Black Flag- Damaged (1981)

This is a very odd debut album for Black Flag. Oh, of course, it's an excellent collection of songs, despite the occasional tiresome exhortation to teetotalism with songs such as "TV Party" (banger though it may be) and "Six Pack"- I, for one, will most certainly be enjoying a bottle of red tonight, and I'd urge you to do the same. And Henry Rollins too...

But yes, a good number of classics on here- "Gimme Gimme Gimme" leading the pack. And yet... by this point, we'd heard many of them before, with earlier singers, and most of these songs had been around a while- 1981 really was awfully late for Black Flag's first album, showcasing a style that they'd sort of already moved beyond by this point.

Then there's Henry Rollins. Not the most technically brilliant singer (Freddie Mercury he is not, to state the bleeding obvious), but this is punk, and he's a magnificent, charismatic frontman- the fact that he's bloody good at stand-up says a lot. He's great. But... many of these songs weren't written for a singer of his style, and it shows.

Still, despite those caveats, this just IS a great collection of songs. Much as this album would've been better if it had been recorded a little earlier, it's undeniably a classic.

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

This is a really difficult album to review in 2025. With this more than any other Beatles album, historical context (especially when it comes to the technology, means everything. And likely goes much of the way towards explaining why, after traditionally topping those lists of best ever rock albums, it's now started to be eclipsed by other Beatles albums.

As a collection of songs, this is extraordinary. We have "She's Leaving Home"; "A Day in the Life"; "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds". Even deep cuts like "Fixing a Hole" and "Good Morning, Good Morning" are capable of burrowing their way into your brain. And yet... strictly as a collection of songs, is it really better than Revolver or Abbey Road, what with filler songs like "When I'm Sixty-Four" or "Lovely Rita, Meter Maid"? I'd say not. But that isn't the point.

A few years ago, I read of younger listeners criticising Abbey Road for what they saw as an awkward gap in the middle, not understanding that this was because of the need to change the record to Side 2! Context is everything. And this album, despite some earlier achievements with Revolver in particular, utterly revolutionised what a band could do in a studio, especially without the need to reproduce those studio effects live. In 1967, the soundscapes of "For the Benefit of Mr. Kite" and "A Day in the Life" would have utterly wowed people, whereas these days we take those studio effects for granted.

So yes, perhaps it is correct to use hindsight and judge this as a collection of songs- certainly great, but not quite the Beatles' best. But we would do well also to remember how utterly innovative this album was in shaping what could be achieved within a studio.

Metallica- ... And Justice for All (1988)

This album is strangely overlooked, having been released between Master of Puppets and the Black Album, both of which get much more attention. And that's odd, because it contains "One", the only song on the album that truly ranks as one of the band's best known. "One" is, of course, a truly great song about something truly horrific, at one the band's first music video and the reason why Metallica ended up owning the rights to the film version of Johnny Get Your Gun.

Yet, that one song aside... this album is strangely unloved. The first album with the painful absence of Cliff Burton, the first with Jason Newsted desperately trying to fill his shoes... and, by all accounts, being given a rather hard time. And, while remastered versions now abound, the album is rather oddly mixed.

And yet... if we consider the songs themselves, they're as good as any collection of songs that Metallica did in the '80s. "Blackened", the title track, "Harvester of Sorrow". This is the last album the band would make with their trademark long songs with a Sabbath-esque structure and all those superbly done transitions before adapting their style towards shorter and simpler songs. And... it deserves more love!

Green Day- Dookie (1994)

 

It's a little odd, with thirty years of distance, to look back at what was a rather formative album of my teenage years.

Yes, I know it wasn't Green Day's first album, or their second, but it's their major label debut (and "selling out" to major labels was much agonised over back then- how times change) and so the album most of us heard first. And... looking back, it made a huge impact. Grunge was in its death throes (despite much good stuff to come) and Californian punk, spearheaded by Rancid, the Offspring and especially Green Day, felt like the ideal replacement. For a few years (after earlier bands like X, the Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, Agent Orange etc had been awesome but not quite mainstream), Californian punk ruled the roost.

And... well, then came Blink 182 and all that pop punk crap, mixing punk with chart pop, literally the least punk thing ever. And... yes, in hindsight, in a certain light this album might seem like a bit of a harbinger of that, full of the laddish angst of a trio of still very young men. Yet, unlike anything Blink 182 ever did, it's awesome. There's not a single bit of filler on here and, even if we ignore the singles, we have songs like "She", "Sassafrass Roots" and "F.O.D."

With thirty years of hindsight, then... an even better debut that it would have seemed at the time.

Black Sabbath- Paranoid (1970)

It's extraordinary, looking back, how Sabbath could have released this second album so soon after the first. I suppose it was an era where rock band worked, toured and wrote much more quiickly. Killing themselves to live, so to speak.

Paranoid is, of course, brilliant. It must surely be the band's most well-known and popular album and, in "War Pigs", "Iron Man" and the titular track, contains some of the band's most iconic songs. Yet there's zero filler here- even deep cuts such as "Hand of Doom" are magnificent. 

There's still a similarity in style from the album's predecessor with the band's signature heavy riffs that evoke unease and horror. Yet this album branches off into different directions and is less dependent on this feel. There's a variation of styles in thos collection of songs, with the band's signature longer track with their superb transitions, but also shorter songs. Bill Ward's jazz sensibilities are allowed freer rein, lot least with his far from pretentious drum solo in "Rat Salad". The band are, by this point, fully formed- heavy, with their own sound, but announcing that they are by no means limiting themselves and reserve the right to explore.

Motorhead- Overkill (1979)

Happy New Year!

I used to listen to this album a lot in my late teens, but for some reason haven't given it much thought for years. Hearing it again today I'm reminded of why I love it so much.

Then again, we think we know Motorhead, don't we? They're a metal band, right, albeit the metal band that it ewas ok for punks to like before Grunge called a truce between the two genres? 

Wrong. And Lemmy always kept telling us so. They're Motorhead. They play rock'n'roll. Oh, they're heavy, but the songs are very much in the rock'n'roll tradition as much as they obviously owe a lot to the heavy rock of the time. But the songwriting is solid, and the songs are catchy, well-constructed if dsimple, and, well, bangers. There's a reason why this is my favourite Motorhead album, and it's the songs. 

Not, of course, that the playing is anything less than great, or the simple yet clean production. And no, Lemmy's not a great singer, but he's a great frontman- and he writes well for his limited range. But, ultimately, it's about the songs. And I'd quite forgotten how bloody good this collection of songs is.

Sonic Youth- Sister (1987)

 I was in the mood for some Sonic Youth, so Sister it is. This, oddly enough, is arguably one of their more well-known and liked long players, yet it doesn't boast many, possibly any, well-known singles. It is, of course, excellent.

Perhaps it's the fact that I listened to this album not long after hearing Marquee Moon again, but Sonic Youth are very New York, aren't they? We think of them as '80s-90s American indie rock or alternative and badge them alongside the Butthole Surfers, R.E.M, the Replacements. Yet their sound owes an awful lot to Television, doesn't it? You could even look forward and say that the sound, if not so strongly the songwriting, of the Strokes has that same ineffably New York sound too.

Yet Sonic Youth are more than just that. They are a seminal part of that New York tradition while also feeding into so many other traditions. There's so much going on with Sonic Youth. They have perfect pop sensibilities, yet every album is a soundscape. Hence the fact that I never pay much attention to the lyrics. I'm aware this album is largely about both Philip K. Dick and Thiurston Moore's dead twin sister, but these things don't really register while listening.

Regardless, this is Sonic Youth at their peak and a superb album.

The Beatles- Abbey Road (1969)

It's time for another Beatles album, and this time my favourite. I know it's fashionable to rave about the later Beatles albums and neglect the earlier ones- a mistake- but this, their last album in spirit if not chronologically, Let It Be featuring a lot of older, slightly retro material- is my favourite.

It's hard to say why and say something new, though. The songwriting at this point is creative and trailblazing while still solid, with none of the out-there experimentalism of the White Album. That's not to say the album isn't full of experimentalism- the second half medley is utterly sublime- but the songwriting remains nevertheless disciplined.

We have Lennon's R&B-esque "Come Together", a reminder that, in 1969, rock music and soul music were yet to quite be separated. In "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun" we have the height of Geoege Harrison's songwriting career, and a reminder of how good he was, and would have remained if he'd occasionally given that bloody slide guitar a rest in his later career.

For me, the best song on the album is "Because", although the medley runs it close. This album, though, is more than the songs that comprise it. More than any other Beatles album, it's as much a soundscape as a collection of songs. It's also the last album of theirs produced by George Martin, not the sort of man you'd expect to come up with such a forward-looking, clear yet trippy sound.

One could argue that rock music peaks here, and all that's left is to explore various side trips. Maybe I'm being a pretentious git. Regardless, I can't see how the Beatles could ever have topped this.

R.E.M.- Automatic for the People

I first discovered R.E.M. via this album, and I know that immediately marks me out, potentially, as a fashion conscious wanker. Let me, then, assure you that i was genuinely seventeen, exploring music, and pointed towards this by no less than Kurt Cobain.

With any band that makes it big, there's a critical consensus on the best album. For R.E.M., it's this. It's uncool to say this is their best album, but... it is. I challenge you to name any filler within this album, single or no.

No? Well then. This is an album where the deep cuts are Ignoreland and Try Not to Breathe, not singles only by mere chance. Like every damned song on the album.

The album, while awrsome throughout, steps up a gear, incredibly, with the ending duopoly of Nightswimming and Find the River. Two sublime examples of songwriting.

This album, more so even than its excellent predecessor, exalted R.E.M. from the unfderground to the mainstream. I'm not so sure that was a good thing. Yet the band deserves success. Such was the tension of ethics back then. Yet R.E.M. will never belong to them. Always to us. They are real.

Killing Joke- Killing Joke (1980)

 

This is uncannily of its time and quite brilliant. The soundscape, the production: both are so different from the much later singles from which I knew the band. Instead, we have a sound that echoes Magazine, Public Image Limited, the zeitgeist of 1980, a year when punk was fractured and all was in play for a decade of defiance.

The sound is exquisite. The vocals are surprisingly either absent or low in the mix. This is fine. In fact, within context, a plus. This is not what I expected.

I shall be seeing this band in March, with my awesome cousin... and a certain very lovely lady. The next Mrs Llamasttrangler. It will be a delicious occasion.

This is not, perhaps, too remisiscent of the later albums by which the band would come to be known. It's very post-punk, if very good. Yet this is a quietly seminal post-punk album, and one that prefigures greater things from the band.

David Bowie- Hunky Dory (1971)

 

It's odd I've never blogged this particular album before. I've got rather deeply into Bowie over the years- and by no means just the albums from The Man Who Sold the World up to Let's Dance that you're supposed to like; he did great work throughout his career, and yes, that includes the '90s.

But conventional opinion has this album as one of his very best, and sometimes, just sometimes, conventional opinion is right. 

It's not just the obvious huge hits- Starman"; "Life on Mars"- the whole album is full of bangers. "Bewley Brothers"; "Song for Bob Dylan"- literally every song on the album is absolutely as good as the singles.

This is the moment where Bowie stops being an artist who merely makes good albums and reveals himself as a genius, with much credit due to the rest of the band, of course, not least Mick Ronson. It's also arguably the best album of the early '70s, and a positive sign of something new for a new decade. 

Chances are high that the next album I blog won't be anhywhere near as good...

Led Zeppelin- IV (1971)

This was the first Zep album I ever heard, back in my mid-90s teen heyday. Inevitably, perhaps; this is the most famous album, and has Stairway to Heaven on it. That's obviously a sublime track, building up and up in a truly epic way. Yet there's so much more to this album than that, from The Battle of Evermore to its true highlight, When the Levee Breaks, which to my ears is right up there with Kashmir as Jimmy Page's masterpiece.

And the band is, lets face it, about Page, with John Bonham and John Paul Jones. Robert Plant is a decent enough singer but in a style which, well, has dated somewhat. It's also true that a hell of a lot of what the band did, far more understood now than it was at the time, could fairly be described as white boys plundering the musical heritage of the Mississippi Delta Blues.

Yet there's far more to them than that, and even at their bluesiest- see When the Levee Breaks- Page manages to develop those influences into something incredible. And, in a case of conventional opinion sometimes actually being right, this is probably their best album.

Metallica- Master of Puppets (1986)

 I suppose this, while not as widely popular as the bestselling Black Album, would be the Metallica album of choice for the cognoscenti. This is partly, of course, because it's the end of an era, being the last album to have been released before the shockingly premature death of Cliff Burton, an absolutely crucial member of the band and songwriter; subsequent bassists would not have anything like his influence. What Metallica would have gone on to do if he'd lived is one of the great "what ifs" of metal. The band would go one to achieve further great things, but there's an obvious discontinuity.

There is, conversely, a continuity from Ride the Lightning to this, not least in the production. But this album shows a real progression. "Call of Ktulu" was a superb piece of musicianship; "Orion" is sublime. And such standout tracks as "Battery" and "The Thing That Should Not Be" are among Metallica's best work. There's no filler here, and throughout we have the perfect blend of deep musicianship and restrained songwriting. The songs are long, often complex, but never over-long or pretentious.

This is, for me, the finest metal album of the '80s.

Alice in Chains- Facelift (1990)

I didn't buy, this, Alice in Chains' first full album, until surprisingly late, around 2006 or so. I used to play it a lot while playing Civilization III, which shows you how long ago that was, but I nevertheless hadn't heard more than the two big singles during the years when "Grunge" was a thing.

This album has always, therefore, been a bit of an artifact from the past for me. It may be from the beginning of theband's career, but I heard it four years after Layne Staley's horrble, squalid, lonely death after a period of years where his life had gradulally narrowed into nothing but video games, filth, and heroin. It's unnerving how "Sea of Sorrow", in its lyrics "You live tomorrow/I will not follow..." foreshadows Staley's death less than twelve years after the album's release.

In 1990, though, this is at one fresh and similar to the later albums we all perhaps know better. It's heavier, more obviously showing their early pigeonholing as a metal band, but otherwise pretty much what you's expect. "Man in a Box" and "Sea of Sorrow" are standout tracks but, while their later albums would improve on this, it stands up bloody well, and preserves an ineffable Seattle-ness in its sound that later albums would not quite be able to catch.

The Cure- Pornography (1982)

This is an early Cure album, from the days when their sound was more of a general soundscape per album than would later be the case. This is, perhaps, not as good as some earlier albums in that there are fewer stand-out tracks; nor does it reach for the fresh new types of sound the band would go on to create straight afterwards. Yet this album is curiously a bit of a grower to the point where, although I wouldn't describe it as a particular favourite, I tend to listen to it quite often. Sometimes you can have a compelling soundscape without particularly stand-out songs, but this is a strangely anonymous Cure album.

And yet the reality behind this album is arguably somewhat more dramatic than any of their other work.

This album is probably the end of an era, the last hurrah of this sort of sound. It's also an aural record of a particular low point, where Robert Smith himself was deeply depressed and the band as a whole were both struggling to stay together and taking lots of drugs. It's an odd listen for me, born in 1977 and therefore far more familiar with the band in their post-Wish incarnation, where they were known to have lots of ironic fun with their gloomy reputation. It can be a shock to hear their early records, this one in particular, and realise that the gloominess is very real indeed.

Black Sabbath- Black Sabbath (1970)

This may be an old favourite of mine, and hardly exploring new ground, but sod it; I've driven from North Tyneside to southern Leicestershire today, and I'm knackered.

But there's value in going back to this very revealing debut album after several years, and finding new stuff in it. It's still at once a soundscape and a collection of distint and extraordinary structured songs all at once. Sabbath have always been known for marrying complex transitions between different sections of the song with an overall coherence, and that's present from the very first, eponymous track, along with the whole damn album. There's the horror, uneasy feel, with the devil's chord and the whiff, as the band have themselves said, of Hammer Horror, very much contemporary.

And yet it's not heavy metal, not that such a thing truly existed in 1969-70. There's a psychedelia feel, and although it's clealy not an album made by hippies it certainly belongs in that context. Except, of course, this is not made by fey middle class aesthetes from Cambridge or California but four very working class lads from Birmingham, a much grimmer place in 1970 than it is now.

This is also clearly an album from before the awful racial segregation of today's mucic indusstry. There's no while "rock and pop" or black "urban". Here we have a rock band which has an extraordinary jazz drummer in Bill Ward who would not be out of place on a soul record, and frequent occasions where the music has, shock horror, a groove. This is an extraordinary album, yes, but very much one of its time.

Iron Maiden- Powerslave (1984)

I suppose, if The Number of the Beast is the one Iron Maiden album one must own, this would be next on the list. The band's later work- including the bulk of the '90s when Bruce Dickinson went AWOL- is unfairly maligned and well worth a listen, but there's no real doubt that the '80s were their peak. And this album, in particular, comes along just at the right time as the band were at their very best. Significantly, it's the first album to feature the same exact line-up as the previous record.

It's a thing of beauty, at once a coherent soundscape and a collection of killer songs like "Aces High" and "Two Minutes to Midnight". This is far from the last time the band will master that little trick, but never again will they do it quite so well. And never again, to date, have they produced an epic to rival the rather long "Rime of the Ancient Mariner", even if they do decide to bloody butcher Coleridge's words, the philistines. Yet, given how bloody good the album is, I shall graciously forgive them.

And doesn't Eddie look good as a pharaoh?

Alice Cooper- Brutal Planet (2000)

 I haven't blogged an album in a while, so here we go.

There's a tendency, with long-established artists, for their early work to be popular and their later work neglected- sometimes justifiably so, sometimes not. It's true that the Rolling Stones haven't done anything interesting since 1972, but the likes of the late lamented David Bowie and the thankfully still with us Neil Young have released albums of varying quality over the years, some of them very good and others not so much. Quite often, though, even the failures are failures for interesting reasons and, well, I'll never stop defending Bowie's jungle period in the '90s.

Alice Cooper, while some albums are better than others, has been consistently good. His hits of the '70s and '80s are justly perennials of rock radio. But Vince is, at heart, an album artist, with both the alchemy required to move with the times and the sureness to remain himself, regardless of whom he collaborates with. This album, for instance, heralds a shift to a harder style of metal which is more or less retained from this point.It does not feel out of place in 2000. Yet nor does it feel so much of its time as to feel dated today, or pandering to fashions. It is simply a confident, quality, contemporary heavy metal record. No more, no less.

In a sense, then, the fact that "It's the Little Things"- Mrs Llamastrangler's favourite Alice Cooper track ever- makes blatant lyrical references to his past hits in the context of moving on stylistically, is revealing. The esteemed Mr furnier does not reject his past, nor does he wallow in it. The title track may be the one that has grabbed the most attention here, yet this is an album without filler.

It's an album worth listening to. And so are its successors.

Hole- Celebrity Skin (1998)

 

This might seem like an odd choice of Hole album to start with, as it's their last real one and in many ways a bit of an outlier, a very different style (more "mainstream" and more "mature", many say).

It's a curate's egg but, like the egg behind that phrase, parts of it are truly excellent. "Celebrity Skin" itself is a superb little rock belter, while "Reasons to Be Beautiful" and especially "Northern Star" are both achingly beautiful songs that manage to be defiant and uplifting on the one hand but ery real on the other. These are two of my favourite songs of all time, with the result that I don't really care that much of the rest of the album is filler: these two songs are worth it.

The overall sound is odd, I suppose. There's certainly little obvious sign of Billy Corgan's supposed influence. But the song structures are in many ways quite mainstream, even AOR on the surface, but there's something about the "realness" of it all that stops me from seeing this album as any kind of sellout- perhaps charitably. Those two songs really are that good.

Franz Ferdinand- Franz Ferdinand (2004)

I first heard of this band in the pags of the NME- remember that? 2004 wasn't that long ago, but it feels as though it was in the midst of an age where music was curated by the music press and things could never be otherwise. In fact, it was an age that would not really outlast the decade, but it certainly didn't feel like that in 2004 despite Melody Maker having already rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible.

I had long hair then and have long hair now, and have always identified as being a sort of metalhead and sort-of post-punk type, albeit with omnivorous tastes. But by 2001-ish I'd abandoned Kerrang!- it was getting too tabloidy for me, and I just didn't like all these yelping post-punk bands with prominent rhythm guitars and still don't- and turned more often to the NME, which in the wake of the Strokes was full of indie bands (by the '00s definition) which looked askance at Coldplay, landfill indie and such dreariness and instead turned to influences such as Wire and Devo, roducing gloriously weird stuff before fizzling out; indie music had sort of become dreary again by 2007 or so, and has mainly remained so ever since.

But this album... how glorious, how weird and yet how addictive. It's song structures are often odd yet it's full of top tunes, spawning a huge number of singles and yet the best song on here- "Auf Achse"- isn't even a single. Let this album stand as the utimte symbol of an age when indie music was actually exciting.