134. The Beatles - The Beatles (a.k.a. The White Album) - (November 1968)

1. Back in the U.S.S.R.

2. Dear Prudence 

3. Glass Onion

4. Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da

5. Wild Honey Pie

6. The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill

7. While My Guitar Gently Weeps*

8. Happiness Is a Warm Gun

9. Martha My Dear

10. I'm So Tired

11. Blackbird*

12. Piggies

13. Rocky Raccoon

14. Don't Pass Me By

15. Why Don't We Do It in the Road

16. I Will

17. Julia*

18. Birthday

19. Yer Blues

20. Mother Nature's Son

21. Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey

22. Sexy Sadie

23. Helter Skelter

24. Long, Long, Long

25. Revolution 1

26. Honey pie

27. Savoy Truffle

28. Cry Baby Cry

29. Revolution 9

30. Good Night

A-

You know, I usually listen to these albums a few times to get a feel for them. There's no way in hell I'm putting myself through this shit twice.

I like the Beatles. And I like a lot of the songs on this album. But The Beatles also includes some of the worst shit the Fab Four ever wrote. The four song run of dreadfulness that is "Glass Onion" through "Bungalow Bill" nearly broke me. I sat there with my head in my hands going "Please end". And that's the reason I'm only giving this an A-.

If you can make it past those four songs, though, The Beatles is pretty good. It's disappointing that the group never really expand upon the promise of Sgt Pepper's, though. Most of these songs were apparently written on acoustic guitar, and The Beatles features a more stripped-down style in terms of structure. Unfortunately, the simplified structure is offset by a whole heap of over-production. It seems like the group had reached a point where they felt they could do no wrong, where they were enamoured with all the new sounds possible in pop music, and so they drape every song here with countless unnecessary bits of arrangement and bury some pretty solid tunes. The result is an album featuring career highlights like the gentle "Blackbird", the strange and moving "Julia", and the truly epic "While My Guitar Gently Weeps", along side sonic nightmares like "Wild Honey Pie", "Piggies", and the infamous "Revolution 9".

Between these two extremes you have a lot of good, if mostly inconsequential, songs. This album shows real development for the group musically - The Beatles is one of the more important releases when it comes to an influence on punk and alternative rock, for example (check the manic "Birthday", for example). And the sheer scope of the album is pretty impressive. I guess I said once that it's inevitable that every great band will eventually release an incredibly self-indulgent double album. The Beatles is really the ne plus ultra of such things. But at the same time, the willingness to try anything, and the sheer range of styles and sounds, broke new ground for pop music. Other Beatles albums are a lot easier to like (and, to my mind, feature far better songs), but this is the one that really forces you to stand still and think about it as a piece of complex, challenging art. Until "Why Don't We Do It in the Road" comes along and makes you want to throw a shoe at the stereo. But then McCartney redeems himself with something fucking bizarre and wonderful like the proto-headbanger "Helter Skelter". I don't know.

Speaking of "Helter Skelter", I guess there's an elephant in the room. This album has since become infamous for inspiring Charles Manson to go off the deep end. If you haven't read it, the book Helter Skelter provides a fascinating overview of the case. The author makes an observation at one point that really sums up something about the Beatles (and, I guess, The Beatles). Listening to "Happiness Is A Warm Gun" (another great song, although the Breeders did it better), he wondered how Manson could interpret something that was clearly intended to be cheeky and sexual as a call to political violence. Especially when "Revolution 1" is explicitly against that sort of thing. It's been said a million times before, but people have really overthought the Beatles. People act like they're the be all and end all of music, like they have this profound wisdom to share with people. At least Lennon thought this was a bit silly - hence the satirical "Glass Onion", which was intended to gently rebuke fans for just this sort of obsessive misinterpretation of their music. 

George Martin has said that he personally though The Beatles would have worked better as a single album consisting of the strongest songs here. I agree that would make for a far better album. But at the same time I do like the sloppy mishmash that we actually got. It's strange, thrilling, at times unlistenable, but it's never boring. I'll defend Revolver as their peak with my dying breath, but The Beatles is a great deal of fun, and it's nice to see the biggest band of all time refusing to take themselves seriously. I just don't see how anyone could consider something with "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" on it one of the ten greatest albums ever released. 

133. The Byrds - Sweetheart of the Rodeo (August 1968)

1. You Ain't Goin' Nowhere

2. I Am a Pilgrim*

3. The Christian Life

4. You Don't Miss Your Water

5. You're Still on My Mind

6. Pretty Boy Floyd

7. Hickory Wind*

8. One Hundred Years from Now

9. Blue Canadian Rockies

10. Life in Prison

11. Nothing Was Delivered*

A-

More Byrds. More impeccably played and produced easy listening music for freaks. 

This album completely bombed when it came out, and it's not hard to see why. I mean, one of the quintessential psychedelic rock groups releasing an album of understated country music, all awash in pedal steel and elevated by the Byrds' trademark lovely harmonies? The hippies were baffled, and the country music establishment thought they were taking the piss. Time has been kind to this album, though. And that's fair, because it's really very good.

They call this "country rock". I guess because it has a slightly harder, beefier edge that traditional country, and sometimes the bass will kick in and the melody and rhythm will shift to a more rock-oriented sound. Then of course there are a couple of Dylan convers, which are all countried up but then the chorus on "Nothing Was Delivered" will kick in, for example, and suddenly your back listening to 5D or something. Most casual listeners, though, will probably just think of this album as country music. And while I'm not really familiar with most of the original versions of these songs, the cover of "Life in Prison" for example shows that the Byrds didn't always grasp exactly what made things work (this version completely lacks the bleak desperation of the Merle Haggard original). The result is a strange, transitional album - one that hasn't quite managed to shake 60s rock, but also hasn't quite developed into 70s country and country-rock.

What really does make this album work is the music. It's beautifully played and recorded, and the whole album has a lovely laid-back vibe to it. There are a lot of honky tonk sounds, lots and lots of pedal steel, forays into banjo and piano, and of course the vocal harmonies that the Byrds are best know for. The album is really deceptive for how simple and unassuming it is. Listening to it now, almost 60 years later, there's a lot that trickled down into country and rock music, and it doesn't seem startling so much as pretty and charming. At the time, of course, this was an incredibly bold step for a band to take, but nowadays you can just enjoy Sweetheart of the Rodeo for what it is - a very pretty, very well-played collection of well-chosen songs. 

132. Van Morrison - Astral Weeks (November 1968)

1. Astral Weeks

2. Beside You

3. Sweet Thing*

4. Cyprus Avenue

5. The Way Young Lovers Do*

6. Madame George*

7. Ballerina

8. Slim Slow Slider

B+

I don't think I've ever been so disappointed as I was the first time I listened to Astral Weeks. I was of course familiar with Morrison's singles (my dad was fond of playing his greatest hits), and kind of filed him away as a pretty good singer with a few fun songs. Then I heard "Sweet Thing", which captivated me. So of course I bought the album, put it on, and I think my reaction could best be summed up by the phrase "What the fuck is this shit?". 

Of course, this was over fifteen years ago. I've grown and changed a lot since then. But I'm still a cold-hearted cynic, and I still don't think this album is as amazing as people make out. 

Coming back to this album, the first time I listened to it for this post I couldn't get past Morrison's occasionally ear-splitting vocal delivery, and the sameness of the music. But there's a reason I always listen to these albums more than once, and getting up this morning and listening to Astral Weeks first thing with my cup of tea, I found it to be pretty good. Not "life changing", which a lot of people seem to consider it, but solid and occasionally brilliant. Though to be fair, this album came out almost sixty years ago. What Morrison is doing here has since been done as well or better by many, many musicians, and you can't really expect it to pack the punch it initially did. Unless I guess you've never heard a jazz, folk, or arty alternative rock album before, in which case I can certainly see why you'd go gaga over it.

Anyway, musically this album is pretty impressive. The style is a mix of folk, jazz and R&B, very loose and mostly improvised. Apparently Morrison played his musicians the songs once or twice on guitar, then locked himself away in a recording booth after telling them to play more or less what they wanted. This means that the music lacks the sheer studied complexity of a lot of jazz, but it also has a wonderfully spontaneous, loose quality. Unfortunately the jam session nature of the recording process also means that a lot of the songs sound more or less the same. Some people seem to enjoy this, viewing the album as one long song. I kind of got frustrated with waiting for choruses that never came, although the idea of building interest through tension and the layering of instruments rather than complex song structures is a clever one. There's also some excellent use of a string section, which apparently Morrison was deeply annoyed by the addition of, but which I think is vital for expanding the album's sonic palette.

The lyrics are another thing you'll probably either love or hate. A lot of people seem to throw around the term "Stream of Consciousness" when talking about Astral Weeks, but that's only partly true. The lyrics are more free form and impressionistic than anything. This is hardly Virginia Woolf's The Waves. And, truth be told, most of the songs are kind of vague and irritating. There's only so many times a guy can talk about rain before it gets annoying. Then again, Morrison was in his early twenties (and younger) when he wrote these songs. For someone of the age he was, the lyrics are quite mature and complex. Most of the songs are about love, about the distance between people, and about standing on the cusp of adulthood. And they're all fine. Just not mind blowing or anything.

There are, however, three songs that really stand out. "Sweet Thing", of course, is a beautiful love song, as well as one of the most structured songs here. "The Way Young Lovers Do" I quite like because, while still vague and abstract, it's the most conventionally "Van Morrison" song here, and features a actual, catchy chorus and a pretty great horn section. The real surprise for me, though, was "Madame George". This is the song on the album where impressionism meets story telling, a moving portrait of an Irish drag queen and the sad, strange minutiae of their life. It's a pretty, sad, odd little song, and I was very pleased to encounter it. 

I feel bad for talking down an album so beloved by so many people, but at the same time everything I've read indicates that Van Morrison himself doesn't particularly care for Astral Weeks, and can't understand why everyone likes it so much. After a bit of effort on my part, I can understand why everyone likes it so much. It's just not the sort of thing I'm ever likely to be floored by.

131. The Zombies - Odessey and Oracle (April 1968)

1. Care of Cell 44*

2. A Rose for Emily

3. Maybe After He's Gone

4. Beechwood Park

5. Brief Candles

6. Hung Up on a Dream

7. Changes

8. I Want Her. She Wants Me

9. This Will Be Our Year*

10. Butcher's Tale (Western Front 1914)

11. Friends of Mine

12. Time of the Season*

A

I feel like I've hopped in a time machine and travelled back to my second year at university. At the time, the combination of personal freedom, a decent internet connection, and spending a lot of time on the internet sifting through blogs, Pitchfork and Pop Matters, meant that I was constantly exploring music new and old. This is one of those albums that struck me at the time, and while I rarely listen to it these days it's still a personal favourite.

Musically, it's all quite difficult to categorise. The Zombies started out as a beat combo, as so many did, but didn't really manage to achieve much success. So they basically said "fuck it", and recorded an album of complex chamber pop, then broke up. Looking at the cover, you might think this is all hippy-drippy sunshine pop, and it's true that the most famous songs here (the ones that pop up in TV shows and advertisements) are glorious, up beat numbers. But there's a vein of darkness running through this music that keeps it grounded, and gives it a substance lacking in your typical pop album. I mean, "Care of Cell 44" is about someone counting the days until their beloved gets out of prison. "A Rose for Emily" may seem like just a sad ballad about a spinster, but it's actually based on Faulkner's classic Southern Gothic short story of the same name (which you should really read if you haven't - I won't spoil the ending but it has a great twist). "Brief Candles" explores the way an intense romantic experience can gradually fade into background noise the further you get from it. And then there's "A Butcher's Tale". Sandwiched between to glorious feelgood numbers, it's a truly harrowing account of life in the trenches, sung over a demonic organ vamp. Had cooler heads prevailed, it probably would have been left off the album. Which I'm glad it wasn't, as it's one of my favourite songs.

Stylistically, this album is hard to peg. From a modern perspective, it kind of sounds like eclectic indie pop. That type of music didn't exist in 1968, though. The song structures seem to owe a debt to the Kinks' more mannered works, with odd time changes and verses and chorus that sound like they're from different songs thrown in for good measure. There's also an obvious Beatles influence (think something like "Penny Lane"). The really great thing, though, is the vocals. Singer Colin Blundstone has a pure, smooth and almost feminine voice. And there are glorious multi-part harmonies throughout, some of which rival the Beach Boys for sheer prettiness and complexity. 

So really, this is a must have. It's complex musically, incredibly sophisticated and literate, but at the same time very pretty and fun. The stylistic range also means it's hard to get tired of it. A lot of bands have mined this particular sound since, but the Zombies really caught lightning in a bottle here. 

130. Scott Walker - Scott 2 (March 1968)

1. Jackie*

2. Best of Both Worlds

3. Black Sheep Boy

4. The Amorous Humphrey Plugg*

5. Next*

6. The Girls from the Streets

7. Plastic Palace People

8. Wait Until Dark

9. The Girls and the Dogs

10. Windows of the World

11. The Bridge

12. Come Next Spring

A-

This is an unusual album. Which isn't really surprising if you know anything about Scott Walker. But even so, this album stands at a crossroads. Stylistically, and in terms of content, it's a very old fashioned pop album. Lush yet tasteful orchestral arrangements and a mix of covers with a few originals thrown in. If not for the lyrical content (and the sheer quality) it could be mistaken for any number of sixties crooner albums currently clogging up charity shop milk crates across the world. 

What really sets this album apart is the song choices and the delivery. Walker has an odd voice - at once technically excellent and archly theatrical, with a tinge of bombast. The arrangements supporting his vocals are almost uniformly of a dark, slightly sinister type. And the songs themselves! Well - let's just say there are a lot of prostitutes mentioned. The result is a sort of grand, decadent album chronicling the dark side of life in the classiest way possible. Which must have been odd for fans of the Walker Brothers still hoping for another "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore".

The lyrics are uniformly excellent. The standout tracks are two Jacques Brel reinterpretations. "Jackie" is a galloping song about a man dreaming of every possible life he could lead and all the glory it would entail, but who ultimately just wants to bum around with low-lifes. "Next" is harrowing. We've seen it before back on the Jacques Brel album we had a while ago, but here in excellently translated English it's fucking bleak (if you're wondering, it's about the psychological trauma of having been forced to lose ones virginity in a mobile army brothel during the war). However, this album is noteworthy for showing Walker's development as a songwriter, and his originals are pretty good, too. My favourite is "The Amorous Humphrey Plugg", which is a musically gorgeous song about a repressed man who escapes the drudgery of children and work by wandering the red light district, imagining himself drowning in a sea of kisses. "The Girls from the Street" is basically what it says on the tin, and "Plastic Palace People" is an impressionistic song about slightly sinister bohemians.

The rest of the songs, a mix of covers, are kind of all over the place. There isn't a bad song on the album, but it's odd to suddenly veer from the ballad "Best of Both Worlds" to the melodramatised country of "Black Sheep Boy". And, as is often the case with old pop albums, side two can't really match the quality of side one. Still, this is a really good album. Very much a "late night with half a pack of smokes and a bottle of red" sort of affair. 

It's not really hard to see why Walker became such an important cult figure in music. His refusal to cater to contemporary tastes (this was released right in the heart of the psychedelic 60s, after all), coupled with his willingness to take some pretty odd risks, means that he manages to be both exciting and frustrating in exactly the way you want a slightly obscure, "difficult" artist to be. His music is as much about raising possibilities as it is about providing concrete artistic statements. This becomes far more evident on Scott 4 (which we'll be getting to in a while), which opens with, of all things, a bizarre art piece recapping the plot of The Seventh Seal, and features a truly gorgeous song about the dangers of Stalinism, of all things. And then there's something like Tilt, which is just fucking weird. 

Well this album wasn't really new to me, but it was nice to revisit it after a long absence. If you want something grand and eloquent and strange it's certainly worth checking out. Just maybe don't play it around any small children.

129. Caetano Veloso - Caetano Veloso (1968)

1. Tropicalia*

2. Clarice

3. No Dia em que Eu Vim-Me Embora

4. Alegria, Alegria*

5. Onde Andaras

6. Anunciação

7. Superbacana

8. Paisagem Util

9. Clara (feat. Gal Costa)

10. Soy loco por ti, America*

11. Ave-Maria

12. Eles

A

Another Brazilian album which I can't hope to do justice to. The biggest problem is of course language. Thankfully, we live in an era when I can google translations of these songs. That doesn't really help, since lyrics are about how they're sung, and a literal translation can't convey that. Also, Veloso seems to have peppered his songs with countless references to pop culture Brazilian and otherwise, which means there's a whole weight of meaning lying in these songs that I can't hope to grasp.

Putting all that aside, this is a great album. The sound is hard to explain. At its core, it's Latin pop, but it's all been subtly mutated by psychedelic pop and rock from around the world. The result is something thrillingly modern, but also defiantly Brazilian. The rhythms are Brazilian, and there's the tasteful string arrangements and the like that one associates with the classier sort of samba, but there are also fuzzed out guitars, odd instrumentations, elements of studio trickery and forays into a more rock-oriented sound. Through all this wind Veloso's understated, vaguely feminine vocals, which can swing from tender to declamatory in the course of a single song. As for the lyrics, they manage to be political in outlook more than explicit content. As with Os Mutantes, Veloso is pushing a mindset and a worldview rather than openly attacking anybody. It's telling that he wound-up making enemies of the far Left (who thought he was selling out to American culture) and the far Right (who considered him an enemy of the state, and wound up first imprisoning and then exiling him).

All of which sounds pretty heavy, but since I don't speak Portuguese my main take-away from this album was that it's a pretty, quirky album of ultra-sophisticated pop. Tucked down here at the bottom of continental Australia, it's the start of Winter and things are (by my country's standards, at least) getting very grey and cold. No matter how long I run the heater, or how many cups of hot tea I drink, I have to accept that I'm going to spend the next three to four months with cold toes. So a buoyant album of tropical pop was exactly what I needed. 

128. Jeff Beck - Truth (July 1968)

1. Shapes of Things*

2. Let Me Love You

3. Morning Dew

4. You Shook Me

5. Old Man River*

6. Greensleeves

7. Rock My Plimsoul

8. Beck's Bolero*

9. Blues De Luxe

10. I Ain't Superstitious

B

With the title "Truth", and that arty cover, one could be forgiven for expecting something strange and mystical. Instead, this is mostly a straight blues album, although a very well-performed one. Jeff Beck is a great guitarist (at this point in the List, I'd rank him second only to Hendrix), and the rest of the band are great, too. Rod Stewart provides vocals, and while he obviously hasn't quite found his voice at this point, there are glimmers of the guy who'd eventually unleash "Maggie May" on an unsuspecting populace. 

Really, the amount of talent present here can't help result in the album being a bit of a let down. "Shapes of Things" is an amazing, exciting opener, somehow mixing the Who at their most anthemic with British Blues and pointing the way forward for 70s rock. But at the same time there's a gentler, I guess more feminine quality that means that songs like "Old Man River" and "Greensleeves" don't seem out of place. And then there's the instrumental "Beck's Bolero", which just flat out rocks.

But then the rest of the album is just, you know, old blues songs. Well-performed blues songs, I guess (the sound of this album is gorgeous), but nothing to get excited about. It doesn't really help that the group take bog-standard blues, trick it out with a bunch of new-fangled studio techniques, and then have Rod Stewart sing it even though he's not really suited to the material. In attempting to update the sound of the blues, they rob it of the vitality that made it work in the first place. 

These are all personal gripes, though. If you like British blues then this is a fine album (certainly a hell of a lot better than that Bluesbreakers album we had a while back). And there are a few really great songs here. I just don't much care for this sort of music. And why call an album "Truth", when the truth you're telling is "Oh baby you shook me", or "When you walk, you shake like a willow tree"? Plus that piano solo on "Blues De Luxe" sucks so hard I took a point off just for it. 

Anyway, your mileage may vary.