Jamwise #32

Featuring: The Weeknd, Elvis Presley, Pink Floyd, Lauryn Hill, Bo Diddley

Project BAE - Best Albums Ever

Current project: listening my way through Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time

Progress: 142/500 albums

The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn - Pink Floyd

Pink Floyd’s debut album is a tough one for me - I’m a massive fan of David Gilmour, and this album was released before he joined the band. As I’ve come to know Pink Floyd’s music in a non-chronological order, it’s hard to separate Gilmour’s signature lyrical guitar sound from the actual origins of Pink Floyd, and it’s hard to imagine the band without him. But that’s just me. 

This album is half psychedelic jam-rock and half more “traditional” song - style things. I can only assume this kind of arrangement was appealing in 1967, when radio-designed pop tunes were all the rage, the Motowns and hit factories of the world generating a well-deserved backlash, and the rambling, somewhat formless songs Pink Floyd created must have felt comparatively new and refreshing. It’s funny to imagine this album being released today - it seems very ballsy to announce your band to the world with so many tunes that would have absolutely no place on modern pop radio. I like the attitude, don’t get me wrong, I just can’t imagine a modern release like this launching a band to superstardom in quite the same way as Pink Floyd. It just goes to show you how music is relative, and the context of society and other contemporary music is extremely important in determining how an album will sound to the people. 

It’s funny to look back at the run times of the songs on this album - none are much longer than 4 minutes, but while listening I would have sworn I’d just heard a bunch of 10 minute pieces. Maybe Pink Floyd figured out time travel and this is their way of telling us. Or maybe it’s the inverse of “time flies when you’re having fun.” I hate to say it, but I wasn’t having fun. At first I thought it was my speakers - I sat down with my good headphones for my second listen of this one, thinking it would unlock levels of understanding I’d been missing, but this only led to a headache.

There are not many songs I want to take with me when I finish this album. I can only assume the greatness of this album is heavily influenced by its uniqueness, which is a result of the world around it at release. The reviews all seem to support that notion, invariably mentioning the other music against which I’m supposed to judge this unique debut. But solely judging on its own merits, from the lens of today, this ablum doesn’t do much for me. It’s rambling and confusing and abstract, and despite the fact that all of those adjectives could perfectly describe me at times, they aren’t traits I personally enjoy in music.

This is yet another album that requires intimate familiarity with an entire decade of unrelated music and culture to really get, and I just don’t have that.

Bo Diddley / Go Bo Diddley - Bo Diddley

It’s not often that the original sounds more new and relevant than the covers. But listening to tracks like “I’m A Man,” “Hey! Bo Diddley,” and “Who Do You Love,” I found myself thinking this somehow sounded less dated than classic songs I know that sprung more or less directly from them (George Thorogood’s “Bad to the Bone,” The Guess Who’s “American Woman”, and Thorogood’s cover of “Who Do You Love”, to name the ones I know best). OK, maybe new and relevant is an exaggeration, but there’s still a modernity to Bo Diddley’s sound that I’d never expect from a set of recordings from the 50’s. It certainly sounds more timeless to me than, I don’t know, Dean Martin or Patsy Cline, Bo’s 50’s peers who dominated the charts while he was doomed to relative obscurity (he only cracked the Billboard top 40 once, and only had one album on the Billboard 200). 

It’s pretty legendary to name half your songs after yourself, not to mention then having those songs go on to have an entire rhythm named after you. The Bo Diddley beat (daa-daa-daa-dada-daa) inspired dozens of songs - just scroll through the Wikipedia list and you’ll see at least thirty classics you know. It’s a thrill to enjoy an album (technically 2 albums, as voted by Rolling Stone) academically and musically at the same time.

Jams

• “I’m A Man”

• “Before You Accuse Me (Take A Look At Yourself)”

• “Dearest Darling”

The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill - Lauryn Hill

#10 on the Rolling Stone list, this might be one of the most well-regarded albums I’ve come across of which I know nothing. I can’t find a single review site that doesn’t have this album in its top ranks. Every piece of writing I find about it, mainstream or underground, trendy or not, raves about Lauryn Hill. It makes me wonder how I could have missed her music so thoroughly, but then again, I’ve missed a lot of music in my time.

Sometimes I listen to music while doing other things. I listen to albums more than once before writing about them, so between two or more listens I get the full effect. But this album, on the first time through, made me sit down and forget about everything else I was doing. I don’t have one of those cool listening rooms with leather furniture and turntables and massive speakers surrounding the space, but if I did, that’s where I’d go to give this my full attention. Heck, this album made me feel like I was in the finest music library in the world, when I was just on my chair from the side of the road (it’s a sick chair, don’t worry - especially for the price of free-99) with my beat up headphones. 

The level of talent on display here is hard to wrap my head around. I found the songs trending more towards the diva show-off style of singing that Hill is clearly capable of towards the end of the album, and I have to admit I enjoyed the first half far more with its more rap-forward songs. But none of it felt like shallow peacocking; it felt like voice talent with an actual personality behind it, an immaculate voice that exists for reasons other than to celebrate itself. I still have a natural urge to cringe at the 6-note runs and exaggerated overemoting at times, but by the time we get to that point in the album I trust Lauryn Hill as a musician, and I’m more able to let it slide.

Some albums require deeper focus because they’re so esoteric or abstract and you have to grasp for every bit of meaning you can find or you’ll be lost. You have to sit down and listen or you’ll miss the point. But this was completely different - I had to sit down to avoid being knocked over. 

Jams

• “Lost Ones”

• “Final Hour”

• “When It Hurts So Bad”

Beauty Behind The Madness - The Weeknd

This album contradicts itself in so many ways. It’s mopey and downcast, yet full of stadium-shaking backing tracks. It’s sung in The Weeknd’s thin tenor and at times falsetto, yet the lyrics cover almost nothing besides sex, the desire for more sex, expressions of the singer’s sexual prowess, and befuddlement that more people don’t already want to participate in sex with him. There are almost hyper-masculine vibes to the lyrics at times, but sung in the vocal range of a teenager, they don’t feel authentic. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s just jarring and takes you out of the moment while listening. “I’ma care for you,” he wails on the track “Earned It” (of Fifty Shades of Grey “fame”), as if the basic act of giving a crap is the peak of male romantic expression - that’s this album in a nutshell. The backing tracks are more sophisticated and hint that someone’s about to drop some knowledge on us, but on most tracks the lyrics are pretty much throwaways with rhyming syllables.

I realize it’s a little hypocritical of me to pick apart the lyrics so carefully on this album when I’ve repeatedly dismissed albums like Bob Dylan’s Love and Theft for having little of interest aside from the lyrics, claiming that the words aren’t often the primary reason I like a song. Maybe it’s the modern production, which puts The Weeknd’s piercing voice front and center no matter how tiny your headphone speakers might be. Or maybe it’s that I don’t think lyrics necessarily make a song, but they can certainly break it in a heartbeat. Regardless, the lyrics were distracting and frankly bad enough to break my focus on the music, and they didn’t hold up to much scrutiny.

That’s not to say that these songs are totally broken. I thought the production of the backing tracks was stellar - if I was a musician in need of a producer, I’d be running to whoever produced this album (which was a group effort, as it turns out). But I don’t think I’d be inviting The Weeknd to the lyric writing sessions. And the album’s highlight, “Dark Times,” was goosebump-raising, a dark track that finally delivers on the promise of the throbbing bass and almost-whiny emotions of the rest of the tracks. Ed Sheeran steals the show on that track, to tell the truth, but it fits in with the rest of the album so perfectly it doesn’t feel right to give him all the credit for it.

It’s a decent pop album, with great production and a talented singer and lyrics that are just a little too high-school-horny for me. The album is extremely one-note, lacking balance - like a taco with s0 much hot sauce you can’t taste the cheese.

Jams

• “Real Life”

• “The Hills”

• “Dark Times”

From Elvis in Memphis - Elvis Presley

Elvis’ return to the studio after several years away, both from military service and his odd semi-coerced focus on making weird movie soundtrack music, did not disappoint. This feels like Elvis with something real to say, rather than the Elvis who didn’t seem to care what he said as long as he crooned it handsomely. It feels like an older person’s album - Presley was only 34 when he recorded it - but that could be the cold that roughened his voice on several songs, or possibly the pent-up creative energy he hadn’t been able to unleash on such asinine projects as “Frankie and Johnnie” (50% on the trusty Tomatometer).

This also seems dated in the fact that Presley wrote none of the songs. There’s a large proportion of covers, which seems like a trend in the early 60’s that Presley carried into the late 60’s, a time when the singer-songwriter (or band-songwriters) were taking over the world. I know he released many more albums after this one, but this album still feels like a cry of “I’m still relevant” that comes at the end of a career, while the rest of the music world was moving on to new creations rather than harkening to the past with albums of cover songs.

All that said, it’s my favorite Elvis album I’ve listened to so far. Sure, maybe it’s less fun and more blue than young Elvis, but it’s got a lot of depth to it, and he’s clearly putting all his soul into proving he can still make music that moves us; only instead of our hips, it moves our soul.

Jams

• “Wearing’ That Loved On Look”

• “Power Of My Love”

• “Gentle On My Mind”

• “Suspicious Minds”