The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society. My favourite of the late 60s concept albums bar none (even beats Tommy!), this often funny, bittersweet and melancholy reflection on passing timewins me every time. Ray 'n' co were never better.
The Ballasted Orchestra - Stars of the Lid. Recently recommended by a friend and now devoted to the Texas duo who make such dreamscapes possible. I could listen to this for days on end.
Tommy - The Who. It took me decades but I did finally come round to how enjoyable it is to ride on this one with its sunshine vocal harmonies, the genius orchestration of the rock trio and big boomy spaces where you can lose yourself as easily as in some fantastical woodcut from ages past. The 5.1 mix on hi res formats is even better. A great adventure holiday of an album.
Rubber Soul - The Beatles. The point at which it is easy to look forward and backward in time to know where the Fabs had been and where they would go. Shimmering harmonies and tight song structures look back to Love Me Do but the instrumentation was getting restless. Sitar, fuzz bass, sped up piano to sound like harpsichord, tough biting organ tints and a far greater range of electric guitar tone all added more colour to the pallette than ever before. And the songs themselves were breaking and entering. Drive My Car is self-effacingly funny, Norwegian Wood has one of the best opening lines of any mainstream pop song, Michelle had lines in French, long toking inhalations for the chorus of Girl. It might have sounded like it here and there but this was not the local folk club but a brash art directed Swinging London.
Hex Induction Hour - The Fall. It's easy to forget how much good guitar band riffing and playing happens on this album as the vocal assault from Mark E. Smith is always so pugilistic. Nevertheless a few listens in and these sides grow compelling and mesmerising. Once that's settled the combined forces of the harranging vocals and wandering music reveal hooks that surprise after years of repeats.
Replicas - Gary Numan. Though it was old at the time this was a big part of the soundtrack to Schoolies' Week 1980. The icy textures and densensitised tale of a society freezing itself to stasis seemed to reveal the undercurrent to all the often desperate surrounding revelry. I clearly recall catching sight of the Coast's skyline as the huge and sombre Down in the Park boomed and a week later driving back to Brisbane through the rain while You Are In My Vision hammered from the stereo.
Ambient 4: On Land - Brian Eno. A series of atmospheres or textures of landscapes that put you in the middle of scenes that seem to change a little each time. One of the best dream-aids I've known and the pinnacle of Eno's Ambient series.
VI/Led Zepellin/Zoso/Untitled/? - Led Zepellin. From the warming up rotors of the first few seconds of Black Dog to the gigantic flooding wash of When The Levee Breaks we have a set of tracks leaves the era of their appearance back in the prog/country rock sludge and flies beyond the clouds of rock invention. From the storm of the rockers to the silvery middle-earth folk of Battle of Evermore, their Joni Mitchell tribute (Going to California) to the hugest drum sound on record (Levee) done simply with location mic-ing and a drummer who knew that slower meant bigger.
A brief soapbox moment: It's fashionable to point out the similarity between the opening of Stairway to Heaven and the instrumental track Taurus by Spirit. Personally, I think Page did lift it but to say that Stairway is a ripoff of Taurus ignores the facts that the simliarity ends after the first four chords and that part of the song is only played four times in the Led Zep piece before completely changing never to return. The vocal melody is absent from Taurus and the clever thing of it is that it is the same whether in a major or minor context. So apart from a passing similarity in a small slice of each song there really is no resemblance. Taurus was meant to be a brief instrumental. It's nice. Stairway, as numb as it became for me in the years before punk, is a mightier achievement. If you want to call ripoff be honest about it. Anyway...
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me Soundtrack - Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch & co. A towering effort of atmosphere built of dark corners, stormy interiors and aching pathos. Even if the movie wasn't to your taste you might find inspiration in the textures and colours of this music. I still draw to it.
Mezzanine - Massive Attack. After three genre-defining albums the Massies called off the search with this spatial odyssey that is born in a lightless pusling room, continues through quiet fields of brutality and cinematica to the final orgasmic exhaustion of the culture the group had nourished. It's still my favourite of theirs.
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