#684 Bob Dylan - Another Side of Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan sucks. Can we just get that out there? I've now choked down every Dylan album of note and feel I have have some modest prerogative to get that off my chest. As I just got done saying, he's a lousy singer and a meandering songwriter and a passable guitar player. Lyricswise, he's a good version of the dude with a guitar at your undergrad beach bonfire, which is to say, still pretty bad. And if some dude at your undergrad beach bonfire got out his guitar and started singing and he sounded like this, you mean to tell me you wouldn't roll your eyes or boo or throw a half-full can of Coors Light at him?

Highway 61 Revisited has its moments, Blood on the Tracks is personal and affecting, and I was willing to give him a pass on his debut where a certain earnestness pushed me over, but here its back to the same insufferable moaning and rambling that I can't take it any more.

Are there clever turns of phrase? Sure. Was I suddenly, inexplicably made melloncholly by Ballad in Plain D? I was! And that's not nothing. But it's not enough 2/5

#683 Hyper Crush - Night Wave

It's a fine line between exciting and annoying. a girl's laugh in the night. breakdancing dude in a neon hat. really spicy thai food. nipple clamps. It's a line toed by the likes of Spank Rock, Girl Talk, and Dan Deacon, trying to break you out of convention with a kick in the dick that spikes your grin with cringe.

With its overfat synths, banal choruses, relentless repetition, and dead-simple 4/4's, I can't tell if Night Wave is winking, or if this is just the new sound of pop music. If this had come out 5 years ago it might have been brilliant, but right now its either not a joke, or a joke that hits a bit too close to home.

Werk Me is straightforward and abstract enough to work, and work well actually. And some of the hip hop elements are goddamn explosive. But then...

Take Cheap Thrills which puts hard-edged hip hop over vulnerable synths and you get your head bobbing and then "BWEEEEEEEEEooooww", it takes a huge dubstep shit. It's like when you're watching an 80's movie, and you're really feeling like its actually pretty timeless, and then the synth soundtrack kicks in, and you roll your eyes and the moment is over. It's like watching a good comedian, a really good, surprisingly good commedian for a night like this, can you believe this guy, wow this is why I go to open mic night, hah, wow. And then he takes a litteral shit on stage.

The moment is over.

I really liked moments of this album. And then I realized it was really fucking terrible* 2/5

* I still kinda like it though

#682 Bob Dylan - The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan

I've found some of Dylan's songs impressive, a few even enjoyable, but for the most part he's always seemed wildly overrated. Meandering songwriting, abrasive singing, passable guitar work, and an occasionally terrible sense of pacing and showmanship all conspired me to treat checking off each 'essential' Bob Dylan album as an exercise in eating my cultural vegetables.

Things make more sense here though: not yet fat on his own legend, Dylan sings plainly, clearly, spilling out, touching on cultural moments that resonate even 50 years later. Here he is something he never was on his other records: likable. Even when the affair waxes pompuous, it somehow feels earnest, as Dylan is as small as us all, railing against power and injustice.

When the music is this simple, the way it is sung and the persona that sings it is all that matters, and that works here. A heart beats behind this record, still felt at ground level. Dylan as a seedling, more effective at inspiring empathy and hope and fear from below than he ever would towering from above. Still don't like Bob Dylan though. So 3.5/5

#681 The Rolling Stones - The Rolling Stones (UK)

The Stones' debut is one of the missing links between roots rock and R&B and the explosion of 60's popular rock; here's an album with some swagger and bite, but that's more tribute than transgression. The great majority of the songs are covers of the likes of Chuck Berry and Willie Dixon (performed irreverently, but faithfully) and the originals don't fall far from their inspirations' tree. The result is enjoyable enough, packed with retro charm with fleeting flashes of promise in the crannies 4/5

#680 Alexander Spence - Oar

Haunted singer-songwriter tunes that drift through fields and houses at night, with shades of everything from Cash's creaky defeatism to Radiohead's forlorn phantoms. At times altogether straightforward in structure, and then suddenly wildly unconventional: consider the groaning tempo changes of War In Peace or the endless, tribal, possibly brilliant post-rock pulse of Grey/Afro.

Alexander Spence fits easily alongside the likes Nick Drake and Roky Erickson, a troubled troubadour who stumbled through songs, leaving behind affecting echoes of himself seemingly on accident. We stumble across them in turn 3.5/5

#679 Nick Drake - Five Leaves Left

All of Nick Drake's songs take place at night, if not in subject matter then in tone and feel and tenor and color. Here the nights are blue and cool, with watches of cloud and wave. Everything is infinite, folded in Drake's velvet delivery, couched in reed-bent acoustics, glistening with steel and string and wind, with sadness below the surface. Maybe that's the same sadness we'd get dragged into on the comparatively hopeless Pink Moon. Darkness creeps in again and again, but at least here the moon is clear, glowing spaces around the shadows 3.5/5

#678 Blind Faith - Blind Faith

Sounds more or less like you'd expect a band made of members of Cream and Traffic to sound, with a bit more of Humble Pie's softerer-edged soaring. The odd-numbered tracks follow a particular pattern, chugging along feel-good before plunging down a scary/fun psychedelic hole to somewhereanother. Can't Find My Way Home and Presence of the Lord provide sunny breaks in between, but the closer is something else. 15 minutes long, its not so much a jam as a deconstruction, predicting the negative space of Can, bottoming out into drum-dusted spaces and ambient noise and less and less in between repetitions of the main chorus/hook/refrain. Its a curious experiment, one of the earliest to go this far, but generally it kills the momentum of a record that is otherwise actually pretty tight.

That misstep notwithstanding, this is a perfectly good entry into this basic category of hard, jammy rock. Less hooky than Humble Pie's record, but with more depth, take your pick based on your groove and mood 3.5/5