83. Love - Da Capo

1. Stephanie Knows Who
2. Orange Skies
3. Que Vida
4. Seven And Seven Is
5. Castle
6. She Comes In Colors
7. Revelation

 Proving that Love really does overcome all, especially in terms of band names. I have absolutely no doubt that much of my opinion towards this album relies on how much better a band name Love is compared to the psychedelic hangover of "Moby Grape" Anything that makes me think of a grape soda endorsed by Moby is bound to go bad.

Anyway, to the real meat and potatoes: This album is good. The first 6 songs are truly psychedelic  pop masterpieces, awash in orchestration that thankfully manages to avoid the more nauseating cliched sounds that were all over the damned place in this decade. Not only that, but the band's ultra-huge line up (well, 7 was a lot of people for 1967!) for this album means we get a lot of cool stuff thrown into every song, like the ever-inescapable harpsichord.
 Which may or may not have anything to do with how much I liked this record. My secret harpsichord fetish must never be revealed to th

There's a good healthy mix of rockers and mellow tunes on the first half to keep the blandness at bay. Of particular note is 'Seven and Seven Is', the band's only hit, which is a punkish-flavored song that just keeps building and building with furious energy before ending in an explosion. Probably the most exciting thing on this list since the Sonics!

The more laid back songs are nothing to shake a stick at either, though I have no idea why one would want to shake a stick at a song, especially since as the Insane Clown Posse so eloquently put it, you can't even see that shit. Music is all magic, man.

Anyway, they're pretty good songs, though sometimes they may come off as a bit cheesy/dated, particularly Orange Skies. I'd like to see the man who can turn the lyric "Orange skies, carnivals and cotton candy" into something that ISN'T cheesy. And that flute that sounds like it was taken straight off of some sixties lounge record doesn't help matters, although in this context it provides a light and breezy melody that slips the surly bonds of cheesiness and flies off into the stratosphere of taste. Ditto for ¡Que Vida!, which is so impossibly light that you're scared that the song's gonna fly right off of the album.

After 6 very solid songs, I was eagerly anticipating Revelations, the 19 minute elephant in the room taking up the entire second half of the album like it's entitled to do that. Unfortunately, I was quick to discover that it was just a shitty blues jam. Remember Going Home, that 11 minute Rolling Stones song from Aftermath? The one that didn't really go anywhere and Mick Jagger wouldn't shut the hell up? Take that, add a few more interesting bits and solos, and you've got this song. While I liked this a lot more than I liked Going Home, largely because the lead singer has the sense to back the fuck off (though not entirely, unfortunately), it's still not deserving at all of its lofty 19 minute length. There's even a goddamned drum solo. You know you're padding a song far too much when you decide that a drum solo is a good idea.

Despite all my complaining about the second side, the first half of this album is good enough to not wreck the grade curve. I guess it's true that all you need is love everything is terrible! 8/10

82. Moby Grape - Moby Grape (1967)

1. Hey Grandma
2. Mr Blues
3. Fall On You
4. 8.05
5. Come In The Morning
6. Omaha
7. Naked If I Want To
8. Someday
9. Ain't No Use
10. Sitting By The Window
11. Changes
12. Lazy Me
13. Indifference

Words cannot even begin to describe the unfathomable okayness of this album. This album is so utterly decent that whilst listening to it, I almost moved twice. In  time, my fingers were even twitching to the high levels of tolerability that I was being exposed to.


Basically, what I'm trying to say here is that this album, while being enjoyable to listen to and certainly a well put together piece of work, it's about as exciting as a trip to your grandma's house (unless your grandma is Betty White). Simply put, it's nothing that I haven't heard before.


What baffles me the most about this album's critical following (and it DOES have one) is how it has been held up as one of the great psychedelic classics of '67. I'm convinced that this only happened because the band came from San Francisco, because there's very little overtly psychedelic about any of these songs. The closest they get are little weird bits like the intro to Omaha, but in light of the great masterpieces I've heard so far, wacky intros are not gonna cut it. Frank Zappa's got more psychedelic weirdness in his tailbone than all of these songs combined. Fer Chrissake, the longest song on here is 4 minutes long! The audience wouldn't even be tripping yet!


What this album does sound like is sort of a mishmash of every other contemporary sound in rock, complete with the folksiness of Buffalo Springfield, the harmonies of the Byrds, and the oh-so-hilarious R&B rave-ups (well, Changes is actually a pretty good song. You've got me there, you Grape bastards!) The harmonies are actually one of the better parts of the album, actually. I'm saying that because without them, this would be the most dull "psychedelic rock" album since the time Syd Barrett had a bad trip and accidentally left the tape recorder running. 7/10

81. Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band - Safe as Milk (1967)

1. Sure Nuff 'n' Yes I Do
2. Zig Zag Wanderer
3. Call On Me
4. Dropout Boogie
5. I'm Glad
6. Electricity
7. Yellow Brick Road
8. Abba Zaba
9. Plastic Factory
10. Where There's Woman
11. Grown So Ugly
12. Autumn's Child

In this post-mad cow disease world, not even milk is safe anymore.

That's the tagline to what may be the worst film yet to be written, but I'll be damned if I'm not going to write it anyway. But first, I must write about Captain Beefheart, a noted eccentric and contemporary of Frank Zappa. Aside from a few tracks here and there, I hadn't really given him a full listen before this album, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was actually quite accessible. 


Yeah, really. You wouldn't expect it from a guy named Captain Beefheart, but this was a fun and engaging listen. It just might be the best white blues album on the list so far, in fact. The first track sounds like a Muddy Waters track if Muddy Waters dropped some acid and wrote his thoughts down. 


This album tends to oscillate between straight R&B songs like 'Call on Me' that already must have started to sound out of date in the wild Spirit of '67 and some of the freakiest blues this side of the Mississippi. 'Electricity' is nothing short of WILD, maaaaaan. It's even got a Theremin! How many blues songs do you know of with a theremin? 'Abba Zabba' is another particular delight, with its pseudo-African rhythms, which might be the first time a rock band ever used those. Hey, you're getting your world music into my blues! Stop it!

And unfortunately, I've just found out that he's dead while writing this review. I'm hoping this isn't the start of some terrible curse relating to my blog, but all jokes aside, this is quite a sad loss to music and to art in general. Artists as rare and unique as Don Van Vliet don't come around too often: They should be treasured and remembered, and most importantly, celebrated. 9/10

80. Buffalo Springfield - Buffalo Springfield Again (1967)

1. Mr. Soul
2. Child's Claim To Fame
3. Everydays
4. Expecting To Fly
5. Bluebird
6. Hung Upside Down
7. Sad Memory
8. Good Time Boy
9. Rock 'n' Roll Woman
10. Broken Arrow

And now we must deal with one of the more annoying aspects of the blog. After all, it's a bit daft listening to Buffalo Springfield Again when we haven't even given Buffalo Springfield a proper listening-to. But, I suppose that is a quest for another, much longer blog than my tragically limited scope.

This album brings us a first glimpse at what will soon become a very familiar face in the upcoming decade: Mr. Neil Young, one of Canada's finest exports, giving them a reputation that they have since tried their best to dismantle by giving the world Justin Bieber and Bryan Adams. For shame, Canada. No wonder you're stuck as the eternal Oates to the USA's dynamic and forceful Hall (In case you were wondering, Oates' mustache represents Quebec). But enough about them. 

Neil Young is by far the coolest member of this band, and it certainly shows in his songwriting. 'Mr. Soul', although the riff sounds like a shameless ripoff of 'Satisfaction' by the Stones, is a nice slice of mid '60s rock, complete with one of the first examples of Neil Young's awesome soloing. It wasn't all distortion and riffs with Neil, though, as evidenced by his other two songs, 'Expecting To Fly' and 'Broken Arrow'. For whatever reason, he decided to experiment with orchestral arrangements that sound completely unlike anything else on the album. 'Expecting' is a nice enough song, if a little bland, but 'Broken Arrow' is about as overtly psychedelic as Neil ever got, awash in sound effects and bizarre jazz interludes, and even a live recording of Mr. Soul just for the hell of it. All those sound effects result in a relatively disjointed song, but I think it works in its favor. It's by far the most interesting song on the album.


Stephen Stills, the other major figure in the band, has his own share of good songs that aren't quite as interesting. 'Bluebird' is probably his best song here, with oh-so-groovy harmonies that just scream Sixties and a banjo-driven coda, because there haven't been nearly enough banjos on this list. 'Everydays' is an interesting experiment into what psychedelic lounge would sound like if anyone cared to make it a genre, and 'Rock and Roll Woman' is so sixties it hurts.


Oh, and there was another guy who wrote songs named Richie Furay. His songs are fairly nondescript, except for 'Good Time Boy', the sore thumb of the album with its punchy brass arrangements and its SOCK IT TO ME vocals like the band decided to be Aretha Franklin for a day. It doesn't quite work.


At the end of the day, this album didn't really blow my mind or make my jaw drop to the floor with its amazing musicality or songwriting innovations, but it was a very well played record, without any true failures, and even a couple strong standouts! And perhaps most importantly, it's got Neil Young. 8/10

79. Country Joe and the Fish - Electric Music for the Mind and Body (1967)

1. Flying High
2. Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine
3. Death Sound Blues
4. Porpoise Mouth
5. Section 43
6. Super Bird
7. Sad And Lonely Times
8. Love
9. Bass Strings
10. Masked Marauder
11. Grace

After being relentlessly beaten into submission by finals, it is once again time to remember there's a blog going on. And what better way than with this day-glo artifact of the '60s? This album contains most of the psychedelic tropes that we know and love: incredibly cheesy organ, a bunch of mind-expanding jargon in the lyrics, including a particularly subtle bit where "LSD" is whispered at the end of a song....it's music that you can put over a montage of hippies dancing in parks and then sell to baby boomers. They'll eat it up.


This album isn't really what anyone would call catchy, but Country Joe and his ilk make up for it with psychedelic inventiveness. There's a pretty good range of sounds on here, from psych-blues ('Death Sound Blues', shockingly enough!) to a couple of longer tracks where the band lets their considerably long hair down and gets to jamming. 'Section 43' is a standout and just might be the best song on the record, but 'Grace' just sort of meanders along without any sense of where it's going to go.


There's honestly not a lot to write here about this album. It seems to function more as a sort of time capsule to 1967 San Francisco as it actually was, not how it was romanticized in a series of bland pop hits about wearing flowers in your hair and what have you. Like the 13th Floor Elevators before them, these guys were waaaaaaaay too freaky to possibly land a hit record. But when you have a song about making LBJ take acid, who needs hits? 8.5/10

78. The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)

1. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
2. With A Little Help From My Friends
3. Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds
4. Getting Better
5. Fixing A Hole
6. She's Leaving Home
7. Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite
8. Within You Without You
9. When I'm Sixty Four
10. Lovely Rita
11. Good Morning Good Morning

12. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)
13. A Day In The Life

Well, shit. You complain about this book starting a year off badly and then you get one of the most famous albums of all time dropped on you. I don't know who put these albums in order, but they sure as hell did a fantastic job of confusing everybody!

So, here we are, Sgt. Pepper. Unlike some of the more obscure albums I've reviewed so far, you're more or less bound to know this one. Seriously, if you haven't heard this by now, you must be under several layers of rock and halfway through the process of turning into fossil fuels. This album is one of those very special albums that gets a massive cult built up around it, one that renders it nearly impossible to badmouth it in any way, no matter how much I wanted to. Not that I would really need to, since I'm so biased towards the Beatles that you'd think Apple was giving me a stipend.

Listening to this album years and years after the event can make one wonder how on earth this came to be known as the greatest album of all time. A very good collection of songs, to be  sure, but the greatest album ever? Well, not quite. I've always had a bit of an axe to grind where this album is concerned, but that's only because I'm a snob who thinks Revolver is better anyway. When an album is acclaimed to the hyperunrealistic degree that this is, it's inevitable for a bit of backlash to occur.

The only real thing that bugs me about the constant barrage of praise for this album is the constant parroting that this is the first concept album ever. This is blatantly untrue. For one, the phrase 'concept album' can be applied loosely enough that Frank Sinatra's 'In The Wee Small Hours', the very first album reviewed here, could be called one. If you want to get into semantics and argue about 'intellectual' concepts greater than 'sad songs' or 'songs about cars', then I direct you to 'Freak Out', which has a much more solid and significant concept than this one.

Which brings me to complaint #2: This album isn't a concept album. It started as a concept album, sure, but it isn't one. The original idea came after their decision to quit touring in '66, an extraordinarily stressful time for the group that found them wanting to escape their public personalities and perform under the guise of another (fictional) band. And so Sgt. Pepper was born.

...But the Beatles, being human beings, got lazy. So we have two songs and a reprise, and that is all that remains of the album's grand concept. Like almost every other achievement the Beatles made, they were not first, but through the virtues of their immense fame they codified the idea of concept albums for years to come. And all this without even making a proper concept album!

Much of the album's reputation stems from the reception it received at the time. This album plowed into the music world with the force of an atomic bomb. The reception was so huge that even the mainstream press had to take notice. A review in the London Times called it "a decisive moment in the history of Western civilisation", which, while it seems a bit much, perfectly encapsulates the reaction many people had to this album. Before Pepper (BP?), rock music was frequently derided as meaningless music for teenagers that could never aspire for greatness or to be labeled by that lofty term, "art", not like jazz music. This album changed all that. From here on we enter fully into the Age of the Album. It is perhaps symbolic that this would be the Beatles' first American LP that would be left untouched by Capital Records, which had a rather nasty habit of cutting up the track lists of their earlier albums, making a bunch of weird patchwork albums. Needless to say, the Beatles didn't like that very much at all. No more of that nonsense, though. From here on, the album would be fully acknowledged as a genuine artistic statement. And even if this album does suffer from being overrated, any album that has that on their claim to fame is alright by me.

So, I've written all these big lofty paragraphs about how this album was an Event, but I haven't even mentioned any of the songs yet. Christ, Pitchfork oughta hire me.

Despite my whinging earlier, this really is an exceptional album. You've got the iconic intro, replete with sound effects, followed by Ringo getting a song that, for once, isn't way worse than the other members' songs. It's nice that they finally threw Ringo a bone for once. Sure, Ringo may never be an amazing singer, and Joe Cocker's well known cover knocks this song out of the park, but forget all that. Give Ringo some credit for once!

'Lucy' has always amused me on some level. John Lennon's famously denied the LSD allegations over and over, but with lyrics like that, not to mention the sweet acid-fried haze that the song's trapped in, who does he think he's fooling?

Following this, we get 'Getting Better', 'Fixing A Hole', 'She's Leaving Home'...a veritable Paul blitzkrieg. Come to think of it, Paul seems to be doing the heavy lifting on this album, taking up half the record while John gets a paltry 3 and a half songs. The first two tracks' boundless optimism and cheery feeling are perfectly deflated by the depressing 'She's Leaving Home'. With that harp intro and those oh-so-melodramatic strings, it's merely inches away from sliding into unbearably sentimentality. However, one of McCartney's greatest gifts in the Beatles was his ability to fall just short of that line, making cheesy sentimental pop music (famously derided as 'Paul's granny music' by Lennon during that period where he couldn't let a day pass without bitching about Paul and the Beatles), music that is undeniably syrupy, but somehow without leaving a bad taste in your mouth. And as if that wasn't enough, he does the exact same thing in 'When I'm 64', whose music hall atmosphere sounded dated even then.

George is no slouch either, even if it may feel that way on first listen, since he only gets one song, and his role as lead guitarist was rather diminished in the wave of their studio craziness. He still finds time to throw down bitchin' solos here and there, and he's definitely brought the Indian influence up a notch. 'Within You Without You' seems to be the most disliked track here, being a five minute raga-influenced piece with rather preachy lyrics, but forget the haters, this track is fire. Seriously, listen to it again.

I've always felt that 'Mr. Kite' is the underrated gem on this record, for some reason. Although the lyrics reveal Lennon's sheer songwriting laziness that plagued him throughout their later period, taken almost completely from a 19th century circus poster, the song's instrumentation is nothing short of magical. It seems hard to believe that the instrumental breaks were written by humans.

And finally, we can't really go too far without mentioning 'A Day In The Life', can we? This song represents one of the last true songwriting collaborations between John and Paul, mashing their two individual songs together to make a combination that would melt faces for all time. The way the orchestra just keeps building and building...it still sounds jarring today, I can only imagine how it must've sounded back then. While A Hard Day's Night, released a mere 3 years before this (can you believe that?) has one of the most iconic opening chords of all time, Pepper has the most iconic closing chord-a dramatic,climactic finish that closes the curtain on an era in rock history, but not without showing a glimpse of the exciting turns yet to come. 10/10

77. Nico - Chelsea Girl (1967)

1. Fairest Of The Seasons
2. These Days
3. Little Sister
4. Winter Song
5. It Was A Pleasure Then
6. Chelsea Girl
7. I'll Keep It With Mine
8. Somewhere There's A Feather
9. Wrap Your Troubles In Dreams (And Dream Your Troubles Away)
10. Eulogy To Lenny Bruce

EEEEEEEEEY NICO MY CAAAHSIN! WANNA GO SHOOT SOME POOL?!

Actually, never mind. This album would sound terrible if it were in Grand Theft Auto 4. I'd be way too moody to kill anybody. It'd be the most miserable thing in the world. This album is the sort of thing you'd play in a coffee club to chase out the bourgeois. It's "chamber folk" which as far as I can tell means they forgot to tell the string section to leave the recording studio.

Despite my snarkiness, this is a highly compelling album. It's beautiful, cold, forlorn, and if you listen to it like I did, lying on the Squiggle staring into the stars, it can even be spellbinding. You might remember Nico from the super-acclaimed Velvet Underground debut, and most of the members of that group were involved with writing and recording the album in some way. Save for one song , though, you wouldn't really know it. This is music far removed from the famed discordance of the Velvet Underground. While their music is perfectly suited for interpreting the throes of heroin addiction, the music here is tailored towards its subjects. Take 'Chelsea Girls', the toe-tapping (well, if you haven't got a pulse...) title track. It's already a sad song as it is, but when you factor in the oh-so Baroque strings and Nico's strange emotionally detached German voice, it becomes nearly heartbreaking. Listen to the flute, man. According to an interview given years later, Nico didn't like this album because she had very little creative control over how it would sound, and she hated it, particularly the flute: "But the flute! The first time I heard the album, I cried and it was all because of the flute." Well, so did I, but that's because it's a sad fuckin' flute, man! Take that away and the song loses so much of its tragic melancholy air!


Basically what I'm saying is that I am better than Nico at music. What's she gonna do, haunt me?


Oh yeah, there are other songs here too. Including, much to my surprise, two rather good songs written by a 19 year old Jackson Browne! Speaking as a fellow 19 year old, fuck you. Pretty much all the songs on this album follow the same formula, except for the sore thumb 'It Was A Pleasure Then' which is where the Velvet Underground sound comes out of nowhere. Psychedelic, discordant strings, eh? I'm not quite sure how I feel about this song. There were aspects of it that I liked, particularly some moments at the beginning that were downright Sigur Ros-y 30 years too early, but I don't really like how completely different it is from every other song on the album. If it had been placed elsewhere, perhaps it would be recognized for the beautiful (if slightly misshapen) snowflake that it is.


This album didn't necessarily seem like an album that I would enjoy, but maybe it's just the overcast skies, the autumn air, and my general moodiness as of late that  made this album speak to me so much. Whatever it is, it's certainly nice to find an album that soundtracks my setting so well, even if it is on a pre-ordered list. I guess sometimes things just work that way. 9/10