yes, I mean Haydn and not Salieri, this isn't a cheap film analogy, it is actually a music one).

So Tosh... a bit of non-descriptive Reggae that will mainly appeal to stoners because of it's title track which would be cool if I was 15 and on dope. I am not 15 and unfortunately I am out of dope. So...

Track Highlights

1. Legalize It
2. Till Your Well Runs Dry
3. Brand New Second Hand
4. Burial

Final Grade

6/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

In 1987, Tosh appeared to be on the way to a career revival. He was awarded a Grammy for Best Reggae Performance in 1987 for No Nuclear War. However on September 11, 1987 three men came to his house demanding money, and when Tosh replied that he did not have any with him he was shot dead, along with disk jockey Jeff "Free I" Dixon. The leader was Dennis 'Leppo' Lobban, a man whom Peter had befriended and tried to help find work after a long jail sentence. Leppo turned himself over to the authorities, and was tried and convicted in the shortest jury deliberation in Jamaican history: eleven minutes. He was sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted in 1995 and he remains in prison. Neither of his two alleged accomplices were found, though rumors persist that both were gunned down in the streets.

Legalize It:

365. Fela Kuti And The Africa '70 - Zombie (1976)

















Track Listing

1. Zombie
2. Mister Follow Follow

Review

This is the second Fela Kuti album on the list and it is, if possible even better than the previous one. Well, it is basically composed of two songs, but that is no demerit. It is quite a short album, but so is the Ramones one. Of the two songs Zombie is by far superior and it is one of the most infectious tracks ever to have left the African continent. A great track with a message, this anti-militaristic anthem will really make you move... Bob Dylan it ain't.

It is a pity that I knew nothing of Fela Kuti before doing this project, now I am really glad I do know him. Kuti, has energy, humour and a brilliant musical mind. The two tracks, even if one is superior are as close to flawless as you can get. They are not just great fun, or great political tracks, they are also expertly played and composed.

And how rare is it to have an album that actually made a difference in people's lives? The popularity of this album in Nigeria led to a backlash against the military, leading the military to raze Kuti's compound and throw his mother out the window, which led to her death. This is how powerful the music is.

Track Highlights

1. Zombie
2. Mister Follow Follow

Final Grade

10/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

In 1977 Fela and the Afrika 70 released the hit album Zombie, a scathing attack on Nigerian soldiers using the "zombie" metaphor to describe the methods of the Nigerian military. The album was a smash hit with the people and infuriated the government, setting off a vicious attack against the Kalakuta Republic, during which one thousand soldiers attacked the commune. Fela was severely beaten, and his elderly mother was thrown from a window, causing fatal injuries. The Kalakuta Republic was burned, and Fela's studio, instruments, and master tapes were destroyed. Fela claimed that he would have been killed if it were not for the intervention of a commanding officer as he was being beaten. Fela's response to the attack was to deliver his mother's coffin to the main army barrack in Lagos and write two songs, "Coffin for Head of State" and "Unknown Soldier," referencing the official inquiry which claimed the commune had been destroyed by an unknown soldier.

A guy breakdancing to the instrumental bit of Zombie: