#42 - Muddy Waters' "At Newport" (1960)

'Twas the daytime in Newport, the afternoon show
when a Delta-born bluesman stood rarin' to go.
The folkies had flocked from far and from near
in hopes he'd play blues they'd all come to hear.

The buttoned-down crowd nestled snug in their seats
(no visions of dancing to those big Chi-town beats)
and Muddy at the mic-stand, his band at his back,
broke full-throttle through with a sonic attack. 

They jived just like butterflies, they stung hard like bees,
"I Got My Brand On You" had 'em all weak in the knees.
But then "Hoochie Coochie Man" started up soon
and the crowd - to a man - could not help but swoon.

The sun and the heat likely both took their toll,
but neither deprived the poor crowd of its soul.
No, that was Muddy's, his prize fair and square.
He scalped 'em with sweetness, with grit, and with flare.

With his band, he was lethal, so poised and so tight,
having logged all those hours in the juke joints each night.
In rope-a-dope fashion, he reeled in the fish,
called out their songs like he was granting a wish:
"Now, 'Tiger,'
Now, 'Mojo,'
and now, 'Soon Forgotten.'"
Their "I Feel So Good" made "O.K." look rotten.
To the end of the song!
To the end of the set!
With "Mojo" once more
(as if you could forget!)

His harp, how it zig-zagged! His keyboards, how jazzy!
His drums brought out big guns, so thund'rous and spazzy!
His speech between songs was humble, polite,
bringing black southern charm to the young northern white.
The lyrics he slurred and motorboat-barked,
and the axe in his hands - so electric it sparked -
sent currents through him, from his brain to his belly.
Ladies shook when he sang, like a roll full of jelly.

With "Goodbye Newport Blues," he got up and went.
Believe it or not, a half hour was spent
on just nine little songs, of which none was a dud...
...and that is how Newport got baptized in Mud.

Grade: A 

#41 - Jimmy Reed's "Rockin' with Reed" (1959)

When it comes to the blues, "it all sounds the same" is a frequent refrain from the uninitiate.  Of course, epithets like this wear the guise of considered opinion, as if, after exhaustive research, one has concluded that there is water, water everywhere but not a drop one would deign to drink.  Jimmy Reed is especially susceptible to this type of critique, being such a populist purveyor of the blues.  Yes, you'll hear those familiar twelve-bar chord progressions, for the most part played slow and steady.  Reed is no virtuoso and never aims to "challenge" his listeners with experimental noodling or soaring solos.  But don't confuse his genial, unambitious style with lack of talent or vision.  What he seems to understand, maybe better than anyone, is that the foundational pattern of the blues was established not merely because of its simplicity, but rather its deep, abiding power.  In the right hands it becomes the sturdy skeletal framework upon which the musician may hang the sustaining stuff of life.  In Reed's hands, the way he adorns that skeleton becomes everything, which is what someone who thinks "it all sounds the same" will miss ten times out of ten.  The most serious charge I can lob at this album, is that its title constitutes false advertising.  "Rockin' with Reed" is the last track and it does, indeed, rock, but the rest of the songs here do everything but.  There's his loving desperation on "A String to Your Heart," his penitence (and incorrigibility) on "I Know It's a Sin," his smirking sense of humor on "Take Out Some Insurance," and his smooth cool on "The Moon is Rising."  The blues structure is limited and requires a kind of lyrical economy, so he wrings the most out of his lines when he throws in alliterative touches like "green grass grows" on "Down in Virginia."  In the same song, he flexes his vocal range, finishing off each verse with a low, smoldering tremolo that hits like a haymaker every time.  Blues like this teaches you to "see a world in a grain of sand," to love those tiny details, those little moments that make all the difference.  Grade: A-

#40 - Gillian Welch's "Revival" (1996)

One of the great moments in Malcolm Gladwell's less-than-great Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking involves the elaborate forgery of an ancient Greek statue, the authenticity of which was confirmed by several scientific tests and denied outright and immediately by three art historians.  The point Gladwell uses the anecdote to make is that oftentimes an expert's human hunch can trump the analyst's cold calculus.  The point I'd like to make with the story is that the reason the statue befuddled those who studied it was that the form was right, but not the essence.  Early Christian theologians made use of a similar distinction when they repurposed the Aristotelian taxonomy of matter to explain the mystery of transubstantiation.  They argued that the characteristics of a thing (looking, feeling, tasting like bread) are quite separate from that essential quality that makes it what it is (the body of Jesus).  All of this is my admittedly circuitous way of saying that Gillian Welch nearly had me fooled with the songs she wrote and performed on Revival.  They sound in so many ways just like the old-timey material of the 1920s and 30s with which she is so thoroughly engrossed.  The close harmonies, the mono recordings, the hard-luck tales of orphans, factory girls, moonshiners - if you didn't know better, you'd swear she had uncovered some dusty trunk of songs in Joe Bussard's basement.  It seemed like Welch had figured out a way to contact the spirits of another time and place.  And, to crib a line from Scooby-Doo, "she would've gotten away with it, too, if it hadn't been for this meddling listener."  Everything seemed first-rate and pitch perfect until the sixth track, "By the Mark."  I had been anticipating this song as it approached, hoping the title might be an allusion to Samuel Clemens.  In it she sings, "When I cross over / I will shout and sing / I will know my savior / by the mark where the nails have been."  Now, on the surface, this is the type of rustic gospel tune you might expect to hear from a Carter Family acolyte.  It's got that reward-in-heaven theme, that humble evocation of Jesus' bodily suffering on the cross.  You know, that good, ol'-fashioned blood of the lamb stuff.  The only problem is the concept.  As any holy-rollin', God-fearin', Bible-thumpin' Christian (or, in my case, 20-year veteran of Catholic schools) can tell you, it's highly unlikely that someone very familiar with the New Testament would say, "I will know my savior by the mark where the nails have been."  To do so is a little too like calling oneself a "doubting Thomas," the pejorative term that refers to the apostle who insisted on confirming the identity of the risen Christ by feeling his wounds.  This is also why you don't hear a lot of gospel songs that talk about "kissing Jesus," for fear of being associated with that most notorious of kiss-and-tellers:  Judas, the betrayer.  Am I being too picky?  Probably.  But I also think it's likely that Welch, who grew up in a secular household in New York and L.A., is more inspired by gospel music than she is by the religious feelings that produce it.  Of course, none of this is to suggest she meant to perpetrate fraud or pass off her songs as anything other than a sincere homage to the Appalachian folk that so moves her.  At Boston University I had the pleasure of working for, taking classes with, and attending lectures by the incandescently brilliant literary critic Christoper Ricks.  In a lecture on "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," much of which appears in his labor of love, Dylan's Vision of Sin, Ricks said there was a big difference between writing a political song and writing a song politically.  The former requires little skill or imagination.  Mention George W. Bush and you're halfway there.  The latter, however, implies an ability to effect a particular response in your audience by the manner in which you write the song itself.  I think the same goes for religious music, which is why "By the Mark" misses its mark.  Welch has mastered the form.  Now all she needs is the essence.  Grade: B+

#39 - Björk's "Debut" (1993)

björk  noun  \bē-'ork, byawrk\

1 : any of a variety of Icelandic songbirds celebrated for their distinctive tonal quality, yodel-like trills, ability to live in symbiosis with swans, and talent for mimicking human beings.  The björk sang at my windowsill, content mostly to observe "Human Behaviour," while occasionally imitating its mannerisms.  

2 : a liqueur distilled from refined Sugarcubes and treasured for its pleasantly intoxicating effects, which include mild hallucinations and an absolute freedom from stylistic inhibitions.  After downing a carafe of björk, I envisioned "Venus as a Boy" and became "Violently Happy."

3 : a clinical diagnostic term referring to a patient suffering from the rare psychological stresses associated with first being a child prodigy, going on to achieve consistent - yet unremarkable - success, and finally coming into one's own as a late-blooming Debutante.  By the time she was 29, many critics had written the björk off, wrongly assuming her best days were behind her.

Grade: B 

#38 - Guided By Voices' "Bee Thousand" (1994)

Crises in Non-Conformity, a Partial Timeline

1845 - Henry Thoreau, having lived at Walden less than a week, notices he has worn a path from his "door to the pond-side," and reflects, "how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves."

1975 - Writers for Lorne Michaels' Saturday Night Live, while attempting to create a show that subverts time-honored television standards & practices, come to find that the hardest thing to do when developing a skit that "breaks all the rules" is figuring out a way to end it.

1992 - Bob Dylan, ever the upstart, scorns modern recording technology and creates Good As I Been To You, an entire album of traditional folk song covers, in his garage.  Sometimes to move forward, you have to go back.

1994 - Guided By Voices releases Bee Thousand, a twenty-track album of hissy pop rock fragments, quite likely a necessary foil to the slick, bedizened production currently ruling FM radio.  Most bands who record in lo-fi do so for one of three reasons:

(1) it's all they can afford

(2) they enjoy the tinny, mashed-together sound

(3) they are being deliberately non-commercial

At one point or another in the career of Guided By Voices they subscribed to this scrappy aesthetic for all of these reasons.  The problem is that much of its effect derives from the way in which it purposefully alienates itself from its audience's expectations.  In other words, the novelty of a song that cuts out mid-lyric is entirely contingent on the belief that music should have recognizable structures with firmly delineated boundaries.  Likewise, by cultivating this contrarian perspective, you run the risk of substituting one kind of fundamentalist rigidity for another.  Once you don that rebel apparel, the mainstream garb becomes a bad fit and a worse look.  Ultimately, I think this album is a noble exercise in devil's advocacy, a gadfly to keep the music community honest.  There are funny lines and catchy hooks galore, even if they're embedded in texturally homogeneous songs that don't last long enough to imprint themselves on your memory.  I'm not sure if sticking to your indie principles is a goal worth continually sabotaging such promising ideas for, but GBV didn't ask me.  Grade: B-

#37 - Steve Earle's "Guitar Town" (1986)

I have a few questions.

Who

Who did Steve Earle think he was putting out a debut album this self-assured, sounding like a more rural Bruce Springsteen or a cooler John Mellencamp?  Who were the A&R geniuses over the years who decided this guy wasn't a marketable artist? 

What

What else does a body have to do to be successful besides write songs as insightful as "Goodbye's All We Got Left" and as pretty as "My Old Friend the Blues"?  What was going through the producer's mind when he included that tinkling synthesizer nonsense on the lullaby "Little Rock 'n' Roller," taking an acceptably sentimental song and killing it with cuteness?

Where

Where does that same producer get off neutering the best material, like "Fearless Heart," by keeping that solid backing band chained up on the porch?  Where do you suppose Crazy Heart drew inspiration for Jeff Bridges' character - other than Waylon Jennings - if not this rambling force of nature?

When

When exactly did the drugs change Earle's voice, helping the "nasal" part of his nasal twang win out over the rest? 

How

How can I believe in justice in a world where Steve Earle struggles in relative obscurity and Justin Bieber is on the cover of Vanity Fair?

Why

Why are you still reading this review when you could be listening to this album?  Grade: B+

#36 - Dr. John's "Dr. John's Gumbo" (1972)

Remind me again why the pianos and saxophones were made to surrender their seat at rock 'n roll's round table?  I know, I know.  In the 1960s, as amplification technology improved, most bands deep-sixed their keyboardists and horn sections thinking they might sound too retro.  "Electric guitars are the future," they thought, not realizing it was a self-fulfilling prophecy as they knocked down the pillars of rockabilly in the name of renovation.  What they didn't grasp was that the piano and the horns hadn't just added volume.  They added a robust, full-bodied wholeness to the mixture, the presence of which makes the entire ensemble sound richer.  Dr. John got his start as a musician in the 1950s and on Dr. John's Gumbo you can hear his memories of that era come alive.  To be sure, he had a psychedelic phase like everyone else in the late 60s.  But you wouldn't be able to tell that here.  For this album, he's largely jettisoned those influences, preferring instead to return to a classic rock 'n' roll sound by way of his favorite New Orleans r&b and jazz musicians like Huey "Piano" Smith and Professor Longhair.  This is joyful, Saturday night music, the type of tunes that draw customers into Bourbon Street bars.  Listening to the organ intro to "Big Chief," backed by that buoyant bass line and those shuffling drums, I thought, "Wow, someone should sample that!"  Then I realized someone already had as Lily Allen's "Knock 'Em Out" started playing in my head.  If you like "feel-good" music, I recommend Dr. John's Gumbo, with gusto.  It'll stick to your ribs.  Grade: B+

#35 - Cream's "Disraeli Gears" (1967)

Sense memory is a powerful thing.  Once you've associated a perfume with an old girlfriend, it's hard not to remember the relationship when you catch the scent of her brand while walking past a stranger in the mall.  Or try drinking ginger ale and seeing how long you can go before your mind conjures up images of staying home from school with a stomach bug, watching The Price Is Right.  Music is subject to the same phenomenon.  Whenever I hear Cream, I think back to being nine years old and seeing the commercial for Freedom Rock, a collection of songs from the '60s and '70s.  In the ad, which my neighborhood friends and I quoted ad infinitum, a couple of pre-fab hippies are lounging next to their VW Minibus.  The familiar opening strains of "Layla" erupt from their stereo prompting one to ask the other, "Hey, man, is that Freedom Rock?"  It's a fun, silly, cheap commercial.  The kind that used to insist on "No CODs."  Cream's contribution to the set was "White Room," which doesn't appear on Disraeli Gears, but "Sunshine of Your Love" does.  That unmistakable opening riff - on par with those that kick off "Satisfaction" or "Smoke on the Water" - links this album inextricably to 1967.  Being able to capture the zeitgeist in just a few bars is impressive, but it's also a double-edged sword.  On the one hand, you've created a monolith for the ages.  Current and future generations yearning to learn about nascent acid rock will find Disraeli Gears to be required listening.  On the other hand, your monument is a tribute to Ozymandias, a statue that began its long, slow, crumbling decline the moment it was erected.  But it's not all doom and gloom and several of these songs hold up very well.  Cream sound great when they're not trying to filter their beloved blues through too many layers of psychedelia.  Or when they're not trying to commune too closely with the muses as they do on "Tales of Brave Ulysses," which sounds like their Homeric homage to Dylan's "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)."  They explore a variety of guitar textures as the songs warble, peal, drone, and jag.  However, some of the other instruments - particularly the keyboards - get buried too deep in the mix and render them irrelevant.  Likewise, many of the vocals suffer from an almost polite formality (read:  British) that sublimates their power and contrasts sharply with the imagination of the lyrics.  You can get away with lines like "Outside my window is a tree / There only for me" from "World of Pain," but only if you loosen it up a little.  And, in general, though it will tip my hand and betray my preferences to say so, they're at their rootsy best at the beginning and the end, with "Strange Brew" and "Take It Back," respectively.  These songs have a loose, earthy quality truly deserving of the name "freedom rock."  "Well, turn it up, man!" Grade: B-

#34 - The Stone Roses' "The Stone Roses" (1989)

When it comes to certain forms of pop music, orthodoxy has a way of setting in so gradually, so agreeably that almost no one questions it until an artist comes along and pulls the curtains down all at once.  More often than not said artist will be vilified as much as she is celebrated depending, of course, on just how desperately the masses cling to their cherished expectations of what a particular music should be.  The obvious historical example is Bob Dylan in the mid-60s turning the folk world on its ear by knocking the golden calves of American music off their pedestals and reassembling them in his own image.  But pop music has had to weather similar storms on other occasions as well.  If I'm allowed to paint in broad strokes, then in my opinion, by 1989, the conventional approach to popular pop music had become so ossified, so staid, that it no longer had any danger or aspiration to greatness.  Furthermore, it was excruciatingly uncool.  The revolutionaries had abandoned ship for hip hop, new wave, punk rock and all the other proto-indie movements that arose during the 70s and 80s.  Pop music was in a bad way.  Rock 'n' roll was even worse.  Rock, for most of its tenure as a popular art form, had been dance music.  It had strong beats and addictive melodies that had people out of their seats before they knew what they were doing.  But as music fractured into genres and subgenres, "dance music" came to mean a lot of different things (house, techno, club, rave, disco, trip-hop, trance) and none of them even remotely resembled rock.  Rock 'n' roll wasn't dead, but - when it came to dancing - it had been locked up in a home for convalescents.  Within this climate, The Stone Roses' debut was a breath of fresh air to an audience that hadn't realized it was oxygen-deprived.  This is brazen, tough, unimpeachably cool pop.  There's jangle and hooks for days, but there's also a good deal of swagger from a band who knows just how good they are.  To some extent their messianic fervor - the rock-band-as-savior motif they half play for laughs - can be off-putting.  But, then, any band willing to name an 8-minute freak-out "I Am the Resurrection" and their sophomore album "Second Coming" can't be taking their own hype all that seriously.  Besides, rock music has always been in love with its own mythology, with guitar players cutting their teeth down at the crossroads.  But why hone your chops when you're good from the get-go?  As lead singer Ian Brown sings on the opener, "I don't need to sell my soul / he's already in me."  Now all they want is to be adored.  With music this expertly played, this consistently catchy, this well-supported by such a danceable backbeat, that has held up this well over the past twenty years, adoration shouldn't be a problem.  Grade: A

#33 - Brian Eno's "Another Green World" (1975)

It is conventional wisdom not to go grocery shopping when you're hungry.  Well, you probably shouldn't listen to ambient pop either because you might wind up thinking about everything in terms of food.  Brian Eno's Another Green World reminds me of nothing more than a multi-course meal served up by a seasoned cook.  Years of watching Top Chef have taught me the important distinction between mastering a culinary technique and cooking intuitively.  Those who concentrate on the former - like Hung with his sous-vide or Marcel with his molecular gastronomy - are essentially scientists who work methodically, with precision.  Those who concentrate on the latter - the Carlas and Caseys who "cook with love" - refine their natural instincts for food and how it will be received by its audience.  Last weekend, I used a gift certificate to check out Hattie's in Saratoga Springs.  Now, I've been to the south.  I've eaten boudin in Lafayette, crawfish étouffée in New Orleans, pulled pork in Memphis, catfish in Georgia, pit-fired sausage in Texas, and brisket in Kansas City.  But I've never had fried chicken better than Hattie's.  Now it may be a passed-down technique that helps her restaurant continue to satisfy its customers, but her original recipe?  That was intuition all the way.  Brian Eno is an intuitive cook.  He didn't go all in on ambient composition until Discreet Music, which came out later in the same year as Another Green World, but this album is nonetheless a powerful document of the direction in which he was moving.  In many ways, this is a painless, accessible introduction to experimental rock.  First, there are vocal tracks - gorgeous synth-pop songs like "St. Elmo's Fire," "I'll Come Running," and "Golden Hours" - so fans of Roxy Music won't feel too far from home.  But there are also wonderful instrumental pieces ("The Big Ship") built around very simple melodies that, like comfort food, contain tremendous stores of emotional resonance.  Like any cook, Eno pays a great deal of attention to textures and pairings.  Some of the shorter pieces ("In Dark Trees," "Sombre Reptiles") seem to perform the function of sonic palate cleansers, muting the haunting notes of the most recent flavor and preparing the way for the next.  It is a satisfying album from start to finish.  Only, maybe don't listen to it on an empty stomach.  I'm going to get something to eat.  Grade: A

#32 - Lil Wayne's "Tha Carter III" (2008)

I am a latter-day convert to Weezyism.  Having abandoned most of hip-hop and much of other music for several years, it was only relatively recently that I began taking an interest in some of last decade's luminaries.  When it came to my students, Lil Wayne was a universal favorite.  They might have been temporarily distracted by the latest dance craze from Soulja Boy, but, at the end of the day, Weezy was it.  The last man standing after others had been laid low by jail (T.I.), corporate stewardship (Jay-Z), revelation of artistic mediocrity (50 Cent), Auto-Tune/public humiliation (Kanye West) and drug-fueled, self-imposed exile (Eminem).  Of course, nominating yourself "Best Rapper Alive" under such circumstances is akin to declaring yourself a team's biggest fan in an empty stadium after the game.  Simply put, Lil Wayne was wearing a crown that nobody else seemed to want.  That is not to say he doesn't deserve it.  Only that we'll never truly know.  How would the great Satchel Paige have fared against an integrated major leagues in his prime?  The possibilities are enough to make your head spin.  But, more troubling than Lil Wayne's assertion of supremacy is his paranoid style, an unfortunate extension of the hyperbolic narcissism that has come to dominate American rap.  Finding it lonely (and unchallenging) at the top, much of his lyrical content is devoted to tussling with imaginary foes.  "They" say Lil Wayne's a bad influence.  "They" say he's addicted to cough syrup.  "They" say he's lost a step.  OK, but who are "they"?  Pundits?  Politicians?  Journalists?  Internet commenters?  Maybe.  Whoever they are, they aren't anyone who could feasibly exert a negative influence on his career.  In fact, in the case of the pundits and journalists, one could argue that the publicity they generate, however negative, is invaluable.  Teenagers like nothing better than music that pisses their parents off.  As far as everyone else, who doesn't love an underdog story (see:  New York Mets, The) even when the odds against which the underdog struggles are either unequal to the task or altogether nonexistent (see:  New York Mets, payroll of).  So for Lil Wayne's ego to be as big as it is, he needs to inflate these strawmen accordingly.  And thus you get a long, nearly incoherent diatribe against Al Sharpton on the Tha Carter III's closer, "Don't Get It."  By railing against every perceived slight, however insignificant, what is meant to be a show of strength reveals only raw nerves and a glass jaw.  Eminem, too, is especially guilty of this hypersensitivity.  It is duplicitous to say "I don't give a fuck" in one breath and then take on all comers in the next.  To construe every critique to be an ad hominem attack, to treat all resistance as an existential threat - even figuratively - is, at best, overly compensatory.  At worst, it's indicative of delusion too deep to fathom.  The hardscrabble, something-from-nothing, ashy-to-classy story arc permeates hip hop so thoroughly that rap stars continue to push the line long after they've made it.  They're so emotionally invested in their own Horatio Alger rags-to-riches narrative that losing success is a prospect tantamount to having never achieved it in the first place. Ironically, Weezy would have a surfeit of genuine obstacles to overcome without these bogeymen; it's just that the largest of these is himself.  Consider his prolificacy.  Lil Wayne's mixtapes and guest spots are legion.  To the casual observer, it would seem that he is either recording tracks or else he's asleep.  This type of output might have been necessary in helping him to hone his skills (we're talking about practice!) or to vault his celebrity into the stratosphere.  But, at this point, it serves only to decentralize his artistic control, dilute his best ideas over too many songs, and further divide his already hopelessly splintered attention.  Lil Wayne has always had more talent than taste, but imagine how good he could be if he refused to commit sub-par performances to tape?  His verse on last year's Distant Relatives was easily the weakest moment on the album, an appearance that underscored how substantive was the vision of Nas & Damian Marley and what happens to Lil Wayne when he's spread too thin.  As far as one-liners are concerned, he is rap's Henny Youngman.  And, on that basis, he may indeed be the "Best Rapper Alive," the Usain Bolt of hip-hop.  But true legacies require marathon runners and when it comes to endurance, "Weezy" is a perfectly appropriate nickname.  The longer the format, the more conspicuous his flaws become.  Pick any song on this album and you will most likely hear a line that makes you laugh and a line that impresses you.  But, taken together, it's really just a compendium of brilliant non-sequiturs, full of sound and fury, spouted by a weed-addled savant so hooked on phonics he can't see the raps for the rhymes.  Grade: C+

#31 - Buddy Holly's "The 'Chirping' Crickets" (1957)

The first time I saw Casablanca, I was a 21-year-old college student living abroad in England.  My "flatmates" and I decided it was a good idea to take advantage of some of the £1 theaters around town that trafficked in classic films.  I remember watching much of the movie with my mouth agape as line after line of that canonic dialogue hit me as if I'd never heard anything like it before.  Of course, as a self-taught aficionado of pop culture, I had heard it before.  Everywhere.  A similar feeling developed as I listened to the opening tracks of "The 'Chirping' Crickets," Buddy Holly's first and last long player under the band moniker, The Crickets.  And while "long player" may be a misnomer, with its twelve tracks coming in at just about 26 minutes, the comparison to Casablanca is perfectly appropriate.  The riffs, the beats, the rough-edged vocals trading off with that lover's croon and those country yelps all add up to something very special and deservedly influential.  In addition to the well-known highlights - the emphatic drum on the last "when... you... make... me... cry-y" of "That'll Be the Day" - there are plenty of other lesser-known treasures.  For example, listen to the roiling introduction to "Rock Me My Baby" and you can hear a prophecy of rock to come.  Of course, a considerable part of what makes Buddy Holly so compelling is the degree to which his career is shrouded in the mystique and mystery of what might have been.  Hearing all of that talent and potential in one sitting, it is hard not to feel the empty hole his untimely death left behind.  Here's looking at you, kid.  Grade: A-       

#30 - Camper Van Beethoven's "Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart" (1988)

As far as its descriptive utility is concerned, the term "college rock" answers the question "when" much better than it answers the question "what." In the 1980s, before the rise of "alternative" radio stations, "college rock" basically referred to any band that neither fit neatly into a corner of the previously charted musical universe nor could stop being "weird" long enough to get serious mainstream radio airplay.  With the exception of isolated acts like The Long Ryders or single-serving morsels like REM's "(Don't Go Back To) Rockville," it was almost as if every youthful band of the decade was allergic to Americana.  I blame Reagan.  At any rate, Camper Van Beethoven was tackling roots rock well in advance of the No Depression/alt-country movement founded by Uncle Tupelo, The Jayhawks, and other 90s indie heavyweights.  On the one hand, you have to give them credit.  On album opener, "Eye of Fatima, Pt. 1," David Lowery announces "we're driving like hell / to get some cowboys some acid," which is as good a description as any of what this music is all about.  It looks back to traditional styles, but it does so with a view to making them new.  Maybe it would be more appropriate to say that CVB is engaged in irreverent worship.  The approach is not 100% successful.  Early on they take a stab at folk standard "O Death" and ramp up the tempo just slightly, but the results are a mixed bag.  On some songs their warped sense of humor serves them well.  On others - most notably the appropriately named "The Fool" - they end up shooting themselves in the foot, coming off more parodic than melodic.  Lyrically it's a positive feature, but when the snark bleeds into the performances themselves, count me out.  They commit their worst offense, in my opinion, during "She Divines Water," easily the prettiest song in the bunch.  Just as the harmonies are about to soar one last time, the whole thing gets mired in a needless fit of noise and disjuncture, as if they feel compelled to sabotage something empirically good to prove their avant-garde bona fides.  Or maybe it's just an anti-corporate/anti-commercial "fuck you."  Either way, it's infuriating.  Again, I blame Reagan.  There is an unfortunate pattern in music criticism for quality bands to be held responsible for the mediocre copycats they beget; the father is blamed for the sins of the children.  In the case of Camper Van Beethoven, I think they get overshadowed by the acts that came after who did what they were doing, only better.  Grade: C+

#29 - Bruce Springsteen's "Nebraska" (1982)

The Ring is my favorite horror movie.  I think what makes it so effective is its off-putting tonality.  The whole film - and I mean every scene - is bathed in an eerie, unnatural light.  If you've ever seen the sky before a tornado or been alone in a room lit only by a dim fluorescent bulb, you know what I mean.  Consequently, without having to resort to using crutches like the seemingly ubiquitous mirror scare, The Ring subverts the all-too familiar rhythm of other films in the genre:  introduction of characters, upsetting event, calm, upsetting event #2, comic relief, uneasy calm, and then the climax.  And because The Ring looks somehow off, every moment is pregnant with the potential for terror.  It establishes an atmosphere of dread that never lets up until the credits roll.  Combine that with what, for me, is an inherently terrifying concept - a child born evil, who lives only to sow suffering and malevolence - and you end up with a powerful and disturbing film.  Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska begins with the title cut written from the perspective of Charles Starkweather as he awaits execution by electric chair.  It is a chilling song mostly because it provides no consolatory wisdom, no satisfying explanation of the killer's motivations for his spree.  The final line, delivered in the matter-of-fact manner of the classic American murder ballad, simply says, "there's just a meanness in this world."  It's an idea that pervades the rest of the album.  Over the course of nine originals and a cover of Tim Hardin's "Reason to Believe," through songs about innocence and guilt, good and evil, on both sides of the law, Springsteen maintains taut dramatic tension.  Tragedy could - and often does - strike around every corner.  There is no refuge, not in the "Mansion on the Hill," not in "My Father's House."  Competing notions of the good arrive and collide to confound and confuse.  Expect no justice from the "Highway Patrolman" or the "State Trooper."  They are merely men, with the same conflicting loyalties that would tug and pull at anyone's conscience.  There is nonetheless beauty to be heard here:  plaintive harmonica runs, intimate vocals, and even the odd mistake that lends the whole endeavor - which is, after all, a set of unpolished demos - an unrehearsed aura that complements the lyrics just so.  Indeed, the poverty of the production values belies the richness of the material and that's a good thing.  Perfectly imperfect little couplets like, "Now the neighbors come from near and far / as we pull up in our brand new used car" could get lost in or overpowered by more ornate arrangements.  Accordingly, Nebraska should serve as a warning to those producers who would prefer to get paid per knob turned.  Studio tinkering is nearly irrelevant when songs like these are played in the right emotional key.  Grade: A+

#28 - Yo La Tengo's "I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One" (1997)

Allow me to get metaphysical for a moment. On a memorable episode of Futurama, the on-again, off-again cartoon from Simpsons creator Matt Groening, a robot named Bender is careening aimlessly through space when an entire civilization of miniature, human-like creatures evolves on his metal frame.  They worship him as a god.  But, despite his well-meaning attempts to do right by his tiny, pious payload, all of his intercessions on their behalf end in disaster.  Eventually he drifts near some kind of stellar cloud formation blinking in binary which we come to learn is not just a god, but perhaps the God.  His advice to the beleaguered Bender is to use a "light touch," explaining that "when you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all."  Listening to the consistent, quiet daring of I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One it's easy to see how someone might overlook just how good Yo La Tengo are at what they do.  The album isn't gimmicky or trendy in the way that so many others with shorter shelf lives are.  In fact, I would have been hard-pressed to locate this album chronologically on a time-line detailing the last 25 years of indie music.  The shoegaze numbers alone could sound at home in the neighborhood of either My Bloody Valentine's Loveless (1991) or The Pains of Being Pure at Heart (2009).  Over the course of its nearly 70-minute span, this album offers up a cohesive and gorgeous pastiche of reverb-heavy rock, noise pop, gently experimental instrumentals, and pulsing space-age jam sessions.  What's more, YLT does all of this with some seriously versatile musical chops without the result coming off like a high-minded exercise in genre tourism.  For more than twenty years, Yo La Tengo have never insisted.  They've cajoled.  And because they've never aimed a moonshot at the spotlight, despite being critical darlings, mainstream recognition eludes them.  It's true:  they may never sell out Madison Square Garden or play the Superbowl halftime show.  Some people might mistake such modest success for a lack of vision or a failure to catch their big break, as if they just can't seem to stop themselves from flying "below the radar."  As for me, I think that when you maintain a low profile, keep your head down, and "do things right," you are actually flying above it.  Grade: A-

#27 - Willie Nelson's "Phases & Stages" (1974)

A theme album is an inherently venturesome exercise.  Those who attempt them are kindred spirits with those authors who wonder, "why stop at a short story when I could write a whole novel"?  Yes, the payoff might be greater, but likewise the heartache should the enterprise come up short of its mark.  Given the ambitious temperaments from which these albums arise, it should come as no shock that - as artistic endeavors - their concepts or executions (or both) often get muddled somewhere along the way.  On paper, a country music theme album about a broken relationship begs the question, "Isn't that what all country music albums are about?"  In practice, however, Willie Nelson's Phases & Stages is so much more than the sum of its parts.  For one, he provides a rich context for his songs.  Think of all those great LPs with their honky-tonk hymns to horseplay and lover's laments sitting side by side.  The same man crying into his whiskey breakfast this morning was bird-dogging through his beer goggles last night, without the dimmest understanding of how the two situations are related.  Phases starts out with a tableau of sad domesticity:  the woman scorned is washing the dishes and doing the laundry.  But all of it, all those little chores that go into making a house a home feel hollow in the calm before that home is broken.  Nelson's voice is tender on these tracks - the soft and sensitive croon he would use to great effect years later when interpreting American pop standards on his 1978 album Stardust.  As he recounts the story of the woman finally fed up enough to leave, something subtle happens as the track sequencing unfolds.  Each song is just a little bit faster than the one that preceded it.  The color is returning to her cheeks as she heads on home to her mother and little sister, who wryly notes, "Mama's gonna let her sleep the whole day long / The mirror's gonna tell her how long she's been gone."  This rejuvenation picks up more speed still as she heads on down to the "corner beer joint" to dance, even though "her jeans fit a little bit tighter than they did before."  Then, presumably after meeting a fella out on the town, things slow back down as she contemplates falling in love again.  It's not that she's jaded and afraid to trust another man so much as she's upside-down, distrustful of her own feelings, like the workings of her own heart have become a mystery to her.  Then, "Bloody Mary Morning" comes crashing through the gates of dawn and the album switches gears.  It leads with a rollicking banjo that - like the French horns announcing the arrival of the lupine threat in Sergey Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf" - can only mean we're about to hear from the man she left behind.  This is followed by the rapid-fire 1-2 combo of a pedal steel guitar and rowdy roadhouse piano.  Not only is it the best song on the album, but it serves as a much-needed PR boost for the cheating husband, the tune's roguish, outlaw charm helping the listener to understand what she saw in him in the first place.  Just as her suite is characterized by a steady increase in tempo, his progressively slows to a crawl, as the reality of his situation sobers him up.  Again, context is everything.  His denials of the situation ("I Still Can't Believe You're Gone," "It's Not Supposed To Be That Way") are all the more affective when the listener knows the back story.  In this way, ordinary songs are anchored by an emotional heft that might have otherwise gotten lost in translation.  If you haven't heard it yet, I won't spoil the ending except to say that the pedal steel and piano show up again on "Heaven and Hell," perhaps signifying that our male protagonist's attempt at reform has met with something rather less than success.  In the end, I'm not sure if he ever gets it.  But, thanks to Willie's masterful storytelling, I do.  Grade: A

#26 - Death Cab for Cutie's "Transatlanticism" (2003)

To date, Death Cab for Cutie's biggest hit, by a wide margin, is "I Will Follow You Into the Dark" from their 2005 album Plans.  It is, like many of Ben Gibbard's songs, a little bit cloying, a little bit precious, but also catchy as all get out.  Though not exactly Shakespeare, some of the lines are arresting.  Consider the following: "If heaven and hell decide that they both are satisfied, / illuminate the 'No's' on their vacancy signs, / if there's no one beside you as your soul embarks / then I will follow you into the dark."  It's a nice image and it makes for a palatable chorus.  Based on nothing else other than this song particle and Gibbard's collaboration on The Postal Service, I expected Transatlanticism to yield some decent lyrics and some good, melodic ear candy (my ear has a serious sweet tooth).  Well, speaking of Shakespeare, are you familiar with the "infinite monkey theorem" as it relates to statistics?  If not, here's the gist: if an infinite number of monkeys were able to type on an infinite number of typewriters given a long enough timeline, probability suggests that one of the monkeys at some point will eventually produce Hamlet.  To put it in layman's terms, the sun don't shine on the same dog's ass everyday, but sometimes things line up just right.  This is what popped in my head after wasting my time on this wildly overrated album.  Just because Gibbard & Co. have gotten lucky once or twice doesn't make them good musicians.  Turns out that what we have here is a whole lotta monkey typing.  In addition to the music, which consists of one hookless, mid-tempo ode to boredom after another, the lyrics are the worst kind of hackneyed and overwrought nonsense.  There's a lot of first person/present tense narration ("I roll the window down and begin to breathe in"), stupid metaphors ("your brain is the dam and I am the fish who can't reach the core"), trite imagery ("all I see are dark gray clouds"), repetition of lines that don't warrant a first mention ("I need you so much closer"...x12!), and - worst of all - meta-commentary on how the concept for the song came about ("and that's how this idea was drilled into my head").  As the album wore on, I thought things were looking up, but I was mistaken again.  The nearly 8-minute title track starts off with a promising chord progression and begins to build, but ultimately goes nowhere slowly.  "Passenger Seat" likewise sparks an interest before thoroughly disappointing.  Gibbard sings (in the first person present tense - surprise, surprise), "Then looking upwards, I strain my eyes and try / to tell the difference between shooting stars and satellites."  It's not even the best song I can think of wherein the protagonist mistakes satellites for shooting stars.  That would be "A New England" by Billy Bragg.  Nor is it the best song about being in the passenger seat.  That might be a tie between Wilco's "Passenger Side" and Iggy Pop's "The Passenger."  If I end up reviewing many more albums like this over the course of the year, I may be hiring some monkeys to do some typing for me.  Grade: D+

#25 - Wanda Jackson's "Rockin' with Wanda!" (1960)

I'll admit it.  Before last week I had never heard of Wanda Jackson.  I'm no stranger to the rockabilly artists she toured with (Elvis Presley) or the country singers she inspired (Dolly Parton) or the girl group sound she influenced (The Chiffons).  Still, for whatever reason, she had never made a blip on my radar.  It would not be hyperbole to suggest that the concept of a female rock-and-roller is as nearly novel to me as it was to the audiences of the mid- to late-50's.  That is not to say I'm surprised there was a woman bold enough to hang with the boys so much as I can't believe I'm only hearing about her now.  But last week a former student of mine, knowing my penchant for Jack White in general and Van Lear Rose in particular, sent me a link to the video below.  Needless to say, I was intrigued and wasted no time going right to the source.  What I found in Rockin' With Wanda! was the long lost missing link between Kitty Wells, Memphis Minnie, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Loretta Lynn.  Released less as an album and more as an LP collection of her hit singles to date, the songs on Rockin' run the gamut from country to rockabilly and - on "I Gotta Know" - you hear both, tempo changes and all.  If there is a theme to be had here, it's that Wanda's more than a match for all the no-good hound dogs and tomcats scratchin' at her door.  She's a firecracker all the way, whether she's singing about her "Mean Mean Man" or chastising another for lacking passion on "Cool Love."  You do get the sense that one of the reasons she ended up firmly on the side of country was that many of her contemporaries had more potential crossover appeal.  The twang she "brangs" on several of the tracks sounds more "hillbilly" than "rock."  Occasionally she does display some versatility:  she is, after all, capable of both sweetness and grit.  And then, out of left field, there's "Don'a Wan'a" and "Fujiyama Mama" and I'm not sure what to make of either.  The former is sung in a cringe-inducing Italian accent reminiscent of the Andrews Sisters' island patois on "Rum & Coca-Cola" and the latter begins, "I've been to Nagasaki / Hiroshima, too / the same thing I did to them, baby, I can do to you."  Wow.  They were simpler times, weren't they?  Grade: B

#24 - Patti Smith's "Horses" (1975)

Horses is a balancing act.  Patti Smith, in the sympathetic hands of producer John Cale, crafts an album that is at once cerebral and mindless, simple and complex, progressive and classicist.  And while you might expect the attempt at corralling and curating these disparate elements into a single, workable composite to sound forced, it ends up resulting in a loose and compelling whole, rolling along to its own hybridized rhythms.  Smith pushes pop music's tolerance of poetic forms to the limit, but she also evokes the ghost of pop songs past, singing bits of Van Morrison's "Gloria" and Fats Domino's "Land of 1000 Dances" when the mood strikes her.  Fittingly, the cover art is a Robert Mapplethorpe photo of Smith looking androgynous.  On songs like "Birdland," her voice ranges everywhere, from a sexy, steady, neo-Beat spoken word, to a low, operatic, manly moan to a pinched, nasal, Yoko Ono yelp.  Cale's experience in co-creating the diverse styles of The Velvet Underground serves Smith well.  The vocals - moving to the meter of her poetry - turn on a dime and require song structures to be fluid and accommodating.  However, it would be glib to think of the instrumentals as merely unobtrusive background noise.  This is not simply poetry with a backbeat and the studio band is no less inventive and dynamic than the lyricist they back.  On "Free Money," which comes in about halfway through, it is difficult to discern whether she is singing to the music or the musicians are playing to her voice.  That kind of delightful ambiguity is a good representation of what this album is all about.  It might be cliché to say that these songs work on several levels, but it wouldn't make it any less true.  If you like your music to be sophisticated, you can listen intently to Smith's lyrics and decode them to whatever extent you are able.  If, however, you prefer to turn on, tune in, and rock out, well, you can do that, too.  Grade: B+

#23 - AC/DC's "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap" (1976)

One of several quality albums recorded under Bon Scott's reign as lead singer of this Australian hard rock juggernaut.  I had several preconceived notions about what to expect going in.  It'll be trashy.  And it was, but it was also funny and impeccably performed.  Like the dramatization of a Jerry Springer episode by the Royal Shakespeare Company.  It'll be offensive.  Well, kind of.  Our cultural threshold for shocking lyrics has been moved so many times that it's difficult to know where - if anywhere - the line now exists.  There's a streak of juvenile glee running through the songs here, an adolescent fascination with delinquency and hormonal release of all types.  In that context, the monster guitar crunch of Malcolm & Angus Young doesn't sound so much like a back-to-basics aesthetic solution to the art rock pretensions of the 70's as it does self-medication by way of primal scream therapy.  The formula is a simple one:  loud = good, therefore louder = better.  What I didn't expect was the downright conservatism of songs like "Rocker" and "There's Gonna Be Some Rockin'" which, if they had turned down their amps a bit, are essentially straightforward rockabilly blues.  Or how perilously close they get to Spinal Tap-level self-parody on tracks like "Ain't No Fun (Waiting Round To Be a Millionaire)."  As Chris Rock said about Biggie Smalls' "Mo' Money, Mo' Problems," this has to be one of the most popular songs almost no one can relate to.  I could've done without "Big Balls" - the silly, double-entendre-dependent goof that is equal parts Mad Magazine, Dr. Demento, and Tenacious D - but I understand what it's doing here.  It's not as if it's a black sheep track in an otherwise straight-laced family of songs.  At any rate, all albums have their highs and lows, and I'll gladly forgive "Big Balls" after hearing the surprisingly sweet "Ride On." Scott portrays himself  as a lonely, drunken, womanizing drifter, an "empty head."  It's a sad self-inventory, an honest accounting of the emotional bankruptcy that lies beneath the gleaming, gilded surface of the rock and roll lifestyle, which is just one "red light nightmare" after another.  He knows he should change his "evil ways," but he also knows enough to know that's unlikely.  It is a rare island of super-ego in a vast sea of id.  Grade: B