#670 Mott the Hoople - Mott

Back in the day, Bowie took these guys under his wing, and it shows, as this aches with much of the same glammy, Ziggy-era longing and desperation. The fact that Ian Hunter sounds more than a little like David Bowie certainly doesn't hurt either.

On the other hand, there's also a more straightforward element, with piano and backbeats that evoke goodoleboy rock from the likes of Thin Lizzy or early Bruce. This is feelgood glam, exceptionally sunny for a style that largely slunk in beerlight rainslick shadows, and that gives it a flavor all its own.

Despite those pleasurecenter checkmarks though, there's something just missing here, a lack of magic, a subtle drag in the pacing, an absence of clear melodic lines through the business. Guess we can't all be Bowie.

Heck, even Bowie was barely Bowie 3.5/5

#669 Swans - The Seer

BIG. Here's an album that goes for it in every way there is to go for it, in terms of album length, in terms of song length, in terms of volume, in terms of volume changes, in terms of hugeness of sound, in terms of massiveness of thematic heft - large in every dimension there is.

Along the way there's artfulness in texture and sound and structure, but the entire thing is such an enormous, crushing monolith its hard to even take in, petroglyphically defiant of the scale of your perspective.

That makes for quite an achievement, only modest fun, curiously compelling, but work-y to engage with 3.5/5

#668 Patti Smith - Horses

One of the strangest punk albums ever made, strange in Smith's otherworldly delivery, strange in its sprawling structure spun around half-silences, strange in its spacetime-bending musings. The finest moments are the upbeat, culture-wielding songs, including the raucous opener and closer and the velvety eternity of Land. In between are sunny dirges that drag you into the depths, and sometimes just drag, and that sometimes smack of self-indulgence, but this is an undeniably original work, a defiant slash of voice and will, and that's worth something. That's possibly worth more than anything 4/5

#667 Shellac - Excellent Italian Greyhound

Shellac's debut was a bit one-note; here the evolution doesn't involve adding new notes, but spaces between them. The songwriting has moved past punishing post-punk thrash and into art-rock expanses of uncomfortable silences, passive-aggressive intonations, and ominous notes held as long as every note on At Action Park combined. It results in an album that is decidedly more interesting, if only marginally more enjoyable, and decidedly more successful as art than rock 3.5/5

#666 Youssou N'Dour - Immigrés

World music gets a bad rap, deservedly or not. I don't think there's any shame in admitting that a lifetime of 4/4's and 12-tone scales has left you a little cool on obscure Melakartas and polyrhythms. There's a lot of momentum there, and you don't have to kill yourself to undo it.

This though, is a nice transition, decidedly outside Western tradition, totally listenable, providing sunflecked atmosphere without baking your brain. N-Dour's personality shines through, making an album that is accessible without feeling impure (unlike, say, his later collaborations with Peter Gabriel, that feel comparatively whitewashed) 4/5

#665 Frank Zappa - Joe's Garage Parts 1, 2, and 3

Frank Zappa was pretty weird.

You might know that, but unless you've really done your homework you really don't know how weird he really was, how many different kinds of weird he was, how many screwed up directions he went careening in, and therefore how really goddamn brilliant he was.

You might have come across the bent do-wop of We're Only in it for the Money, the batshit pre-post-psychadelia of Freak Out, the frantic jazzy jamming of Hot Rats, and more. And then you still might not know about the depraved genius that is Joe's Garage, an epic that careens between styles, touching on Thin Lizzy feelgood raveups, through frenetic funk, into loungy languisher, past dubby downbeat jams, through future-fucked-euro-new-wave, before exploding into cyber funk that would make Midnite Vultures-era Beck wince and shrug.

The whole thing is wrapped around a loose narrative, full of satiric bile and bite, about the perils of rock and roll, taken to ridiculous extremes. Its sex and sluts and STD's, and that's all before things start to really get freaky and there's motor oil in orifices and worse.

Strange, brilliant, possibly awful, certainly demanding of further attention, with a solid half-point deduction for the intrusive, incessant spoken interludes that prevent this from being a remotely smooth listen 4/5

#664 Talking Heads - Fear of Music

Talking Heads always trucked in alienation and subversion, but here the message is less about shaking things up than about an insidious injection of perspective.

Perspective comes in the form of eroding heaven's appeal, in chipping away at human superiority to animals, as reminders about the first-world nature of our problems, at undermining escapism's promise of change. Little by little, you're lowered into the warm bath of existence as it is, even as it grows cold. Even album-opening I Zimba's non-Wester polyrhythms, while musically a red herring, are decidedly in line with this theme, dropping you outside your comfort zone, if just for a moment.

Musically, the mix is dark and rich, with few of the popping new-wave angles, settling into a simmering region of post punk, grappling rather than punching, pulling you to the mat, and blurring the line between a submission hold and a firm spooning, as you drift off to a tough love sleeper hold slumber 4/5