#57 Mr Tambourine Man by The Byrds

The Byrds. I don’t understand the reason for the misspelling of this name. I can only guess it is a reference to the similar occurrence in The Beatles. Either way this has always annoyed me and I don’t entirely know why. Annoying name or not their influence has already been felt on this list despite Mr. Tambourine Man actually being their debut release. Hurrah! Who did they influence I hear you/no one ask? None other than the original Tambourine Man himself, Mr. Bob Dylan. So needless to say this band are a bit of a big deal.

When it comes to what The Byrds sounds like you can easily see that they are heavily influenced by The Beatles, and not in the annoying over the top way like Oasis are. Also there are the close harmonies that dominate most of the songs, which are more of a resemblance to The Beach Boys. So here we have an album that draws itself from two of the great acts of the sixties and feature covers from Bob Dylan, aside from the incredible alliterative possibilities this shapes up to be a good album.

On the whole it stands up as a pretty decent album, if a bit too heavy on the covers for my taste. Although, with the majority of covers, they actually manage to twist everything round so that it sounds like they are the original writers. To do this demonstrate greatness in a band to be creative and make the best of it and as such should be applauded. This tactic, however, doesn‘t really work on the . This, however, doesn’t work on the first and last tracks, Mr. Tambourine Man and We’ll Meet Again respectively, since the original versions resonate so much in the public consciousness that you can not help but think on the original versions. It may sound controversial but I actually prefer the Bob Dylan version of Mr. Tambourine Man, this isn’t detracting from The Byrds who do an amazing album highlight-version but I found myself missing the quirky vocals of Dylan.

The rest of the album just makes you feel as if you are floating on some puffy sixties Technicolor cloud. The electric guitars and harmonies on songs like The Bells of Rhymney and I Knew I’d Want You makes me wish that they had made a brief jaunt into lullabies as it’s so loose and relaxing that I found myself sitting in some lucid dreamlike state where I knew I was typing at a laptop but somehow every action seemed to be coloured different. Before you ask, no I don’t do drugs. I don’t even drink coffee. But when you have earphones in and all you can here is are these songs you can so easily lose yourself in it.

This can not be said of my least favourite track Don’t Doubt Yourself, Babe which I personally just found annoying and out of place here. There is one thing creating these dreamlike songs that allow them to transport the listener but this is way too hippy for my tastes. The lyrics and sentiment are something you would expect a 16 year old to concoct in his bedroom addressing a depressive girl he knows in his year, I know as I was that 16 year old boy. You would hope that The Byrds or the record company would have had the wherewithal to leave it out. The same applies to We’ll Meet Again. So all in all a very disappointingly trite ending to an otherwise great and original album.

Despite the final two tracks this is actually an amazing album, that deserves this high rating. As you listen to it you can here the beginnings of songs that’ll later be sung by R.E.M., Beck and The White Stripes. That, in my opinion, is never a bad thing.

8.5/10

Fab Four:
Mr Tambourine Man
I’ll Feel A Whole Lot Better
The Bells of Rhymney
I Knew I’d Want You

#56 Bert Jansch by Bert Jansch

The first review that you write after a longish break is always the hardest to do. This sentiment may sound a tad familiar since I wrote something similar at the beginning of my review of I’ve Got A Tiger By The Tail but I again have had a week off. This time it has been because of a family holiday to New York City where it isn’t really feasible for me to be writing reviews, especially since I didn’t bring my laptop. Also we did so much walking that my lower back and right knee ache terribly. What? I know I’m 19 and shouldn’t be having such aches and pains.

Since I started off this post with a tangent about my holiday I might as well start the actual review with another one. My favourite album of 2008 was She & Him’s Volume One. It was through this that I discovered M. Ward (the him in She & Him) whose albums I have grown to love, especially Hold Time and Transfiguration of Vincent. Why bring this up? Why else, but to point out the sheer influence that I can spot feeding from Bert Jansch after listening to this album.

From the fact that I made a reference to my top album of last year it should be pretty clear that I enjoyed this album, which I did. It has been too long since I listened to an album that features such beautifully complex guitar work. To find this you really need look further than Smokey River, a three minute guitar instrumental that is bloody impressive. Also there is the album closer Angie which also demonstrates his amazing guitar-playing abilities without sounding overtly cocky or avant-garde.

In a way Bert Jansch reminds me of a Devandra Banhart that can sing in tune (this may be a at unfair towards Mr. Banhart since my only exposure to him is via Rejoicing In The Hands). This is a very apt comparison as these two share a lot when it comes to the lyrical content and the complex use of the guitar, only difference being the 40 years that separates both of their entries on the 1001 list.

That is the beauty of Bert Jansch. This is one of those albums where the recording and the production has truly stood up to the test of time. Maybe this is due to the minimal production values, or the fact that this is an album that Bob Dylan could have made if his singing voice decided not to prance around behind the fine line between quirky and annoying. True that this is my shortest review for a while, and for that I apologise, but try to review a bluesy-folk album while you are suffering from jetlag. I promise to do a better one next time, but only if you listen to this album. Believe me it is worthy of the attention and rating bestowed on it.

9.0/10 Fab Four:
Stolling Down The Highway
Smokey River
Running From Home
Angie

#55 Rubber Soul by The Beatles

An interesting thing about reviewing an artist multiple times is that you begin to take on the same role as an auntie. Every now and then you get a glimpse of this artist at irregular intervals, of about a year or so, and every time that you see them you begin to notice the changes that they have gone through. For some artists, such as Bob Dylan, this process has been gradual for the first album of his was already exactly what I expected of him, this was not the case for The Beatles. While I did enjoy With The Beatles there was a sense of playing it safe and a lot of the material was derivative. This changed in A Hard Day’s Night where there really was a profound shift in the music that they were making. I guess that what I am trying to say here is that in developmental terms it appears that The Beatles are similar to a border collie where Rubber Soul is their puberty.

Rubber Soul is the first time that over the course of a whole album you can identify it as purely a Beatles album. This was not made to gain a foothold like With The Beatles as they had gained the world by storm with their previous releases. This wasn’t a purely commercial venture like A Hard Day’s Night as there was no film to accompany. What we have here ladies and gentlemen is the true creative emancipation of the Beatles, like I mentioned in my last review of their material. This is, as I previously coined, puberty for The Beatles as finally they resemble the act that we all know they will turn into.

Also as I go along the ratio of songs I know to total songs on the album keep increasing. This is always a good thing as in the end for a song to be still doing the founds over forty years later they must have been doing something right. So when this album began with Drive My Car which is such an irritable scrap of pop that you really do find yourself drawn into the world of distorted images and contemporarily ground-breaking music.

On the whole this is a very good album, wow I appear to be on a bit of a streak here, and it is very well put together. Little treats like the sitars in Norwegian Wood and the dark stalker-like song Run For Your Life are dotted so liberally that you almost brush over the two lesser tracks of the bundle, Michelle and Wait. But those tracks are there, and although this is a Beatles album I have to be as unforgiving as I was to A Christmas Gift For You.

While there are a multitude of people at my age, and younger, who still look down their noses at The Beatles and albums such as Rubber Soul as being old and therefore being of no relevance to their life. You know who I mean, the people that sit in their bedrooms pawing over posters of The Jonas Brothers or The Arctic Monkeys declaring that they know better. Well, after listening to Rubber Soul the final remnants of my Beatles-related demons have been washed away and I can actually recognise them for what they were. A pioneering act who themselves had to evolve, and take a few wrong turns in songs like Wait, before they made their magnum opus.

While it is true that in many ways The Beatles had it easier, as nowadays there is such a melee of artists that you do need to make something new, this act never became complacent in their towering popularity and strived so that they never really wore the same guise twice. As such I await their next album, Revolver, with baited breath.

8.5/10

Fab Four:
Drive My Car
Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)
I’m Looking Through You
Run For Your Life

#54 Live At The Regal by B.B. King

Never have I had to listen to an album so much before I started writing a review. This isn’t me putting an early slight on B.B. King’s Live At The Regal but just a comment on how recently I have been doing all my reviews after midnight and this time I just had to say to myself ‘no this is stupid, just do it tomorrow morning’. So that is what I did, but there were first some other tasks that needed performing like washing up and having the remains of last night’s Chinese take away for breakfast. But at least I have listened to this album enough to have an opinion and an awake opinion at that.

Blues is a genre that has begun to be featured on this list with increasing frequency but because of the way that it is arranged it is becoming hard to figure out who in this genre influenced another. I say this because B.B. King is one of those names that I actually knew previously to be a big name in the blues but has an album 4-5 years after Muddy Waters, another name that is associated with the same genre. So I guess I need to see how these two albums match up as I am finding myself with a case of writer’s block here.

Well, I like them both. That’s a good start. With B.B. King there are some amazingly masterful solos on his electric guitar with the wailing reverberating around the venue, yes it’s a live album. The use of these electric instruments is definitely a new occurrence on the list, with the first album really showcasing them being Bringing It All Back Home. As an artist it really does need to be pointed out that B.B. King has the whole package, he has a powerful voice, can play the guitar like a virtuoso, can write his own material and has such charisma that you can hear him whip the audience into some sort of frenzy. This is actually the first time since Sarah Vaughn’s At Mister Kelly’s where I found myself looking forward to the audience interactions as what has been captured on vinyl/CD/mp3 must inevitably lack some of the effect it would have live, so it’s perfectly understandable how he got everyone to scream his name.

Another major plus point has to be directed at the length of this album. Like with yesterday’s review for A Love Supreme the length is so perfect that you can actually give this album the time to hear from start to end multiple times. The songs are short and punchy so it doesn’t venture into dullness and punctuated with falsetto on tracks like Worry, Worry, something I can always appreciate. So with such a glittering review of this album what is the catch? Well there really isn’t one. This is without a doubt the best blues album that I have probably ever heard. Maybe an album will arrive in my lap that’ll make me say otherwise, it is not beyond the realms of possibility, but for now it has that ‘honour’.

So that makes this a best of the genre album and yet it doesn’t get a perfect rating from me like Sam Cooke, Dusty Springfield and Jerry Lee Lewis have. The reason for this is probably a bit of a cop-out but in the end a blues album is not one that I would automatically place high on a list of preference. This is still an amazing album and, alongside Muddy Waters, has really changed my opinion on how good the blues can be which is in itself rather impressive.

So, if you are feeling adventurous or like the blues you would be a fool to give this a miss.

8.5/10

Fab Four:
Everyday I Have The Blues
Sweet Little Angel
How Blue Can You Get
Worry, Worry

#53 A Love Supreme by John Coltrane

Don’t get me wrong here when I say this as I love Spotify to pieces, without it this project would have never come to fruition, but sometimes I bloody hate it. This isn’t a slight against the annoyingly out of place adverts for Lethal Bizzle as I listen to Coltrane or the amateurism that are the voice-mail advocates. Those are old complaints and there is a new one, specific to John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. If you feel the need to listen to this album after my review here is a prior warning: Spotify have two different albums listed under the same title. This is something that is worth noting as it took a good 6 minutes of listening for me to work out this wasn’t the right album. So let that be a lesson to everyone, no chickens escape from Tweedy’s farm always check the covers before you start an album on Spotify.

One thing that only just dawned on me is that this is the first jazz album that I have reviewed for a while. In fact the last one, if I recall correctly, was the abomination that was Charles Mingus’s The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. Wow, there is little wonder why I actually approached this album with as much trepidation as I did. Either way, it is time to put my jazz hat back on and utilise the rules of jazz appreciation as stipulated in my earlier review for Jimmy Smith’s Back at the Chicken Shack.

John Coltrane is one of the few names in jazz that I had actually heard of, although it’s a sad fact that this is now my jazz knowledge completely used up and anyone I now encounter will be greeted with a resounding ‘who the hell are you?’. Either way, it is nice to know that my knowledge of him has been rewarded with a thoroughly good jazz album. Coltrane, unlike Mingus, knows how to balance the complexity of a piece so that it’s not completely overwhelming whilst not making it too sparse so as to induce a coma. He wants to create a mood and he will find the perfect combination of instruments to make this a reality. This is the truest on Psalm, the closer and my favourite track on the album, is backed with a smattering of cymbals and ends on the rolling of some great drum.

A lot of these classic jazz albums tend to have some running theme, or a message that they are trying to send such as Duke Elliington tried to in Black and Tan Fantasy. This is something I only because a teacher of mine tried to explain this to me a few years back in a music appreciation class where he actually sat on the floor and mimicked someone rowing a boat. Do I remember why? No. Was it funny? Kinda, maybe a better word to describe is absurd. This is something that I got from this album, both from the musical content and the names of the tracks. After all they all have some pretty big names such as Acknowledgement, Resolution, Pursuance and Psalm so there is probably some hidden meaning linked in with the title. I didn’t look it up as I preferred to make my own interpretations but I got something possibly spiritual and an attempt to explain the journey someone, maybe Coltrane, took as a means to truly find themselves. Whether this is true or not, it is my interpretation.

The sheer fact that an instrumental jazz album was able to reach out to me is a very new thing for me, not even Kind of Blue did that. The arrangements are brilliant and at just over half an hour this is the perfect length for this genre of album so that it never actually feels stale and that 5 play-throughs later you are still enjoying the subtle nuances that jazz really is all about. Definitely an album for the iPod.

8.5/10

Fab Four:

...it’s four tracks long and only just over half an hour. You know the drill

#52 Today! by The Beach Boys

Previously on this blog, in a review of A Date With The Everly Brothers if I recall correctly, my opinion on close harmony male singing was expressed as one of dislike. However, as I was writing that review I had completely forgotten about The Beach Boys. So for now that opinion is now retracted seeing the new parameters involved. This is a band who I have previously defended to the hilt in a random drunken argument in a Micklegate chip shop as one of the big influences to come out of the sixties, alongside The Beatles and (if this argument occurred now) The Rolling Stones. It was one of those standard arguments, the guy said that all this music was terrible, then I chimed in saying how Queen, his favourite band, wouldn’t have made the music that they made. This of course a bit of aggravation on his part but it’s a truism that I maintain to this day.

I will be the first to admit that for my third term in university I had a bit of a love affair with Pet Sounds and yet I never really gave any of their albums a proper go. Thus I commenced my listening to Today! with complete gusto and the pay-off was almost immediate as I leapt into the happy summer half of the album that sets your soul alight. What The Beach Boys knew how to do very well was how to use harmony for the ultimate emotional expression. It doesn’t matter whether it is upbeat or a ballad they still know how to use their collective voices to just inspire that immediate connection that a lot of artists somehow miss out on.

The highlight of the upbeat first half is Help Me, Ronda and is a perfect example of when I say that Today! is the first album that makes me really feel like I am actually in the sixties. This is very apparent on the track Don’t Hurt My Little Sister through the use of the lyrics “you know she digs you and thinks you’re a real groovy guy”. So sixties that it makes me want to watch re-runs of The Banana Splits, while obviously whizzing through the cartoons. Then there is the amazing Dance, Dance, Dance which is a complete throwback to their first hit single Surfin’ USA and not in a bad way. Only The Beach Boys could succeed here in making you not feel just happy but also feeling rather groovy.

Then we have the second ballad filled half, a half that I usually dread, but somehow they pull it off. In all of these you can see the seeds that have been sown for the forthcoming God Only Knows, which will rear it’s head soon. It is also here that I heard a very clear influence here on the early works of Of Montreal (a band I love who sadly aren’t on this). My favourite of the ballads is without-a-doubt She Knows Me Too Well, and not just because it reminds me of Of Montreal’s Eros’ Entropic Tundra. This is a bit besides the point, sorry, but I do love trying to find the routes that musical evolution has taken.

Don’t get me wrong this isn’t Pet Sounds but frankly what really is anything like Pet Sounds? Today! serves as a brilliant introduction as to what The Beach Boys were, musical pioneers. The lush production that you see on here and on all their albums are unlike anything I have heard up till now on this list and these techniques will be used ad nausea for now it is seen as the norm. Brian Wilson is a genius and this album is a testament to that.

9.0/10

Fab Four:
Don’t Hurt My Little Sister
Help Me, Ronda
Dance, Dance, Dance
She Knows Me Too Well

#51 Otis Blue by Otis Redding

In my quest to complete the 1001 challenge it was always likely that I would be confronted with artists who’s life was cut short in some tragic circumstances. Sam Cooke, Janis Joplin, Ian Curtis and Mama Cass are the first names on this list that immediately spring to mind. This is also a review introduction I could have applied to The ‘Chirping’ Crickets being the only Buddy Holly album to be featured on this list. However, I thought it more apt and a little less clichéd to do it here after I discovered the tragic fate that befell Otis Redding.

For some unknown reason I actually had it in my head that he was one of those musicians who was still alive, or at least died in the last decade, so you can appreciate my shock when I discovered that he died at the tender age of 26 about two years after Otis Blue was released. Much like Buddy Holly, who I previously mentioned, Otis Redding too died in a plane crash. A bit of a downer really when you are just getting over a bug that makes you throw up. So, in between adverts extolling the virtues of the latest release by Colbie Caillat, I tried to give this album the listen that I believed it warranted.

However, there was one problem with this approach (and no this isn’t the fact that the album is only available in mono). Otis Blue just never able to envelope me in it’s velvety world of soul. In all three attempts to listen to this album I got distracted by different things. The first attempt was the theme song to ’The Tudors’ which my mum was watching in the other room, the second by the sound of the torrential rain outside. By the third attempt I had had enough and forced myself to sit down and really listen to this. Sadly though this still left me cold.

Although there is no denying that Otis Redding had talent. This album is indeed a testament to this and in fact makes me wish that there was a live album of his on this list rather than this studio album. In this era I am not doubting that these live albums would be in short supply. In this way this is a bit annoying as in the entire album I can feel this shimmer that is constantly bubbling that makes me think that wills me onwards to try more of his back catalogue, but it somehow just remains there below the surface and never truly reveals itself. I guess this shows how far I have come from condemning the first live album I encountered on this list as being absolute refuse, but it serves a point. So, why is this album on here?

Aside from the multitude of 5-star reviews and Top 100 Albums Ever placements this has received there must be some reason. To represent a talent lost tragically soon? Maybe. But I think more likely is the sheer influence that this sound has had on music today. In fact if you listen to I’ve Been Loving You For Too Long you can hear in the nuances of his voice and in the arrangement that there is something different going on here. This is resplendent throughout the album and really culminates in the cover of Satisfaction (not as good as the original, but still very good). So in the end, at least in my opinion, this has owned a placement for being an album placed in the stages of music’s evolution rather than sheer merit.

Many music critics, if they would give the blog of a 19 year old guy the time of day, would happily point out how wrong I was in my judgement, or how it isn’t right to let personal preference interfere in the rating of an album with me instead weighing it up by musical merit. For me though the point is to give an opinion based on my musical knowledge and preference which this doesn’t really fit in. Instead this to me is an album where greatness is missed and it’s sad because where there should be gold there is but mediocrity.

4.5/10

Fab Four:
A Change Is Gonna Come
I’ve Been Loving You Too Long
Wonderful World
Satisfaction (I Don’t Get No)