Jamwise #35

Featuring: The Rolling Stones, Sade, Neil Young & Crazy Horse, U2, Neutral Milk Hotel

Project BAE - Best Albums Ever

Currently listening my way through the Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list. Progress: 180/500

Beggars Banquet - Rolling Stones

The Stones love to mix all time great songs with junk don’t they? “Dear Doctor” is as far from the greatness of “Sympathy For the Devil” or “Street Fighting Man” as it gets. Can somebody please explain to me what the heck they were doing? I know some artists like to pace their record by mixing fast paced songs with slower ones, or higher intensity with lower intensity, manipulating the momentum of the record like a novelist unwinding a story. The Stones, on the other hand, like to alternate great songs with, ah, much less great ones to pace their album. They have the quality of their songs on a slider in the mixing room and while it’s normally locked in the “10” position, sometimes they’ll flick it all the way down for a track or two just for kicks. 

And these throwaway songs aren’t even experiments, at least not for the larger music world - “Dear Doctor” is like a crappy 50’s country folk ripoff. No matter how hard I try, I can’t hear the Stones as authentic when playing this kind of music - I know, I know, authenticity is a nonsense metric when rating music from 5 decades ago, but still. This probably sounded like the most exotic, subversive shit ever made in 1968 Britain, but that effect is totally lost on me from 2024 USA. I can’t explain why the Stones’ folky/country explorations bother me more than the blues - I guess the blues just fit the Stones better. The folky stuff just feels like a gimmick. Did anybody ever really buy that these guys were Beggars or “Salt of the Earth”?

Thanks for indulging my rant. Look, the fact is this is an incredible album with multiple timeless bangers, and it’s also sometimes just fun to go off on some negative tangent in my writing. This is the internet, after all.  Modern day catharsis comes from writing mean stuff online. The only real peeve I really had was whiplash between great songs and a sudden stinker. Everyone’s entitled to make B- or C-side quality songs once in a while, and everyone’s entitled to rip off other genres - artists are doing that constantly, and that’s part of their musical evolution. I just want to go back in time and tell the Stones to skip the folk next time and stick to what they’re good at. But no matter - this is still my favorite Stones album to date. 

And OK, fine, “Factory Girl” grew on me, despite being the same genre-trespassing i denounced above. Whatever, man. The Stones are infectuous and hard to resist, that’s all the excuse I need for changing my mind slightly. I still ain’t buying that Mick Jagger knows a thing about the “hardworking people” he sings about, but who cares? Zeppelin sang about Hobbits and Styx sang about angels and aliens.

To clarify, since I know that review might also cause whiplash: this one’s a 9/10 for me - excellent stuff.

Potentially my favorite Stones album on the list. What can I say, sometimes it’s the ones we love the most that make us the most angry.

Jams

• “Sympathy For The Devil”

• “Street Fighting Man”

• “Factory Girl”

• “No Expectations”

• “Stray Cat Blues”

Diamond Life - Sade

I had to read up more than usual on this album because Sade was a mystery to me. In my research I came up with the single most horrendous term I’ve ever read regarding music - “Sophisti-pop.” Good lord, does that make me cringe. I don’t care if there have been a dozen books and millions of reviews dedicated to Sophisti-pop as a genre, I’m boycotting that term in perpetuity. Holy pretentiousness, Batman.

All that aside, Sade’s debut album is… fine. It’s smooth, and the first song “Smooth Operator” is an undisputed classic. “Your Love Is King” is the most streamed song from the album, but it’s about as sophisticated as a nursery rhyme, lyrically. This album is kind of like making frosting for a cake - at first, when you stick all the stuff in the mixer, it just seems smooth and silky and you can’t wait until it’s ready. But then you keep whipping it, adding powdered sugar, perhaps, and the smooth texture morphs into a more stiff, fluffy texture, full of air and sugar and saturated fat. Icing benefits from a little air and fluff - Sophisti-pop does not. 

Some of the more soul-oriented tracks show flashes of music I might actually enjoy (“When Am I Gonna Make A Living”, “Cherry Pie”), but it never really gets there. I’m sure there’s a time and place where Sade’s music might hit right. In elevators, perhaps. Or in an overpriced underground jazz lounge. 

Jams

• “Smooth Operator”

Rust Never Sleeps - Neil Young & Crazy Horse

Neil’s back on Spotify! Unfortunately his demand of “Joe Rogan or me” didn’t pay off, because old Joe is still corrupting the streaming airwaves on Spotify’s dime, but you gotta love Neil’s effort. 

“My My, Hey Hey” and its electric inversion are all-timers, of course. This album, mostly recorded live, is built around the acoustic to electric concept of these two songs, gradually shifting form an acoustic set of recordings to the more electrified songs of the second half. But as for the rest… Well, my first time through this album, the entire middle of it wasn’t my thing. Neil Young just sounds like an ornery old fella, even in 1979. The slice of life vignettes of old America just kind of went over my head, or perhaps just didn’t capture my attention. But a deeper read felt necessary, and it paid off.

The trouble I had the first time through this album was getting past Neil’s voice to the message beneath. There are themes hiding beneath the nasality, you just have to listen more deeply than the high-frequency rattling of Neil’s septum. He sings about class divides and the plight of Native Americans and the working class, playing guitars with aliens, chasing “welfare mothers”, beating old ladies at billiards, and the immortality of rock ’n roll. It’s kind of this midwestern US degenerate vibe, like we’re following a renegade from like Idaho hitchhike his way across the flyover states, getting stoned and drunk and dreaming. It’s not an old man yelling at clouds, as some of my generation might assume at first glance - it’s a beat-up man yelling at the world, and there’s a big difference. Millennials are the most beat-up generation we’ve had in a while, so there’s a lot for us to relate to in Neil’s music.

Jams

• “My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)”

• “Sail Away”

• “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)”

The Joshua Tree - U2

U2’s image in the age of social media is complex. They’re painted as a little pretentious (with the Edge’s dumb stage name, plus his simplistic and 100% special effects-supported guitar work), a little too political (Bono), and a little overplayed (the iPod commercial and countless others). I don’t know if any of those things are escapable as a band that’s been playing together for almost 30 years, honestly. Plus, anything that’s commonly agreed upon in social media is pretty much always nonsense. That’s a good rule to live by to survive in today’s over-socialized nonsense world.

Fun fact - this album was produced by “friend” of the newsletter Brian Eno. For those that don’t know, I’m on a journey to make myself like Eno in some form or fashion, but I’ve been failing miserably so far. It’s turning into a fixation. I will like something Brian Eno has made one day, mark my words. TBD if producing this album is enough to sway my opinion of his music, though. 

Bono’s semi-haunting voice, the guitar 101-level plucking processed until it holds down the rhythm of each track, the almost-deep subject matter on every song - these might seem like grounds for kids these days to dismiss U2. But to me they’re all positives. This album is so easy to enjoy. It just sounds good. The songs are spacious and wide-open and stadium-epic. U2 writes about America with the loving touch of locals and the clarity of part-time visitors. The entire thing is fantastic. 

Jams

• “Where The Streets Have No Name”

• “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”

• “With Or Without You”

• “Red Hill Mining Town”

In The Aeroplane Over The Sea - Neutral Milk Hotel

The compressed and slightly jagged sound of the recording is intentional, but it’s annoyingly ear-poppy (I happen to be listening to this on an aeroplane over the Atlantic Ocean, so maybe the ear-popping compression is meant to sound like you’re on a plane? Trippy, man). The pseudo randomness of the lyrics, themes, and sounds hint at buried meanings that I suspect aren’t actually there, especially for a middlebrow millennial like me.

I was too young when this came out to know this at the time, but this sounds like the 90’s, and the 90’s were weird. This album encapsulates a lot of the post-hippie sort of folky alternative sound that seems to be fertile ground for cult followings looking for an overlooked album to celebrate. And that’s exactly what happened - this album got a cult following later on. Some credit the internet for this, others credit the mystique of the lead singer’s disappearance from public life and the bands quiet breakup. 

In the past, I’ve noticed I don’t care much for cult classics. But this one hits me a little differently. It’s got a sad undertone, but there’s a funky kind of optimism in the music that I can’t pin down, and I’m a sucker for the optimistic. that’s not to say I loved it, but I didn’t really hate it. Better to say I value this album’s uniqueness but don’t fully vibe with it.