#464: Frank Zappa - Hot Rats (1969)

Zack: Last time I listened to a Frank Zappa album for this endeavor, I was getting very drunk on bourbon with a coworker and listening to Freak Out! I really liked that album, and I really liked Hot Rats as well. But while my fondness for Freak Out! stemmed from how impressed I was at the execution of a concept, I appreciated Hot Rats just as a piece of music. Only one track here had any vocals, but unlike Jazz Samba, I was sufficiently engrossed into the jazz-infused sounds at work here that I didn’t mind at all. The arrangements really are beautiful, and I can’t wait to relisten to it once I get a chance. It’s definitely a perfect in-the-background-while-I-work album.

Favorite Tracks: Willie the Pimp; Son of Mr. Green Genes; Peaches in Regalia

Emily: When we listened to Freak Out! way back in 2012, I wasn't sure where the next Frank Zappa album would go. My prediction was "blues, rock, noise, or something completely different?" Five and a half years later, we've returned to Zappa and the answer is (D) something completely different. Hot Rats is best described as an experimental jazz fusion album. The only words sung on the album are by our less-than-favorite guy, Captain Beefheart, but overall it's probably 90% instrumental. And it's really interesting instrumental music, not just background noise. Frankly, lyrics would have been a distraction from the unique and complex arrangements that flow beautifully throughout this album. Now I truly have no idea what other Zappa albums will entail - could be blues, could be jazz, could be Beefheart, or could be all of the above.

Favorite Tracks: Peaches in Regalia; Willie the Pimp; The Gumbo Variations

#463: Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd - Jazz Samba (1962)

Zack: I’m going to keep this one sort and sweet, just like this 33-minute gem. Jazz Samba was a good album, and reminded me a lot of the Sinatra and Jobim jawn we listened to forever ago. The main difference is that one had Sinatra’s crooning over the bossa nova jazz sounds, whereas this is all instrumental. Overall, the lack of vocals hurt my ability to focus in on the music, and I ultimately found this album good, but not as great as I had hoped it would be.

Favorite Tracks: Samba Triste; Desafinado; Ex Lux So

Emily: The bossa nova vibes of this album can transport you back to a tiny New York jazz club in the '60s. Everyone is dressed to the nines, drinking classic cocktails and smoking long cigarettes (hey, different times), and tapping their toes to the jazz musicians huddled together on a too-small stage. Definitely a far cry from how I listened this album today (on the couch, Sunday morning, drinking coffee and skimming the news) and how I would probably listen to it in the future (at my desk at work, writing briefs or reviewing documents). But the genre blending and vintage flair of this album has the power to transport you away from such mundanity, if only for 33 minutes at a time.

Favorite Tracks: Desafinado; Samba Triste; Bahia

#462: The Birthday Party - Junkyard (1982)

Zack: I fucking hated this album. Absolutely despised it. The first two tracks had this edgy hardness to them, and I thought I was in for a post-punk album that was heavier on the punk. And that was true, from a certain point of view. Unfortunately, it was a pretty shitty punkishness. Honestly, I think Wikipedia sums it up pretty well: Despite limited commercial success, The Birthday Party's influence has been far-reaching, and they have been called ‘one of the darkest and most challenging post-punk groups to emerge in the early '80s.’ The group's ‘bleak and noisy soundscapes’… provided the setting for vocalist Nick Cave’s disturbing tales of violence and perversion.” The Birthday Party are certainly…challenging. They seemed to be trying to create a sound where every element sounds like that moment where a motorcycle goes screeching past your window right at the moment where you’re getting frustrated that you are still awake and doing work at 2 a.m. It’s noise for the sake of being noise. What’s disappointing is that the vocalist Nick Cave mentioned above is that Nick Cave, whose album Henry’s Dream is one of the gems we’ve encountered and an album that I return to frequently. That album is also dark, but at least the music is, well, musical. From start to finish, this album was just the parts of Sonic Youth I dislike the most, amplified, and I am just glad it’s over.

Favorite Tracks: Blast Off; Dead Joe [2^nd Version]; She’s Hit

Emily: Birthday parties are supposed to be fun and festive. Friends gathered together, balloons and streamers, snacks and drinks. There should be cake! The Birthday Party, sadly, doesn't have any cake. It doesn't even have fake "birthday cake" flavor (which I don't like but would be appropriate). It's loud and mostly unpleasant, not even close to festive. So I guess it's more Junkyard than Birthday Party, and not exactly how I wanted to spend 45 minutes of my day off.

Favorite Tracks: Blast Off; Several Sins; She's Hit

#461: The Doors - The Doors (1967)

Zack: We last checked in with The Doors in February of 2013 which…man, I feel like I write about how long we’ve been at this in every post but that is just crazy. We were already more than 200 albums in then, and that was four years ago. Anyway, I had no memory of listening to that album so I went back and re-read my review, mostly just to look up how long ago it had been. In my review of L.A. Woman I wrote that I liked the album so much that I was planning on taking a deep dive into the rest of The Doors discography, going so far as to say, “So when either Morrison Hotel or The Doors rolls around, you can bet I’ll be a much more informed Doors fan.” Lol. What a sweet, naïve, person I was. If you made that bet, I’m sorry to inform you that it’s time to pay up. I have not delved into The Doors discography, and I don’t even think I’ve re-listened to L.A. Woman. So, this is The Doors’ second chance to thoroughly engross me, and maybe this one will stick. I am pretty impressed with the bluesy, heaviness that this album has. At points, the sheer weight of it feels palpable. The sound is more directly comparable to Black Sabbath than what I typically think of as psychedelic rock. But there are those tropes as well, and the mix of the heaviness and the swirling psychedlia make it a sound that stands out as its own thing. Maybe Iron Butterfly was similar, but otherwise The Doors sound like The Doors and no one else. It sounds simple, but a unique sound is one of the hardest things for any artist to cultivate. That they were able to do that here, on their very first album, is a testament to why the band is now considered so iconic.

Favorite Tracks: Break on Through; The End; Twentieth Century Fox

Emily: Fifty years ago, I bet Jim Morrison and The Doors had no idea that several of their songs would become mainstays in car commercials. That's really how I know many of the songs on this album - they've been repackaged as bouncy jaunts over visions of Hondas and Toyotas and probably a few Diet Cokes and replayed hundreds and hundreds of time in between Monday Night Football plays and Bachelor rose ceremonies. It's a blessing and a curse I suppose. On the one hand, this exposure means that millions more people know how awesome The Doors were. But on the other hand, it kind of bastardizes the whole heavy, psychedelic artistic expression that embodies this entire album. Jim Morrison was a one-of-a-kind talent, and that really shines through here on The Doors' debut. They have such a fully formed sound from that first song, Break on Through (one of the most prevalent Doors-in-commercials songs), and that coherent vision carries through throughout the album. It really shows that The Doors deserve to be explored in longer than 30-second snippets.

Favorite Tracks: Break on Through; Light My Fire; Soul Kitchen

#460: Mudhoney - Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge (1991)

Zack: While Nirvana rightfully get credit for popularizing grunge, they were hardly alone in its innovation. One of their contemporaries, also from Seattle, were Mudhoney. They started releasing early projects at around the same time Nirvana released Bleach (except Mudhoney’s first EP and album are actually supposed to be pretty good) and both of their opuses came out within months of each other in 1991 (Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge came out about two months before Nevermind). Now that I’ve actually listened to a Mudhoney album, I’m starting to think that they don’t get enough attention. EGBDF was a very strong album. It’s certainly grunge, but softens some of the harsher edges with extra alternative rock and garage rock. The result is a very interesting album worth checking out for anyone who wants to broaden their appreciation of the grunge scene.

Favorite Tracks: Broken Hands; Let It Slide; Something So Clear

Emily: Early '90s grunge is almost always up my alley. Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Soundgarden are staples of alt-rock radio to this day (and I've heard that they've started sneaking on to classic rock radio as well - guess it's time for that). That's why I was pretty surprised that all of Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge was unfamiliar to me. Mudhoney hits many of the same beats as their Seattle contemporaries - fuzzy guitars, angsty lyrics, and DIY punk sensibilities - with somewhat softer and perhaps more radio-friendly sheen, but they didn't catch on with audiences in the same way. I guess there was too much out there at the time that kinda sounded like them, or the shine of Nirvana blinded listeners to other grunge records in 1991. It's a shame, because EGBDF is a really good grunge album. It's no Nevermind, but a few songs have definitely earned their place on a '90s alt-rock playlist (or, in a couple years, on a deep-dive classic rock station).

Favorite Tracks: Broken Hands; Thorn; Who You Drivin' Now

#459: The Shamen - En-Tact (1990)

Zack: That’s three consecutive albums that I really, really enjoyed, a streak which will end right now. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I did not like an electro-rave dance album from 1990. (Or, at the very least, I didn’t like the US/1991 edition…which seems to be radically different from the original version but this is the one that’s been sold since 1991 so I’m sticking with it.) I found it annoying and dull, despite the attempts to seemingly overstimulate the listener. That said, I’ll focus on the few tracks that I did kind of like and point out the elements that drew me to them. First, Possible Worlds and Evil Is Even had these interesting ambient/soundtrack qualities to them. Like, if they were slipped into the background of a TV show, they might kind of work. In a weird way, they kind of reminded me of Nujabes, whose albums and soundtrack work I absolutely adore. These tracks didn’t have the same delicate and ethereal quality than Nujabes songs typically have, but at least there was something sort of compelling about them other than the bouncing and beeping. Second, on Progen 91 and (to a lesser extent) Move Any Mountain, The Shamen embrace a little bit of hip-hop. I mean that beyond just an awkward rap verse shoehorned in there (although they both have them and they are terrible and I’m actually docking points for those). There’s something to those beats that are reminiscent of Afrika Bambaataa, for example. I didn’t totally mind that element as well. On the rest of the album, though, The Shamen eschew these elements in favor of a plainer ravish sound, and I thought it was pretty shitty. But at least there were a few things I could like.

Favorite Tracks: Possible Words; Evil Is Even [edit]; Progen 91 (I.R.P. in the Land of Oz)

Emily: I started listening to this album a couple weeks ago, and I only just returned to it tonight. A combination of things got in the way, including a friend visiting, a busy few weeks of work, traveling for the holidays, and getting a new dog(!!!). Mostly, though, I didn't really want to return to an early-'90s British rave album. Without much going on this evening (and with some prodding from Zack), I returned to En-Tact before settling in to watch basketball and/or Black Mirror. And, big surprise, I still wasn't much of a fan. I mean, it's fine background noise, nothing too clangy or untz-untz or earth-shatteringly loud. But nothing really grabbed my attention, and I was mostly just bored. So bored that this is all I have to say about it.

Favorite Tracks: Omega Amigo; Progen 91 (I.R.P. in the Land of Oz); 666 Edit

#458: Neil Young - After the Gold Rush (1970)

Zack: Yaaaaaaaaaaas!! My feelings about Neil Young have been well documented at this point. We’ve listened to two solo Neil Young albums before now, both of which I absolutely adored (I believe Rust Never Sleeps made my top 5 for the first 100 and Harvest was my favorite album from albums 201-300). And we’ve encountered Neil Young in a couple of bands, where I usually found his contributions to be the most striking. Plus, since this endeavor introduced me to Neil Young, I’ve gone through some of his more popular – but not included on the list – albums, and generally found them to be quite good (I haven’t yet dived into all the albums from the 80s and 90s that people straight up hate, but maybe one day.) I was looking forward to listening to this album so bad that I plowed through many of the last dozen or so in an effort to get to it sooner. And while After the Gold Rush didn’t transfix me quite as much as Harvest or Rust Never Sleeps, I still thought it delivered up to my expectations. It wasn’t as consistently excellent, and there were songs I just did not like, but the highs were just as lofty as on those other two. After the Gold Rush is definitely a great album, and although I’ll need to give it a few more listens before I decide if it’ll be a contender for the 500 album awards, I’m definitely looking forward to doing so.

Favorite Tracks: Southern Man; After the Gold Rush; Don’t Let It Bring You Down

Emily: When I told Zack this morning that I was listening to Neil Young (he was in the other room and I had headphones in, so he had no idea), he bounced up and down and YAYed. That's how much he likes Neil Young. While I'm not quite as enthralled, I definitely appreciate the winding folk-country-rock road that Neil Young has taken and continues to take over the course of his 40+ year career. And I liked a lot about this album. The first song underwhelmed me, but then it was three songs straight that I absolutely loved. I went on to like the rest of it, but those three songs really got to me. There's something about the songwriting and the simplicity of the arrangements that make Neil Young's music really special. And what I think this means is that I have to revisit the albums we've listened to in the past, and perhaps expand my Neil Young horizons beyond this list.

Favorite Tracks: Only Love Can Break Your Heart; Southern Man; After the Gold Rush