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peteryoung
Led Zeppelin, Physical Graffiti, 1975
Joe Walsh, But Seriously, Folks..., 1978
Dire Straits, On Every Street, 1991
Toto, Kingdom of Desire, 1992
Joe Satriani, Engines of Creation, 2000
Led Zeppelin, Physical Graffiti, 1975
Few bands have suffered in the transition from vinyl to CD in the way that Led Zeppelin have, not least their famously expensive and interactive album covers which are now reduced to mere pictures and at a fraction of the intended size: when the release of the double album Physical Graffiti was delayed Robert Plant was obliged to explain it with a cryptic "We're having trouble with the windows!", leaving everyone completely mystified (and mentioning this now will also mystify anyone who has never seen the complexity of the original album cover, haha.) I reckon there is no better album than Physical Graffiti on which to discover the wonder of John Bonham's drumming; what he does on 'Kashmir' is very hard to pin down: somehow his interpretation of the time signature shouldn't work, but it does, iconically so. My favourite track from this double album has always varied over the years (and the second disc is utterly forgettable), but I'm currently gripped by the belief that 'In My Time Of Dying' has to be one of the most exciting pieces of music I've ever heard. Again, it's mostly down to Bonham: did any drummer ever get as much noise out of his kit in one take as Bonham does in this track's two instrumental parts? Just what the hell is Jimmy Page doing in those two guitar solos? And how do Plant's vocals actually, somehow, lift you past that time of dying? It all somehow defies description, showing that the Zeppelin magic is alive here more so than on just about anything else they ever did. Cough.
Joe Walsh, But Seriously, Folks..., 1978
Punk was already well-established in Britain by this time, but after hearing the wit of 'Life's Been Good' on the radio in 1978 I made it my mission to seek this album out. This was the man who did the awesome 'Rocky Mountain Way', after all, and finding Joe Walsh albums in the UK was not an easy task. So after getting it home and being amused by the strangeness of the cover, I quickly discover that what's inside is barely rock music of any description. In fact it's hardly anything you can pin down specifically. It inevitably veers towards The Eagles, maybe Dan Fogelberg even, or... oh my god, country music? No surely, it ain't that. Definitely not. It must be rock. Isn't it? Yes. Er, maybe. It has strangeness ('Theme from Boat Weirdos'), it has beauty ('Indian Summer') and plenty more to pull you into the water. So while trying to decide simply what this album was during that summer, I must have fallen in love with it because when the sun was out it matched the weather: But Seriously turned a patchy English summer into a Californian one, the kind of climate Joe Walsh lived in every goddamn day of his life... life had indeed been good to him. Hence for me this has become the music for wasting a lazy summer's day while doing very little else, and a blissed-out punk-ignorant Joe Walsh had been telling me that all along: the cover has a swimming pool and a picnic table, combined in a way that was possibly too subtle. This album has stood the test of time by still being too wonderful and far too clever for me.
Dire Straits, On Every Street, 1991
I've always believed this album's title has a hidden meaning because, as I've always understood the music business's unwritten ambition, when you've made it truly BIG you probably have at least one copy of your latest album on every street. Therefore to me this was Mark Knopfler's slightly mocking way of saying Dire Straits probably couldn't get any bigger after Brothers In Arms, and true enough On Every Street was to be their last studio album. It was probably time to quit, anyway. Even if this is a bunch of Brits doing American music as good as, if not better than, most Americans, they didn't give us anything too original or relevant to their home country, being a mostly underwhelming assortment of music designed to provide company to lonesome Texan truck drivers. It still went double-platinum in the UK, mostly on the strength of the single 'Calling Elvis', a song that annoyed almost as many people as it impressed.
Toto, Kingdom of Desire, 1992
It was reassuring that even after reaching the stratosphere Toto could prove they were still a well 'ard rock band after all. As the cream of 1980s American session musicians, Toto always lost some cred by being at the top of that 'R.E.O. Speedforeigner' stack of American radio-conscious AOR. And after your previous multi-million-selling album closes with a trumpet solo from Miles Davis, where on Earth can a legitimate rock band go? Toto were well on a steep descent into mediocrity and irrelevance even before the departure of their lead singer Bobby Kimball, so guitarist Steve Lukather took the band by the balls and squeezed out of them their meanest album, before or since. Lukather's vocals had the rough edge that Kimball's lacked, his guitar was sharper than ever, and drummer Jeff Porcaro proved beyond doubt that he knew precisely and instinctively what percussion arrangement a song needs. You can hear Porcaro's musical intelligence behind every track, though his sudden death after this album shook the American rock scene and threw Toto into tailspin. Nevertheless Kingdom of Desire is a fine statement of what they could do when they really had to: a noticeably stronger, more solid and more honest album than they ever did, only let down by two sub-standard songs (the kid-rock of 'Kick Down the Walls' and the crass power-chord ballad '2 Hearts'). Sadly it has been mostly directionless from there on, though their decent 2002 album of covers Through the Looking Glass seems to have given them some fresh energy.
Joe Satriani, Engines of Creation, 2000
OK, so maybe he's not a dinosaur yet, but he sure is huge. After his earlier definitive album The Extremist established Joe Satriani at the peak of the 'guitar god' league, then shaving off his hair and flirting with electronics on Crystal Planet, Satriani then worked himself up to making another definitive statement, this time on the whole guitar/electronic crossover genre. Engines of Creation is an almost self-aware musical fusion of human creativity merged with cutting edge technology, though Satriani wisely never let the machines take over entirely. The concept is mostly in evidence on the sublime and killing perfection that is 'Borg Sex', in which Satriani's imagination gets the better of him, and it illustrates perfectly the thinking and controlled experimentation that infuses much of the rest of this album. It is often difficult to hear the precise point at which acoustic and electric meet: while the drumming and percussion often sounds perfectly man-made (this album's one tribute, 'Until We Say Goodbye', is to John Bonham) no human being is credited with the drumming anywhere except on that one track, and what Satriani gets out of his guitar is sometimes indistinguishable from a synthesizer. Song titles also give rise to a strong feeling of synaesthesia, a merging and confusion of the senses: 'Clouds Race Across the Sky', 'Flavour Crystal', 'Attack', and again that dangerous 'Borg Sex' – as simple a riff as you've ever heard – which would be perfectly self-explanatory even without the flirtatious male/female middle section. There is a mocking wit to 'Champagne?', all southern dance-hall cheapness dressed up as class, and the concluding title track which through endlessly layered guitars Satriani somehow nails in sound what he feels about the technology he's using. Like other earlier albums, he also could have dropped a few lesser tracks and still given us an album to salivate over. Excellent in parts, then.
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Date: 2004-07-29 05:37 am (UTC)Led Zeppelin CDs
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