A Year of Blind Spots: Closer

Joe is working through a list of albums that he considers "blind spots," i.e. albums that he's never heard but feels like he should.

1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die:

After 25 years, it is almost impossible to separate the unsettling atmosphere of Joy Division's music from the disintegration of its singer's personality and sudden death. While their 1979 debut Unknown Pleasures peered into a terrifying abyss, it was still just music.

Not so with Closer. Compared to its violent, more conventional predecessor, Closer is a quantum leap. The songs stray far from the punk-inspired template of the band's early years. Where much of the dank atmosphere of Unknown Pleasures came from producer Martin Hannett's revolutionary use of digital effects, here the music itself is alien—from the strange, militaristic rhythms of "Colony" to the hysterical twisted guitars on "Atrocity Exhibition." The addition of synthesizers—notably on "Isolation" and "Heart and Soul"—hints that had the band continued with Curtis, they may still have ended up sounding like New Order.

The ambience that Hannett creates here is practically an instrument in itself. While it once provided a dark background for the band's assault, his trademark reverb and delay treatments are now part of the skeletal songs, somehow rendering them all the more stark.

But it is on the final three songs—the desperate "Twenty Four Hours" and the defeated "The Eternal" and "Decades"—where, with hindsight, one can clearly see that the boundary between Curtis' personal torment and his bleak lyrical themes no longer existed. The cover's gravestone design may have been an unfortunate coincidence, as it was decided upon long before Curtis' death, but it is hard not to interpret this grim full stop of an album as anything other than a suicide note.

Joe:

I'm not well-read on this band so I don't know if this is an original thought (most likely not), but the name "Joy Division" is an excellent choice for such a band as this. There is no joy within these songs, which makes the name morbidly ironic. That's a good thing, artistically, even though it's not a good thing emotionally or mentally or spiritually for the band. I usually have mild quibbles about the 1001 Albums blurbs, but they nailed this one: the music is dark as shit, and it is totally indicative of the well-being of its lead singer (or lack thereof).

That's always interesting, isn't it? The issue of death comes up again and again in writing about music, and it fascinates me, how death always elevates the art. It's like, obviously the tragic suicide of this (way too young) musician is a horrible, horrible thing, but technically speaking, does this not make the music more interesting? Does it not make the morbid themes hit harder? I'm fascinated just as much with our reaction to such art as I am of the art itself. I do not think that we'd be talking about Joy Division with such reverent tones if Ian Curtis had lived a long and happy life and Closer was the second of eight studio albums including a mediocre reunion album from 2013 or whatever.

That's speculation but it's based on evidence from plenty of other artists who have passed away under all kinds of circumstances. David Bowie released an album about death and died a couple days later. Drive-by Truckers found poignance in the airplane crash of Lynyrd Skynyrd. Cult '90s psych band the Olivia Tremor Control just released a fantastic album years after both frontmen died because their circle of friends were able to piece together their left-behind work. A thousand examples, Joy Division being just one of them. I think it was a bit histrionic for 1001 Albums to call this album a "suicide note," but I can't knock 'em for finding that thematic relevance within the art. That's just what we do. We look for meaning. Often times, we find the greatest meaning of all when the artist stares down death.

If you want to put all that aside, then that's fine too. Yes, the synths really do point toward the band's reincarnation as New Order. And if you're gonna insist on pointing that gun in my face, I'll reluctantly tell you that I like New Order's sounds a lot more than Joy Division's. But that's because New Order was doing new wave and synthpop, genres I'm way more amenable to than gothic post-punk. That has nothing to do with the depth of the art. Joy Division finds plenty of depth, traveling down at least six feet deep.

There was speculation in my New Order piece from this column that their first album after Curtis' death (and ever, since they renamed themselves New Order after his death), Movement, probably found some meaning in their rebirth after death (I'm still not familiar with that one, I'll get to it eventually). No speculation needed here. Joy Division was dark and deadly and that directly or at least indirectly led to the dark death of its frontman. It's all here, in the songs. Plenty of value to be found in the songcraft ("Combat" is the best), but that's not why we're here. Let's not pretend otherwise.

Listen to the entire album here:

A Year of Blind Spots: Merriweather Post Pavilion

Joe is working through a list of albums that he considers "blind spots," i.e. albums that he's never heard but feels like he should.

There are plenty of big-tent indie rock classic releases from my formative years that I'm not intimately familiar with. But at this point, around 20 years after the mid-point of that time period, any huge, critically acclaimed indie rock album that I'm unfamiliar with still is unfamiliar by choice. At some point, for many of those albums, I kind of gave up. I listened to Merriweather Post Pavilion a few times, shrugged, claimed I would never understand it, and tucked it away for a couple decades. This is a Blind Spot of my own making, based on assumptions I made at a younger age about whether I would be able to understand it or if the efforts weren't worth it.

But as the years fly by, that kind of decision holds less and less weight. We grow and change, we adjust our musical values, we discover that some things aren't as harsh or unpleasant as they might have seemed earlier in life. I couldn't handle spicy food when I was younger, but now I love hot buffalo wings. I'm not going nuclear with the spiciness, but there's a noticeable uptick in tolerance. That's how it goes with music too. I thought Merriweather Post Pavilion was fucking stupid when I was a 20-year-old, just an indecipherable psychedelic mess, a scam pulled on any susceptible indie rock critics worth their salt. The thought is that, at the age of 37, maybe I suddenly find that such an album is tolerable, or maybe even enjoyable. You never know! The quest for new (to me) music is infinite, and in its infinity, it occasionally circles back around.

Animal Collective has always been a weird-ass test case for this theory, because I actually really like their second-most acclaimed album, Strawberry Jam. (Is it their second-most acclaimed? Feels is up there too, quantitatively speaking, and so is Sung Tongs. I am not quite there yet.) This album snuck through somehow. Was it because Strawberry Jam was released the first week of my undergrad experience? That my mind was so totally blown open from so many new experiences that it left a wide gap for some weird-ass neo-psychedelia to sneak in? And that by 2009 my mind had closed and Merriweather Post Pavilion just didn't land the same? Or maybe Strawberry Jam provided everything I'd ever need in the right amount, and MPP was just a little too much?

It's not worth reiterating. It's honestly not that important, or that interesting either. This is how music works. Sometimes it lands and sometimes it doesn't. It's all so fucking arbitrary that it's not the type of thing you can build a blog post around.

The 2026 verdict on Merriweather Post Pavilion? Pretty good! Seems more accessible this time around, definitely more tolerable to my ears that have been conditioned over the years to handle harsher audio terrain. I am able to find the hooks buried amongst the psychedelia in ways that I couldn't contemporaneously. But at the same time, there are definitely more than a couple tracks that don't go anywhere, and don't amount to anything other than white noise (e.g. "Daily Routine").

Even after listening to this album a bunch more times after mild dalliances in the late aughts, and coming to a better understanding of how it ticks, I still think that everything hinges on the one big "hit" of the album, "My Girls." If you're looking at Top Tracks of '09 or whatever, that's the one you see around the top (like Pitchfork, for example). And it's a great song! I see that now. I understand it better in two ways. The first is the lyrical theme of the song is now applicable to my own life—I too don't care about material things but really want to provide a nice life for my wife and daughters. The second is in the repetition—in my older age I have come to the realization of how repetition in music can act as a balm, can bring peace, like, the act of repetition itself is the calming thing. I like how the song is unhinged rhythmically, but still manages to stick the landing of being heartfelt and powerful.

Otherwise, ya know, I'm not totally sold on the album as a whole, but I'm very far removed from the original assessment of "this is fucking ass." I like it, but I just can't find enough to latch onto, especially in its latter half. I think Animal Collective is generally lame, a little too try-hard for my tastes, a little too "out there" to the detriment of the quality of the songwriting. It would probably be more interesting to write about Strawberry Jam and try to explain why that one is the winner for me, as opposed to something like MPP. Because, really, are there are large differences between the two? Probably not. It's just more so timing. But time marches on, and we can adjust the clocks as we see fit.

Listen to the entire album here:

A Year of Blind Spots: Celebrity Skin

Joe is working through a list of albums that he considers "blind spots," i.e. albums that he's never heard but feels like he should.

1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die:

When she dies in the bathtub, who doesn't shed a tear? Courtney Love is fabulous in The People Vs. Larry Flynt, a celluloid signal that her post-Cobain years might not be all flings and fisticuffs ("Hole is a band," huffed Rolling Stone, "Courtney Love is a soap opera").

The musical legacy of her mid-1990s Hollywood heyday is Celebrity Skin. From the whoosh that opens the title cut, it is a whirlwind ride into a post-grunge Oz. Courtney is half Dorothy, half Wicked Witch, alternately blessing and blasting those who cross her.

As the words skip between sunshine and shade, Eric Erlandson's guitar jangles and jabs, Melissa Auf Der Maur's bass rumbles and rolls, and Patty Schemel's drums smack and crash. Above it all soars the voice of Love, who roars where once she screamed. Also key are co-writers Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins, Jordan Zaroronzny of Blinker the Star, and Charlotte Caffey of the Go-Go's—and producer Michael Beinhorn.

There is plenty for armchair detectives: "Boys on the Radio" is about Jeff Buckley, Brian Wilson, and the Lemonheads' Evan Dando, "Awful" is Bush's Gavin Rossdale, "Northern Star" is probably Cobain, and "Playing Your Song" fits Trent Reznor like a gothic glove.

Gossip aside, Celebrity Skin is a misunderstood, melodic masterpiece. "I was very disappointed for her that people didn't get behind that record" lamented Love's muse Stevie Nicks. The album takes the same sonic leap from 1994's Live Through This as that crunching classic did from 1991's synapse-shredding Pretty on the Inside—and thus completes a Hole hat trick of classic albums.

Joe:

Certain key questions arise when listening to an album for the first time, questions whose answer will provide what you need to know about the story of the band. The questions will look different to everybody. E.g. when we were listening to this song at home, Pam was like "I think one of these songs was in a '90s rom-com," which is probably right, and most definitely important to Pam's understanding of the music as it fits into pop culture. But my question was "I wonder if this came out before or after Live Through This?"

Because we covered that album in this column over five years ago at this point, and it's probably one of my favorite Blind Spot albums ever, and this one is even better, in the way that it sounds waaaay more pop-like than the grunge album I fell in love with previously. So my question would provide the answer of which direction Hole traveled in? Did they get grungier through Love's love of Kurt Cobain and reach grunge catharsis around the time of his suicide, OR did they find the peak of grunge and move past it, into the upper reaches of mainstream rock, by writing hooks that could find themselves into any number of styles of pop songs?

The answer is the latter, obviously, if you took like two seconds to read the blurb above or the Wikipedia page or whatever. That makes the most sense anyway. It's more common to become more accessible as time goes on. And it makes sense that Hole would take their sound in that direction in 1997, which was past grunge's peak anyway. I like the fact that it was done on purpose, that Hole had a vision for this album and that vision had everything to do with being boldly accessible and catchy.

The title track is recognizable from '90s rock radio. I didn't recognize anything else—which is a good thing, as always in this column, to not be distracted by ubiquitous hit songs of yesteryear—but I fell in love with "Awful." I think the chorus on this one will be burned into my brain forever. I really liked the aforementioned "Boys on the Radio" too, felt like a grunge-fringe version of jangle pop, like a dark mirror version of something that R.E.M. would have been putting out around the same time.

Why did Hole remain such a blind spot, after all this time? I think the RS quote in the blurb above hints at the reason—women in rock 'n' roll are taken less seriously than men. Which is fucked up. But I will cop to the fact that I have been raised in my rock 'n' roll education to know Courtney Love as a slightly unhinged woman who was Kurt Cobain's widow and who has loud opinions. "Frontwoman of Hole" almost seemed like a footnote. It's fucked that it took multiple efforts in a dumb blog column to understand what a formidable musician Love was and is, and how the main story here is that her band kicked fucking ass. Who gives a shit what "celebrity tabloids" are (still) saying about her. It's all about the music, and the music is incredible. If Live Through This is one of the best grunge rock albums of the '90s, then Celebrity Skin is surely one of the greatest rock albums of that decade, period.

Listen to the entire thing here:

(P.S. I cannot fucking BELIEVE that the 1001 Albums blurb spoiled a Film Club movie for me. What the fuck!!)

A Year of Blind Spots: 1999

Joe is working through a list of albums that he considers "blind spots," i.e. albums that he's never heard but feels like he should.

I struggle with an artist like Prince. Struggling is not the same as disliking, of course. I like Prince and I like the music that he made in his lifetime—the small fraction that I've heard of it so far, anyway. 1999 completes the trifecta of "critically acclaimed albums" for me, after Purple Rain and Sign o' the Times. I like them, and there are moments throughout that I love (we will eventually focus on today's album, don't worry). But in general, I get the overwhelming sense that I am "missing" something when it comes to Prince. It's less a disagreement about whether he's good (he is), more of a disagreement about how good. I hear some fun and competent and interesting pop/funk music, whereas it feels like other people hear a god. And I don't get that sense.

Here's my theory on it. And this doesn't just apply to Prince, I don't think. You could probably apply the theory to a bunch of other artists from Prince's time period, or slightly earlier or later. Basically anyone who was big before I was born, and is still seen as relevant today. It comes down to whether the artist's image is marketable. That's it. Decades after the artist was last relevant in pop culture, and a decade after they pass from this mortal coil, if they are seen as a "legend" or "one of the greats," etc., then that has everything to do with the marketing of their image, and almost nothing to do with the art. (Exceptions abound, obviously, like Bruce Springsteen for example, but let's not get distracted from the point I'm trying to make.)

That, in turn, tricks me into thinking that my assessment of Prince's best three albums as "very good but not great" is somehow inadequate. It's because, through constant reiteration, we are told that this is an artist to remember, because they are easy to remember (being the character that they were), and that you should keep buying the things that their estate is giving you, keep listening to their five or ten hits over and over, keep funneling money into that image. And if you keep seeing this, keep seeing Instagram posts with Prince music or reddit posts of supposedly crazy shit Prince did and Facebook status updates that "nobody does it like Prince anymore" and so on, then you're gonna feel that ancient impulse to want to fit in. And so you end up here.

"Here" for most people looks like: "hey, Prince's hits are great." "Here" for me, unfortunately, looks differently. It looks like full-album dives. And if I'm getting through his best known and most beloved albums and nodding along like they are good but also half-shrugging too, then what, do we even have to consider the rest? He more or less released an average of one album a year from the release of 1999 to the year of his death, and the vast majority of those are critically reviled. But you're not supposed to remember that. You're supposed to cue "1999" on the monthly music streaming subscription AI-curated playlist and let it play again and again. Because that Prince, man, he was a real one!

For what it's worth, I don't think Prince himself would care about any of this. I don't think he lived on this planet, actually. There's no other explanation for all of it. I think he was just a weird fucking guy who made a lot of music, and some of it, almost by accident, was really fucking good. I think that 1999 is really fucking good. I have my qualms with it, but there was no pain in listening to the Minneapolis sound all week. He knew how to lay down a groove, and he knew how to write a hook. "1999" and "Little Red Corvette" are the hits for a reason. If that's all you know about Prince, then let none of what I wrote about shame you. I'm actually jealous of you.

There's not really even anything "wrong" with this album, or any Prince album that I've had the pleasure of knowing. I might be inclined to say that some of these songs are too long, but I have accepted it. It's a double album with only eleven songs. By design, those songs are all going to be a little too long. On the one hand, it might've been nice to condense every song and tighten the album as a whole, make it one disc, make it eleven unimpeachable pop hits collected on that one disc. On the other hand, maybe that would be detrimental to the artistry. Maybe the idea of extended each song by repeating the hook over and over in an outro is the way that Prince becomes unique and stands out. 

I turned the album on at dinnertime at some point, and Pam (who, it should be noted, is probably more of a Prince skeptic than I am) did her usual "what are we listening to?" But she said it because she didn't know that the album version of "1999" has a weird spoken-word intro. She knows the song. The radio version is almost half the length of the album version. I prefer the album version because I prefer albums, but I can't diss the decision to trim the fat either. But you see? Every step of the way, we have found the invisible hand of commercialism pulling the strings. It's like Prince hit some unspoken goal of having twelve marketable songs and then was forgotten about, left to wander in the wilderness for twenty years making unlistenable music, all of that easily swept under the rug when the artist dies and the legacy is all the remains, a legacy to be propped up by those who are left to prosper from it.

I acknowledge all this, and say that there is a way around it. You can just not care. Well, okay, no, instead how about: Care just enough to be aware that you are being manipulated, and ignore those forces, and just slip into the artistry. If I had a gun to my head and was told to choose between listening to a Prince Greatest Hits compilation over and over for the rest of my life or listening to the eight-minute "D.M.S.R." over and over for the rest of my life, picking the latter would be easy. Prince lays out such a fine-ass groove on the Oberheim OB-8, and it's so pure. It's pure because no ad man sold me on it. It's just there, in the margins, and it makes me feel good. It's not the best thing I've ever heard, and it doesn't move the needle on my view of Prince at all. It's just good music. The forces that be are trying to make me feel like I'm missing something by thinking that way, but I don't think I am. I think this is good enough.

Listen to the whole thing here:

A Year of Blind Spots: Ambient 1: Music for Airports

Joe is working through a list of albums that he considers "blind spots," i.e. albums that he's never heard but feels like he should.

1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die:

If the first three solo records Brian Eno released in the early 1970s represented a left turn from his work with Roxy Music, then 1975's Discreet Music was virtually a lift-off into space. The quartet of drifting, peculiarly hypnotic soundscapes, three of them reinventions of Pachelbel's "Canon in D Major," marked his first forays into what he called ambient music. The idea was a progression of sorts from French composer Erik Satie's creation in 1920 of musique d'ameublement: literally, "furniture music," designed less to be listened to and more to be occasionally overheard. Discreet Music was conceived during an extended hospital visit; for its follow-up, Eno produced this set, inspired by a similarly sterile environment.

"It must be ignorable as it is interesting," wrote Eno on the liner notes to Ambient 1: Music for Airports. As a manifesto, it could scarcely have been more fully realized. The four shapeless works drift glacially in and out of focus: a ghostly choir, some muted brass, countless piano teardrops (played on "1/1" by Robert Wyatt). And yet despite the lack of structure, it is never displeasing, due chiefly to its astutely grounded tonality.

Some critics called it boring, missing the point by a mile. Undeterred, Eno followed Ambient 1: Music for Airports with numerous other records of a similar bent, most notably 1982's mysterious, enveloping Ambient 4: On Land, and the gorgeously ethereal Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks from 1983. However, it is as a producer that he found greater renown, famously working with Apollo collaborator Daniel Lanois on U2's The Joshua Tree.

Joe:

Okay, just because I'm calling it "boring" doesn't mean I'm missing the point. I get the point. I think it's a good point, an interesting point, even. The point being that we should recontextualize what we think of when we think of "music as art." That it's still art if we engage with it in a different way. Brian Eno's point is foisted upon us in this album, as there is literally nothing to engage with, and so we must push it to the background. This is where, according to Eno, we are able to "create space for thought." Yes, okay, I get it! If we're judging a work of art by how well it achieves its stated goals, then Ambient 1: Music for Airports is an obvious success.

But it's still boring, is the thing. This is what I want: I want music to be exciting. That's the point I usually try to make in album reviews (which this is not, it's more of an explainer, but still), that I tend to like music that is exciting, i.e. catchy or uptempo or melody-forward or whatever. Not all of my favorite music is like that, I'm speaking generally, with plenty of exceptions. There was no chance on earth that I was going to find Music for Airports exciting, because it's not designed to be that. It's designed to be something else completely. And I understand what it's supposed to be, I do! Just because I come back to the same conclusion that it's boring as shit doesn't mean I don't understand it, and I feel insulted that the book would imply that.

I understand that this is the landmark ambient album, in that it's considered the "best" ambient album, as well as the album that literally coined the term. The idea "of" ambient music, as noted above, was not new, but Eno called it that in the title of this album, and that's the term that stuck. I don't think it sticks as well if Ambient 1 wasn't also considered a top-tier ambient album right off the bat. Moreover, I think that it doesn't stick as well if this was "ambient + [something else]." Not that it could have, this early in ambient's existence, I'm just speaking hypothetically. But think of the other well-known and well-appreciated albums that have the "ambient" tag on them.

Think about Selected Ambient Works 85-92, as an example from this very column. I liked that album when I finally got around to it a year ago. In that column, I discussed how "ambient" was a misnomer, and that it was actually an electronic album that functioned in the same way, ideologically, as an ambient album. Ambient 1: Music for Airports, instead, created the function and the ideology. It's pure ambient, on its own self-created terms. This is the reason that this album is known as an important one, because of how much of genesis it was for a whole fucking wing of music. This is, consequentially, the reason that I felt the compulsion to check it out. I'm at the point where I know what I like, but equally like the act of exploring what I don't know I like.

So I know I don't like Brian Eno's ambient music. I know this for certain. It's funny, if you go back at read the second entry in this ongoing blog series, six years and 338 column entries ago, the one about Speaking in Tongues by Talking Heads, you'll get some backchat about Brian Eno. Too much chat for someone who didn't really know anything about the guy at that point.

I still don't—his production discography is massive, too big to ever presume a solid understanding of it—but I am here at a critical juncture in his solo career, and an important moment in the formation of his legacy, and I can say this: I get it. I get what was appealing to a certain type of person. That type of person values what the art means over the art itself, to a fault. I can't seem to ever bring myself fully outside the value of the art itself, though, and so I'm stuck with an ambient album that is pretty fucking boring.

Listen to the album in full:

A Year of Blind Spots: Recovering the Satellites

Joe is working through a list of albums that he considers "blind spots," i.e. albums that he's never heard but feels like he should.

There's a music genre called "big music." I think I've written about it before on the blog (though, unfortunately, its generic name makes it impossible to adequately use the search engine to find), probably in the context of the Waterboys, whose Mike Scott coined the term originally. It refers to a specific type of rock music that is explicitly built to sound "grandiose" and "stadium-ready." Specifically, it is used in the framework of '80s British rock bands who sang songs you could reasonably call "anthemic." The Waterboys, Big Country, and U2 are the bands most likely to be cited when talking about this niche genre. But the influence juts out in both directions, into and away. You could say that Springsteen's heartland rock fed into what "big music" could sound like; you could say that Arcade Fire's indie rock heyday was the reincarnation of "big music" as we understood it years later.

Personally, "big music" as a definition is the closest explanation I've ever had for why music is important to me, why it makes me feel the way I feel. I want my music to be grandiose and anthemic. It's the easiest and best way to hit me square in the heart. Consider those aforementioned '80s British rock bands to be the only "big music" bands feels reductive to me. No, I think about big music whenever I listen to an artist whose music feels big. Even when they are '90s American alt-folk-pop-rock band. Even when they are Counting Crows.

A lot has changed since I covered Counting Crows' debut album, August and Everything After, in this column. Back in August (I know) 2022, I was saying how you needed to understand that this is lyrics-forward music to get into this band's sound. Is that true of the debut? Maybe. Such an argument, though, totally ignores the fact that "Mr. Jones" is one of the greatest, most anthemic songs of the entire decade. Earlier this year, for personal reasons, I checked out their third album too, This Desert Life, and I will say that this is when Counting Crows (non-"Mr. Jones") clicked for me. The music felt fucking BIG.

I feel the same way here, on Recovering the Satellites. Like, to the point that I think Counting Crows are probably one of the best bands of the 1990s, any genre. This is not such a revelatory thing to say, I guess, since they've sold 20 million records and are, in some respects, a household name. However, I'd argue that it's revelatory in the context of this blog, or at the very least for me personally. I was familiar with the hits on the radio, they faded to the background like so many rock hits from minivan stereos in my youth, and now it's only in middle adulthood that I'm waking up and looking around and feeling shocked to discover that I can dive deep into this band and come away thinking that this is an offshoot of Big Music, my favorite.

It probably comes down to Adam Duritz, if we're being honest. His vocals are unabashedly balls to the wall on every song. During their heyday, which was peak Gen X and peak irony, I'm sure Duritz's quality of singing heart-on-sleeve was the source of mockery. But as I try to push the sins of my ancestors to the side and approach art honestly and irony-free, I am finding that Duritz's vocals are what drives my immense feelings about Counting Crows' music. Some of the songs on here dip into alt-rock, some of them are more in line with the folky roots rock that you'd expect them to cover, but regardless of what the production sounds like, Duritz singlehandedly makes everything feel big.

"Angels of the Silences" and "Children in Bloom" goes hardest for me. Apparently the former was a big radio hit for these guys? I didn't remember ever hearing it before now. Regardless, these are the ones that feel the "hardest," as in "hard rock." Adam Duritz is up for the task! I legitimately forget that Shrek 2 even exists when I listen to these songs! And then you have something like "Have You Seen Me Lately?" coming immediately after "Children in Bloom" that keeps the tempo up. They don't keep the pace the whole time, like maybe something like "Another Horsedreamer's Blues," but see, this is what I'm talking about. Even when they are ROCKING, Counting Crows sounds like "big music." It sounds important, essential. There's something in the sauce, and it's tasting really good.

The song that has been getting the most play on the internet and the blogs over the past couple years is "A Long December." I remember Nike Stratis pushing hard for this song somewhat recently. Maybe a little too hard, because now I'm seeing it pop up in conversations of "is this a Christmas song?" You know the answer to that (it's always "no" if you even have to ask the fucking question in the first place), but still, interesting to see Counting Crows reenter the conversation in the 2020s in a niche interest sort of way. The whole thing makes me maybe not take the song as seriously, but even this proves my point. "A Long December," even if overrated due to circumstances beyond my control, is a fucking BIG song. Big mostly because it's deep in its sadness and wistfulness, which is big in its own specific way.

I suppose there's a chance that you are reading all this assuming that I am exaggerating. I am not. That's just what happens when I try to describe "big music" as a genre. It sounds too big to be true. But it's not! As for you: it's not too late. You too can fall (accidentally) in love with Counting Crows, the Biggest of the '90s alt-whatever bands. I have, and it feels good. Blind Spot filled, now time to explore the rest.

Listen to the whole album here:

A Year of Blind Spots: Live at Leeds

Joe is working through a list of albums that he considers "blind spots," i.e. albums that he's never heard but feels like he should.

1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die:

The legendary power and volume of the Who was always best sampled live. The studio tended to deaden their electricity: they recorded some fabulous singles, but no truly perfect albums. Even Tommy suffered from pretentious production. Live at Leeds, then, is not just possibly the greatest live album of all time, but also almost certainly the Who's finest moment.

The album caught the band soon after touring Tommy in its entirety, itching to cut loose. A show at Britain's Leeds University on Valentine's Day 1970 was the location; the band surged at full strength for more than two hours, playing Tommy, their classic singles, and a clutch of rock 'n' roll gems along the way. Unrestrained onstage, the power trio of musicians behind Roger Daltrey swelled to fearsome strength—bassist John Entwhistle carrying the melodies, drummer Keith Moon rolling and filling with powerhouse abandon, and Pete Townshend proving himself a pioneer of feedback and dynamics, his terse solos full of ideas and emotion, a truly understated guitarist.

The resulting album arrived later that year, packaged like a faux bootleg in a shabby cardboard gatefold. Though later expanded on CD (2000's completed two-CD deluxe edition is the one to buy), the original six-track vinyl is perfect in itself, especially the devil-driven cover of Mose Allison's "Young Man Blues," and the sprawling "My Generation," which soon becomes a kaleidoscope of windmill riffage. Live at Leeds is as pure as heavy rock gets.

Joe:

"No perfect albums" is an interesting take, only because that statement is true for most, if not all, musical artists that have ever existed in the history of music. Can you name a perfect album, without being hyperbolic? Even my favorite albums of all time have minor flaws. They are flaws that I can easily overlook because of how brilliant the art is overall, and so, calling something "imperfect" is unfair and sort of pointless. But I get the point here. The author is building a case for Live at Leeds. They need to imply that "Cousin Kevin" on Tommy exists and therefore Tommy is worse than Live at Leeds. I get it.

But I've never agreed with it. I've always been pretty reticent to get into live albums. I think that it's certainly possible that there are days in which a live album hits better than a studio album (especially if said live album acts as a greatest hits compilation). But I don't respect the artistry as much. I see the studio album as the statement, and the live album as an extension of that statement, merely a limb that juts out and could easily be sawed off if need be. This is why it's taken me over 20 years to finally listen to the exalted live album from the Who that I've been cognizant of and pestered with by the gatekeepers this entire time. It's a good album. It's a great album. It has no business being compared to the Who's studio albums.

This is my argument to view Live at Leeds in the proper context. Fuck out of here with "no perfect albums." You simply cannot compare. And so, if you remove it from that context, and just listen to it in a vacuum, then it's easier for me to evaluate. In that vacuum, I say that Live at Leeds is great fun. Agreed on all other counts—the Who sound to me like a wild live act, at least back in the '70s (not so much today probably, R.I.P. Keith Moon and John Entwhistle). The appropriate flowers have been given, I'm sure, for "My Generation," which turns into a Tommy medley, but my money is on "Magic Bus" as the one that goes hardest. Could be a matter of comparing/contrasting to the studio version, how "My Generation" was already pretty wild and "Magic Bus" was relatively scaled back and subdued, and when both go off the rails in concert, "Magic Bus" appears to be more a revelation.

As is the PoYB standard, I listened to the original version, and not the bonus deluxe version that doubles or triples the album's length. Six songs, all killer and no filler. I wouldn't mind hearing Tommy performed live in its entirety, but I also think that that would be too much of a good thing. I already have Tommy. I can just listen to that album. I don't need to hear it in a "different" way. The original studio album is great. Not perfect, sure, but c'mon. No need to throw that word around. Ain't no fucking live album that's perfect either. Certainly not Live at Leeds. Good, though.

Listen:

A Year of Blind Spots: Standing on the Verge of Getting It On

Joe is working through a list of albums that he considers "blind spots," i.e. albums that he's never heard but feels like he should.

My OCD when it comes to categorizing music puts me at odds with the mess that is George Clinton's discography. As we explained last time we entered this iconic artist's world (sidenote: he's acclaimed because he starred in Trolls World Tour), we explored the Blind Spot that was Parliament, and their album Mothership Connection. I learned then that the band name Funakdelic was a misnomer, and that Parliament was the funk band, whereas Funkadelic was the psychedelic rock band. Over time, those lines blurred, and currently, George Clinton is usually just performing songs from both bands at once. But here, on this Funkadelic album, we're comfortably back in the rock sound that was first seen (by me, anyway) on the Record Club album Maggot Brain.

I'm not too impressed with Standing on the Verge of Getting It On, but I like it all the same. Clinton's music is fun, for the most part. Some of it has aged poorly (in tame ways, i.e. that it's kinda lame now), and some of it is a little too indulgent for my taste. But when the groove is locked in, something like "Sexy Ways," then it's undeniable why this band is (or, these bands are) a go-to example of '70s funk rock. I was actually thinking that maybe the quality doesn't need to bleed through everything for that reputation to stand firm. George Clinton is probably already confirmed as the Godfather of Funk Rock at the point this album drops. Even if half the album was dumb as shit (and it sort of is), then just its existence and its feel would be enough for Clinton to affirm that legacy.

I appreciate the fact that the album is bookended by its two worst songs, because this was the exact set-up for Maggot Brain. I wonder if that was on purpose, or like if this is a thing they do across all albums, putting the experimental stuff at the beginning and the end and stuffing all tight poppy funk songs in the middle. It's probably not a coincidence that Funkadelic guitarist Eddie Hazel left the band after Maggot Brain and returned for Standing on the Verge; on both albums, there is a long guitar piece with a minimal number of discernable hooks or patterns.

"Good Thoughts, Bad Thoughts" has the same momentum-killing aura as "Maggot Brain" does, but at least this one comes in at the end. The lyrics are cringe pop-psych bullshit, but the guitar playing is fine. It's obviously a retread of a successful gambit that Hazel and Clinton pulled off the first time. The first song's excuse was that Clinton was under the haze of LSD and told Hazel to play like his mother was dead. What's the excuse for "Good Thoughts, Bad Thoughts"? Hazel's mother gets songwriting credits, but that's just so Hazel could sidestep some legal issues. There's no indication that his mom actually had anything to do with the making of this song, not even spiritually.

She gets credits on all the songs instead of Eddie Hazel, except for "Red Hot Mama." That song is the exception because it's a rework of a song that Hazel already had songwriting credits on, back from when it was performed by Parliament. And in fact, this song apparently predates even that and was at one point a song for the Parliaments? I don't have the chronology available to me right now. I think it's cool that there was a song that united all three versions of George Clinton's vision of music. I conversely think that the beginning of Funkadelic's version of it is so bad that it hurts. I know this song predates the reference by 36 years, but I fucking hate hearing a Minion voice when I'm trying to just listen to some fucking funk rock.

The five tracks in the middle, though? Great stuff. The title track goes hard, probably the funkiest shit you'll hear in this supposedly not-funk band. I'll go to bat for "I'll Stay" too, which has less heat but still manages to lock into a nice little groove. Even "Jimmy's Got a Little Bit of Bitch in Him" passes the sniff test, if just barely. If there's anything that pushes the limit of "aging poorly," it's this, but I don't have any real concerns about the intentions of this song being impure. It's a song about a gay friend. Does it seem like the best choice of words, even right there in the title, to describe this? No, not necessarily. But there's also evidence that George Clinton was greatly upset at all the actual, verifiable homophobia that was being laid out over samples of his tunes, once the G-funk hip hop thing started in earnest.

Overall, let's chalk this album up as a win. Any issues I have with it have already been litigated on this blog previously, and extra points for Funkadelic remaining consistent, flaws and all.

A Year of Blind Spots: Tidal

Joe is working through a list of albums that he considers "blind spots," i.e. albums that he's never heard but feels like he should.

1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die:

Just one year after emerging from New York, ambitious eighteen-year-old Fiona Apple capitalized on her recent signing with Sony and released her debut album, Tidal. Her remarkably mature vocals and angst-ridden lyrics swiftly earned her comparisons to the empowered female heavyweights of the music world at the time—Alanis Morissette, Tori Amos, and PJ Harvey. The album's minimalist artwork—mostly black-and-white portraits of Apple—reflects the tone of the album: self-reflective and self-indulgent perhaps, yet breathtakingly beautiful, stark, and powerful also.

Apple's sullen, heartbroken, yet defiant words dictated the sound of many of the tracks. Heartache, however, had never sounded so good. The impossibly young Apple dabbled in an array of genres ranging from psychedelia, sultry jazz, and blues, to confident, soulful funk. The majority of the tracks meander beyond the five-minute mark as Apple delivers her enrapturing stories, her alto pitch drifting seamlessly from the sultry, throaty vocals of standout "Criminal," to angelic heights in "Never Is a Promise"; from bitter and impassioned in "Sleep to Dream" to the longing and innocence of "The First Taste."

Along with the album's growing reputation and critical acclaim came a throng of awards and accolades. In 1997, Apple was nominated for Best New Artist and Best Rock Song ("Criminal") at the Grammys, although she would eventually accept the award for Best Rock Vocal Performance (Female) for the same song.

Joe:

I recently saw Tidal on a list of "The Definitive Mom Rock Albums." This was from Steve Hyden, who was doing a bit (as he often overuses the phrase "dad rock," and the bit was that he was now doing the opposite thing), but also being serious (in that he really could picture moms rocking out to the albums listed, and maybe some of you can too). I have trouble imagining my own mother liking any music (even though she does, I'm just saying I have trouble picturing it, despite evidence that I have that she does in fact listen to music). The best mom I know, my wife Pam, is definitely a fan of most of the artists on the list, especially the top three—Tapestry, Blue, Rumours—which are all also included in Pam's Best Albums of All Time list.

Sure enough, she knew Tidal really well, which is comforting to me. Feels like a good sign of parenting, right? That we can together cover so much ground and fill in each other's blind spots occasionally. I listen to a lot more music than her, but this is NOT like the famous NHL record of the most points scored by a pair of brothers. I have never listened to Tidal. It's not even because I'm not a mom. I liked the album a lot. I just never got around to it before now. 

It feels like an outlier on the Mom Rock list (which I will include at the bottom of this blog post, because I can't link to it, as it's paywalled). It is not like, for example, Come Away with Me. Similar vibes, like "coffee house," to use a term if I was trying not to be derisive but failing. The thing about Tidal, though, is that there is an extremely dark edge to the proceeding that makes Fiona Apple infinitely more interesting to me than Norah Jones. 

The fact that Fiona Apple is nineteen when she makes this album is a subject that is very well known and overly discussed at this point, but I need to bring it up here, because it makes me feel differently than I might normally with the "wow, they were so young when they made this!" conversation. With Fiona Apple, it makes me feel uneasy. I think she's a genius, but I also think that the brain power made her act like an adult at too young of an age, and I think that actual adults took advantage of that, and made her life difficult. I don't think it's shocking that she is somewhat of a recluse after this point. I don't think it's surprising that an album like Fetch the Bolt Cutters (made in her early 40s) was partially created in her kitchen, away from the music studios. I don't think it's surprising that she accepted an award for this album at an award show and proclaimed that this world is bullshit.

"Criminal" is one of the best songs ever, and the video is just fucking haunting. Fiona Apple is an attractive person and she is dressed provocatively in the video, but it's pretty easy to see (especially when viewed from a social work perspective) that this is NOT a video to get horny over. This is a person who is fucked up and got fucked up by other people, but who is also brilliant enough as an artist to funnel those complex emotions into her art. Has "Shadowboxing" been featured in a horror movie yet? If not, it should soon.

I've been thinking about the Mom Rock Canon ever since he posted it, and I still don't know how I feel about it. My first reaction was to be defensive, how many of these albums feature some deep emotion, and why can't I, a certified non-mom, be privy to such emotions as well? Why can't Tidal be Parent Rock? It's actually interesting, to finally listen to Tidal, way too late, but possibly at just the right time? Like, the ballyhoo surrounding this was that Fiona Apple was only nineteen but presented herself as way older, but here at 37yo, she does not seem older than me. She still seems really young on this album, which is not something I would've thought, even at the age of like 29. I'm not projecting myself onto her emotions. I'm projecting my kids'. And that makes me worry.

But that's what makes some of the slower, deeper cuts on this album truly sing. Something like "The Child Is Gone" might normally be a snooze, but as a parent, I see so much pain. There's a loss of innocence here. I would've related to it as a peer when I was younger, but now that I'm older, I feel way more empathy for the Fiona Apple of the past, and how she had to face the loss of that innocence, just like we all do, just like my kids will soon enough. Coffee house music this most certainly is not. Mom Rock, though? Maybe...

~~~~~~~~~

Mom Rock Canon, according to Steve Hyden

• Carole King, Tapestry
• Joni Mitchell, Blue
• Fleetwood Mac, Rumours
• Tori Amos, Under the Pink
• Fiona Apple, Tidal
• The Boys on the Side soundtrack
• The Cranberries, Everybody Else Is Doing It, Why Can't We?
• Sheryl Crow, Tuesday Night Music Club
• The Chicks, Fly
• Indigo Girls, Swamp Ophelia
• Norah Jones, Come Away with Me
• Madonna, The Immaculate Collection
• Sarah McLachlan, Fumbling Toward Ecstasy
• Alanis Morissette, Jagged Little Pill
• 10,000 Maniacs, MTV Unplugged

A Year of Blind Spots: Combat Rock

Joe is working through a list of albums that he considers "blind spots," i.e. albums that he's never heard but feels like he should.

This is a true sequel Year of Blind Spots entry, as Combat Rock was released just about a year and a  half after the epic, insane Sandinista!, and it works as a logical follow-up to that triple album as well. There's really only one way you can go after releasing an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink opus like that: you get smaller. Combat Rock would seem compact in anyone's discography, let alone next to an album that is 98 minutes longer.

I haven't found the motivation to go beyond the big three (Sandinista! itself was a stretch after the two stone-cold classics I've been deeply familiar with since my youth, London Calling and the UK version of The Clash) until now for a couple reasons. First was that I made the disastrous decision to buy a CD compilation of "the singles" in the same time frame I owned those two classic albums, and it really distorted the story of the Clash for me. More on this comp in a minute, after the second reason. The second was that, quite simply, it was made clear to me by the gatekeepers that I admired that the other albums just simply weren't as good.

After spending some time with this supposedly not-as-good Clash album (their fifth—I'm still not familiar with sophomore album Give 'Em Enough Rope, maybe next year?), I can say that it's better than I expected, but it has a few flaws. The first is obvious, because I've harped on this point in pretty much every other Blind Spots entry over the past seven years of doing this shit. There are songs on here that are very popular, even ubiquitous, and their presence is distracting.

In the case of Combat Rock, we're talking about "Should I Stay or Should I Go" and "Rock the Casbah," situated back-to-back on the tracklist, a one-two punch of songs that are, for better or worse, so familiar to anyone who gives even a single shit about rock music that they might as well be "Johnny B. Goode." They are fundamental, and this is to their detriment. How I feel about both of these songs is the closest I ever get to dismissing the Clash as a stodgy classic rock band in the same genre as, like, fucking Boston or Steve Miller Band or something. They are overplayed and overrated, and I did not realize they existed on the same album in the same space on that album. I can't get past it.

The second thing I'll say about it that isn't favorable is that Combat Rock stays in some of the weird lanes that were permanently paved in Sandinista!, but it doesn't land as well because of the lack of heft or daring-do. Two and a half hours of the craziest shit you can imagine does wonders for some of the bizarre deep cuts. But if you have twelve songs and two of them are pasted on the back cover of "Punk Rock for Beginners," and the other ten shoot for the same range as Sandinista! but in 20% of the time, then it just feels watered down. Something like "Red Angel Dragnet" is weird on purpose; something like "Death Is a Star" is barely there. I like "Overpowered by Funk" for finding hidden back alleys in this band's sound. "Know Your Rights" would sound like parody if that aforementioned singles compilation hadn't already burned it into my brain.

It's weird that the criticism lobbied toward this album seems to be that it was, like, a commercial sellout. Beyond those two tracks, there's nothing really accessible here. I guess the gap between all the dub shit on Sandinista! and the straightforwardness of "Rock the Casbah" was enough to convince people that the Clash went in a different direction. I actually wish they had gone in the opposite direction as they do here. I would've respected a dozen dank-ass dub songs on an album. I might not have liked it, but it would have been a stronger artistic choice. Combat Rock just seems half-assed. 

I still like it, though. I fall victim to the same comparison game as anyone else. Tough to recover from casually knocking out a few masterpieces. There's nowhere to go from there, except make something that's a bit lacking. It's a good album, but I've seen this band do better.

A Year of Blind Spots: Roger the Engineer

Joe is working through a list of albums that he considers "blind spots," i.e. albums that he's never heard but feels like he should.

1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die:

The Yardbirds finally unleashed their first studio LP in August 1966, by which time the band featured the incendiary guitar soloing of Jeff Beck (who replaced Eric Clapton). The album was much delayed by heavy touring of Europe and the U.S. (where the Yardbirds became a primary inspiration to the myriad garage and psychedelic bands springing up), and was eventually written and recorded in just one week at Advision Studios in London.

Roger the Engineer mixes up supercharged blues, prototype psychedelia, feedback, and Gregorian monk chants to great effect. Anticipating the heavy blues-rock of Cream and Led Zeppelin, the searing "Lost Woman," "the Nazz Are Blue," and "Rack My Mind" reflect the way the band built fiery workouts from traditional blues riffs and licks (Snooky Pryor's "Someone to Love Me," Elmore James's "Dust My Broom," and Slim Harpo's "Baby Scratch My Back," respectively), in the process showcasing Beck's astonishing talent (he makes a sustained one-note solo exciting on "The Nazz Are Blue"). Hit single "Over, Under, Sideways, Down" is based around the bassline to "Rock Around the Clock," yet manages to sound positively futuristic with the addition of Beck's winding guitar, the stop-start structure of the song, and the rabble-rousing calls of "Hey!"

Reissues include "Happenings Ten Years Time Ago," a storming rave-up featuring the dream-team of Beck and Jimmy Page, and its B-side "Psycho Daisies."

Joe:

I love listening to any "proto-" version of a genre. The prefix, at least as I use it here on the blog, means that this music sounds like a genre that wasn't officially formed until after that particular artist made those particular sounds. It's another way of saying what 1001 Albums said above: "Anticipating the..." It means that the artists were ahead of the game. I like it from an anthropological perspective. It's not that I like the Yardbirds more than Led Zeppelin, but I do think that the Yardbirds are more interesting than Led Zeppelin. And that's mostly why we're here, exploring the Blind Spots. I don't need to find an album that I love (though that happens sometimes too). I just need something to pique my interest in the story of music.

This isn't the first time we checked in with the Yardbirds, a band famous for the guitarists involved who would become much more famous afterward. With Having a Rave Up with the Yardbirds, we heard a lot of Eric Clapton. Roger the Engineer is mostly Jeff Beck. The blurb above mentions Jimmy Page, because he's an important part of this band's story too, but he's not on this album in its proper form. So I'm not claiming that Led Zeppelin ported the sound directly from this album. It's more like that they are just part of the same scene, and the Yardbirds were the genesis of the off-shoot of that scene. Does this mean that they are coming from garage rock and added blues back in? Or the other way around? I think an interesting theory to think about would be that Clapton come from blues first and Beck comes from garage rock first, and the juxtaposition of that is what made the Yardbirds so revelatory. And then maybe Jimmy Page felt that when he joined up and took it to the next gig, etc.

The balance is close to perfect on Roger the Engineer. Something like "He's Always There" hits the psych-adjacent garage rock tones that you hear all over Nuggets. Occasionally, it veers to far into the psych territory, like in "Hot House of Omagararshid," with its bubbly sounds, and the Gregorian chant nonsense in "Turn into Earth." But that evens out with something like "Over, Under, Sideways, Down," which is probably the song you're gonna recognize if you listen to this album. And for good reason, it's a badass tune. And "What Do You Want" feels like an electrified, hippie-fied Muddy Waters song.

None of this is revelatory if you're listening in a vacuum. It's all the kind of stuff you've heard before. But that's why we place it in its proper spot in history. It becomes revelatory when you understand how music exploded from this point. The Yardbirds were a detonator. Not the detonator, but one of them, and an interesting one, one worth checking out. I know that you can find shit that sounds like this in a lot of other places. I think the reason I'm drawn to the Yardbirds specifically is because of the Jimmy Page and Led Zeppelin piece. Zep is a band very near and dear to my heart, so it's a lot easier to understand how the Yardbirds could be the "proto-" version of that band because of how important they are to me. If I was enamored with Cream, I'd be saying the same thing. If you're gonna show me a band that greatly inspired, I dunno, fucking Deep Purple or something, then I'd be far less interested.

I think that's okay, to know where you came from, so you can know where something else came from too. It's all subjective anyhow.

A Year of Blind Spots: Ghost in the Machine

Joe is working through a list of albums that he considers "blind spots," i.e. albums that he's never heard but feels like he should.

The first thing you should know is that the two-part Season 4 premiere of Degrassi: The Next Generation is called "Ghost in the Machine," and it is named after this album (which is itself named after a philosophical idea credited to British philosopher Gilbert Ryle, but the Degrassi episode-naming standard was that each title was named after '80s music, so we know that D:TNG is referring to the Police, not philosophy). Back in Season 2, Paige Michalchuk was raped by a college dude named Dean Walton, and in this two-parter at the beginning of Season 4, the trial is finally called. Paige slowly realizes that the justice system is not going to save her, but she remains steadfast in her decision to press charges in the first place, since this will at least help other women avoid Dean Walton, now that the world knows he's a rapist. Oh, also, Joey asks his stepson Craig for money.

There are no connections, literal or thematic, between this Degrassi episode and the album it's named after, but I wanted to make sure you knew how we got here. The ghost of Paige Michalchuk hung heavy over my experiences with Ghost in the Machine, the Police's fourth and second-to-last album. I think if I were to attempt to explain why, then maybe I'd say a general statement like "you'd think this would be a serious affair, but it's really not" and apply that to both. We don't need to go down the Degrassi rabbit hole, of course, but for the Police, it's an easy explanation. By the time I came of age, Sting was adult contemporary music. Even the one Police album I had before this week, Synchronicity, isn't necessarily FUN. It takes itself seriously. Ghost in the Machine doesn't take itself seriously, and it's all the better for it.

Like, I thought that was part of the joke in The Office, wasn't it? Kevin was the drummer in a Police cover band, and I thought one of the layers of that joke was that the Police played serious music but Kevin in all his naïveté was attempting to turn that music into party music (and the mediocre results in this regard would lead to another layer of the joke, when the dumb-dumb fiancé of Pam Beesly books them for their wedding without consulting his soon-to-be wife). But no, Ghost in the Machine reveals—to me, anyway, since I'm the real dumb-dumb here—that the Police actually did make fun party music. (Unlike Degrassi: The Next Generation, The Office sucks shit, and I would never recommend anyone watch it, but it's relevant here, so I held my nose and mentioned it anyway.)

The big highlights for me are the one-two punch of "Too Much Information" into "Re-Humanize Yourself," both of which feature the saxophone. I think I read that guitarist Andy Summers was a little pissed because it felt like he and Stewart Copeland were the backing band to a pop star, and the supplemental saxophone was named as a culprit. I understand that, and who am I to say, because I am not familiar with the first three albums in the Police's discography beyond the singles. Maybe the "fun" part of the Police, or at least the fun part as I experience it here, was only a temporary blip, and I'm just focusing on that blip right now, and getting the wrong impression. Does it matter? I'm having a fucking blast. I love this album.

The one you all know, "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic," is instructive on how I feel about the album as a whole. Every time I hear the intro and opening verse of this song, I think, "this song is going to suck, isn't it?" And then every time that chorus hits, I'm like, "Ah shit, this is fucking GREAT, one of their best songs." It gets me every time. It's because I'm a man who fucks with preconceived notions, and looks out for things that confirm or deny those notions. I started listening to Ghost in the Machine thinking that it wasn't going to be good, that it was gonna sound like the Sting that I hear on the radio, but then I actually listen to the whole thing, and I'm just blown away.

I guess I was also always a little skeptical of the "reggae rock" genre that is typically applied to this band. Mostly because I didn't really hear any reggae within the code of the hit songs that I'm familiar with, and I was a little weary of hearing what skeletons these extremely white boys had hiding in their closet of deep cuts. Crisis averted—it's more style than substance, with the style basically being: cool as fuck. I definitely hear some reggae flavor in the groove of "Spirits in the Material World," and it is so fucking badass. I always assumed Stewart Copeland was a well-meaning nerd, but he's looks like the coolest person in the world when he locks into that groove at the chorus (I'm talking about the video, I should clarify—my iPod is still in the shop, I'm still wearing out YouTube playlists.)

Even when things do get a little serious, like "Invisible Sun" or some of "Ωmegaman," it never goes off a cliff into the turgid. Things are kept lively. And those are the exceptions. "Invisible Sun" moves right into "Hungry for You," which is like strict '80s new wave pop, and then "Demolition Man," which is closer to the Specials than anything Sting would ever do later in life. Even the last song, "Darkness," which isn't necessarily a party, can be chalked up to it being written by the drummer. Very cool they let him take the final slot (speaking as a drummer), but more importantly it's just cool how well the Police balance the profane and the profound on here.

This is a great example of why Year of Blind Spots is functioning in this specific way in 2026. All 50 albums are Blind Spots from artists that I'm already familiar with (and have written about on the blog, mostly but not always in this very column). I'm trying it because all these great bands are out there with unplumbed depths that I just never fucking knew about. I'm coming in here ready to roll my eyes at the Police, and instead I'm finding one of the best albums I've heard this year for this column. If you are looking for something cool and interesting and upbeat and are willing to try ANYTHING to erase the memory of the phrase "Sting and Shaggy," then start here. Or maybe watch Degrassi. Either one.

A Year of Blind Spots: Definitely Maybe

Joe is working through a list of albums that he considers "blind spots," i.e. albums that he's never heard but feels like he should.

1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die:

It is all too easy to forget quite how barren the musical landscape in the UK was in 1994. Britpop was yet to fully blossom, and grunge had died with Kurt Cobain. It took five of the most ordinary, working-class lads to reignite the scene, and redefine the musical landscape.

Oasis never really had an infancy. Spewed from the streets of Manchester, they seemed already fully formed. Definitely Maybe remains their most coherent, exciting, and fresh album to date. The album cover betrayed their influences—from George Best, to Burt Bacharach, to carafes of red wine (actually blackcurrant juice). Football, music, and booze. A band of the people.

And the people loved them back. There was no pretension in their often thinly veiled reworkings of Beatles tunes. "Rock 'n' Roll Star" sets the agenda from the off, a hedonistic anthem par excellence; the exhilarating "Cigarettes and Alcohol," which references T-Rex's "Get It On," provides another. "Shakermaker," itself a New Seekers rip-off, is all the more vivid for such brazen borrowing. "Live Forever" is as classic-sounding a single as ever flowed from the pen of chief songwriter Noel Gallagher. That all five members of Oasis would actually go on to become (briefly) Nineties personifications of the true rock 'n' roll spirit makes listening to the album today much more satisfying. Even the acoustic simplicity of the closer, which famously determined the supposed audience's music as "Sheeee-ite," had a bite they rarely revisited.

Oasis are like a Sherman tank in the music industry. Reliable, often devastating, and something you most definitely do not want to argue with.

Joe:

It's a well known fact—I'm joking, this is all just in my head, but still—that I am, at best, agnostic on the Britpop music of the '90s. The only other example in this column over the past six years (by design, because I don't really consider Britpop to be a Blind Spot I desire to make less blind), the Verve's Urban Hymns, had the big hit, and then a bunch of filler. Oasis is obviously the prime example in this genre, though. I checked out (What's the Story) Morning Glory? before "blind spots" were a thing, but I've always been ambivalent on that one too. I don't get the hype.

Look, the three big songs are good. But I'm reaching the point in my old age that I get sincerely worn out from these sort of generation tentpoles being overplayed in the general populace. I'm not saying that "Champagne Supernova" couldn't hit hard in the proper context, but 99 times out of 100, I'm rolling my eyes. It's actually a pretty similar situation to the music of the Notorious B.I.G., now that I think about it. Music made for one audience, and the co-opted by a younger audience as a sort of artless aesthetic ritual. Think seventeen-year-old white women singing along to it at a party after they heard it on six or seven TikToks over the past few months. Not to throw that demographic under the bus or anything. The same shit happened with mid-'00s indie rock, how it started out as something cool and eventually became closely associated with Urban Outfitters.

So if I'm listening to an album with that song and "Don't Look Back in Anger" and, most prominently, "Wonderwall," then those songs are going to weigh the album down instead of lift them up. I'm tired, I'm so fucking tired of songs that have hit a global wavelength like that. All this to say that Definitely Maybe is my fucking shit! This is really good! And you know why? I didn't recognize any of the songs. Thank fucking god.

It's just really refreshing to hear Oasis as the way they've always been described: young hooligans casually changing the course of British rock 'n' roll. They can't be like that after their second album, the fame becomes too much of an albatross (much like the Jersey Shore cast after Season 1, Oasis could only be themselves before the point when they started playing characters based on themselves). On this first album, everything is so pure. Just a couple ugly British idiots making fun rock songs.

I never understood the Beatles comparison until I listened to this album either. Obviously there are still key differences even here, but this was the first time I understood even a hint of connection, beyond the accents. Like, I can see how you get from Beatles to Oasis, this debut album was just a crucial missing link for my understanding in that. I do find it interesting how 1001 Albums frames the comparisons to other bands, basically accusing Oasis of stealing from all their sources? I can't say that I literally recognize and Beatles melodies or anything here, but I feel a Beatles-esque energy that Oasis manages to shake free by the time you get to Morning Glory.

One thought I had, just based on my experience with Oasis fans and what they say about this band versus my own limited experiences with them, is that maybe a lot of what I hear is based on what is happening in Definitely Maybe? How they are cool and how they were so fucking casual. Nothing about the album after this is casual, but this one certainly feels that way. Definitely Maybe feels loose and fun. Don't wanna overstate the Beatles thing—this definitely rocks harder than anything McCartney or Lennon could put together. But even when there's a hard edge, it feels like it's done in a winking way. Does the band regain this ability post-Morning Glory? I don't know if I have the stamina to get there. Maybe we'll table this question until RC deigns to answer it for us with an Oasis pick.

I also think it's extremely funny to read the 1001 Albums blurb 20 years after it was published, because a lot has happened with Oasis since then. Well, there was the absence of Oasis for a long time, because the Gallagher brothers were fighting. Then there was a much-publicized reunion tour, which feels like a pretty explicit attempt at making more money (they have been clear there'll be no new music, for example). This is partially my Britpop agnosticism talking, but, haha, very funny to see Oasis described as "reliable," when in my mind they are clearly anything but.

Though I'm not here to judge the scope of Oasis' career, I'm simply here to chat about their first album. And from the skeptical position I'm sitting in, I'd say that Oasis nailed it the first time, and never did anything better than this.

A Year of Blind Spots: Music of My Mind

Joe is working through a list of albums that he considers "blind spots," i.e. albums that he's never heard but feels like he should.

Stevie Wonder is the fucking man. Most of the time, I only like-not-love his music, but I respect the motherfucking craft. He's kinda corny, but that's what happens when you've been working since you were twelve, you're insanely talented, you smile all the time, and you can't use your eyes. No one is coming to Stevie Wonder because he's cool. You're coming for the hooks, and for the positive energy. It's fun when you give into it. I wonder what it felt like to hear Stevie contemporaneously. Was he also considered kinda corny? Maybe not as much. He was probably on par with... Justin Bieber or something. No one actually thinks that dude is cool either, but he's popular as fuck, and he's making catchy music. These guys are just out there, growing up in the music industry, living entire lives through song, using the songcraft as a way to exist, which ends up sounding corny, but you respect it anyway.

The interesting thing about Stevie Wonder's music, due to working so goddamn long from such an early age, is that you can compartmentalize. I knew all his hits basically they are culturally ubiquitous, but was still surprised to see a young Stevie on that Motown compilation that I played at so many parties back in the day. It felt like two different careers, somehow. You had "Signed, Sealed, Delivered," and then centuries later you had "Sir Duke." It's good to listen to Music of My Mind, because it bridges the gap in my mind.

It also literally bridges the gap for Wonder, because this was the first album on which he had full creative control. I like knowing this. It reminds me of the Blind Spot a few years ago—Headquarters by the Monkees. That situation was a little different, since the Monkees had to forcibly seize control of their own destinies by making the jump from "fake band" to "real band," whereas Stevie Wonder was no one's idea of a joke. It was just a matter of moving from a pseudo "hit factory" songwriting collective type thing with Motown toward Wonder having control of his art and creating it from his own image, as opposed to having to work with equal collaborators.

What you hear in Music of My Mind is... well, it's what you'd expect from a Stevie Wonder album. But the important part is right there in the title! This is his music, from his mind! There's something comforting about hearing the music exactly as Wonder wants you to hear it. There are the ballads, the goofy harmonica thing, a really great trombone solo, some excellent Stevie Wonder wailing, and also, a bunch of Moog synthesizers. This dates the music, for sure, but I kinda like it. It reminds me of Pink Floyd sometimes, in a weird way. Why is that? What song specifically? I don't even have one spare moment to go back and check, but I think it's the back half of "Shine On You Crazy Diamond"?

I'm told a couple of these songs ended up on that weird-ass episode of Atlanta in which what's his name buys a piano from Donald Glover in six inches of prosthetics? You remember that one? I recall that episode being about a Michael Jackson type who was fucked up from a lifetime of abuse in the music industry. I wonder if Music of My Mind was chosen on purpose as an ironic juxtaposition. Here are songs from a man who is completely free, soundtracking a fictional character who is completely imprisoned. Even if the songs were just chosen because they are fun, then they fit. "Evil" is a fun song! Very corny, very Stevie.

A Year of Blind Spots: Autobahn

Joe is working through a list of albums that he considers "blind spots," i.e. albums that he's never heard but feels like he should.

1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die:

Though it is their fourth album, Autobahn is widely considered to be the true beginning of Kraftwerk. Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider had met in 1968 and formed Kraftwerk and their experimental electronic Kling Klang Studio in early 1970.

After years of playing the university, club, and art gallery circuit, where they developed their music, Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider composed and recorded the symphonic synthesizer track "Autobahn" together with poet and painter Emil Shult. Inspired by the long road journeys on the German motorway system, the title track marked the band's definitive separation from their "Krautrock" peers.

On Autobahn, joined by new percussionists Wolfgang Flür and Karl Bartos, Hütter and Schneider crystalized the pristine sound and deadpan four-man image that would define Kraftwerk. The album contains sublime pieces of wordless and ambient "Electronic-Volks-Musik" in the tracks "Mitternacht," "Morgenspaziergang," and "Kometenmelodie," but it was the symphonic title track that became symbolic of the international breakthrough of Kraftwerk.

A chart success on both sides of the Atlantic, the album became a landmark in avant-garde pop minimalism. As Ralf Hütter commented in 2003: "In Autobahn, we put car sounds, horns, basic melodies, and tuning motors. Adjusting the suspension and tyre pressure, rolling on the asphalt, that gliding sound when the wheels go onto those painted stripes. It's sound poetry, and also very dynamic."

Autobahn is cinema for the ears.

Joe:

Here we are at our second sojourn with Kraftwerk, and it's immediately clear that this is a matter of discography chronology. I spent a lot of time discussing Trans-Europe Express as "pioneering," and now listen to Autobahn, which came out three years earlier. If I'm not appreciating Autobahn as much, then it's simply a matter of it coming out earlier, and then the band having a few years to define their sound and sharpen it. It's okay to say that Autobahn is instrumental in shaping progressive electronic music while also sounding a little weak compared to what comes afterward. It can be both. It probably should be both, since this blog column cherry-picks albums from throughout the long story of famous bands, and so of course you're going to be telling multiple stories at once. Kraftwerk were revelatory and yet they obviously did not arrive fully formed.

So yeah, I didn't like this one as much. I thought it was neat, and I appreciated what is said about this being a new sound and about Kraftwerk breaking away from their peers with this new sound, etc., but I just didn't find the hooks to be compelling enough for me to enjoy it fully. "Kometenmelodie 2" is the one that probably sounds the best, or has the brightest melody or something, I dunno. But it doesn't have any vocals and it feels slight, being tucked into the back half of that album after that beastly title track.

Let's talk about "Autobahn" then. It's 22 minutes long, which means its length comprises more than half of the album total. It is unavoidably the centerpiece, being that long and right at the beginning and the title track to boot. The song is thus too dense to do anything but pull focus from the rest of the album. The other four songs amount to nothing. They are low-key, ambient, wordless, and occasionally driftless. They are toss-offs that create an illusion that this is a full album, as opposed to a one-song EP with bonus tracks. I don't like it. I think that this album would be better served making its centerpiece Side 2, and the final song.

None of this would matter if "Autobahn" was flawless. It unfortunately has flaws. At 22 minutes, it doesn't do nearly enough to maintain one's attention. It changes it flow a few times, but mostly keeps coming back to the monotone chorus of "fun fun fun at the Autobahn." Obviously, it gets stuck in your head, but not in a pleasurable way. I appreciate—as I have often in these past few years, through an intense effort to view art in a fresh way—the repetition of this song. I get that it's supposed to emulate the long, sometimes droll drives on the German freeway (much in the same way that the repetition on Trans-Europe Express emulated a train traveling down a track). That it's on purpose makes it art, but that the boredom is on purpose does not make it very fun.

I'm just speculating as to why I thought this album was just okay and the last album I listened to was a lot of fun. My hypothesis remains that it's just an earlier album, and that Kraftwerk would eventually get a beefier, stranger, and catchier sound. For now, it was enough to just do something different. They did that with Autobahn. Different is good, even if the actual results vary. I would be more inclined next time to see what they did after Trans-Europe Express, to see if they kept improving, or got even weirder, or what. Autobahn stands as an important piece of the puzzle, even though I can't sincerely recommend it.