For as long as I’ve moved to rating things out of 5, Rumours was my go-to example of a commonly accepted 5 star masterpiece. It’s a perfect cultural object, and it’s been rediscovered repeatedly my entire life. My friends and I found it through Rock Band 2’s inclusion of “Go Your Own Way” – then another generation through “The Chain” in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 – then another through the “Dreams” longboarding cranberry juice TikTok. Part of the reason this album can keep being rediscovered is that every one of its eleven songs could be the song of a generation. I guarantee “Second Hand News” will get its day in the sun.
Of course, when you bring up Rumours, the instant association is with its mythology. A web of infidelity and broken hearts. If you’re a lyric-first listener, this is a vulnerable, rich text, and its legacy would be secured by that alone. But what makes Rumours such a consensus masterpiece is that you can just as easily zone out the lyrics’ meaning and purely enjoy the sound. Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, and McVie sing almost every song with an impressive degree of remove, delightful break-up pop in the same vein as The Beatles’ White Album.
The exceptions, where I feel the weight of pain is really allowed to break the mask, are “The Chain” and “Oh Daddy.” The former’s blues intensity is shaped around Mick Fleetwood’s drum kick, but it’s the Buckingham/Nicks vocals that ascend the song into a ritual of divorce. Christine McVie provides backing vocals on the song as well, but “Oh Daddy” is really her chance to turn her back on the brave face of “You Make Lovin’ Fun.” It’s a more traditional pop ballad of the era, but the plaintive lead goes perfectly with Buckingham’s slinky guitar line.
Pop is mastered by the interplay of John McVie’s bass lines, Christine McVie’s keys, Buckingham’s guitar parts, and Fleetwood’s percussion. Everyone is so thoughtfully building every perfect structure with so many delightful musical details and fills. It makes every listen an opportunity for rediscovery. That interplay is really what makes Rumours so special to me. Its legacy as metatext is fun to talk about, but I think more than anything, the band poured their newfound independence into embellishing sonic opportunities with solid gold.
KEY TRACKS: “Dreams,” “The Chain,” “You Make Lovin’ Fun,” but also all of them!
Richard D. James, better known as Aphex Twin, referred to his most recent full length album as his “poppiest album yet.” I don’t know that I necessarily think anything here is more accessible or friendlier than “Alberto Balsam” or “Windowlicker,” but relistening to Syro, I’d forgotten just how melodic and beautiful the album tends to be. The earworm that’s been in my brain for a decade is “180db_[130]”, maybe the album’s most frantic dance cut, high drama that fits voguing or an evil movie nightclub more than an actual night out. When I spend time away from Syro, that harsh synth melody overtakes the more austere beauty of “XMAS_EVET10 (thanaton3 mix)” or “”syro u473t8+e” (piezoluminescence mix).”
You’ll also notice, if you’re unfamiliar with the album, that unless you’re listening to it so frequently you’ve got these titles memorized, that the album resists identifying individual tracks. According to James, the album consists of ideas written over six or seven years, none he considers forward-looking experimental music, all of which he considers ruminations on the past. The variation on this we might be more familiar with are letters and poem series, titled by date or sequence rather than by something more poetic and evocative. Most interpretations of the track titles here are descriptions of gear and technical detail – “minipops 67 [120.2]” refers to the MiniPops drum machine, likely take 67, set at 120.2 BPM, lord knows what a source field mix is. The album cover includes a record of the album’s production and promotional costs. Despite being a “pop album,” this is a documentation of a period of time more than a Concise Statement.
I’m as far from a scholar of electronic music as they come. I hear stuff, like what I like, integrate it into my playlists, and roll on. So when people say this is a culmination of thirty years of electronic music history, I believe them. I hear playful reverie, memories of holidays past, reflection on a quiet afternoon. I hear the soundtrack to a nightmare movie rave. I hear a feeling that the form has been mastered and now it’s simply about the pleasure of creation. These thoughts are abstract, and I’m not sure I could map them for you directly to a timestamp or even a track title. By disconnecting the music and its context, James has created a throughline from electronic instrumental music back toward the sort of classical roots. This album exists because the studio and equipment to create it existed and demanded to be played.
James has continued to make music, releasing EPs every few years rather than full length albums. He’s toured once in that time and played sporadic festivals as well. Based on the teaser timeline set last year leading to the EP “Blackbox Life Recorder 21f/in a room7 760”, he’s due to disappear for another couple years before giving us another bite sized update. Between Syro and the previous full length album, Drukqs, James claimed he’d written six unreleased albums. It’s possible that like some classical composers before him, there are hundreds of recordings we won’t hear until a century has passed. I hope selfishly to get to hear some of his beautiful sounds sooner.
I can’t remember if I found “How We Met, The Long Version” through Spotify’s recommendation algorithm or Pitchfork’s Best New Music – I read it regularly, having just started my tradition of making seasonal playlists and needing more new music than I ever had in my life prior. It’s an extremely catchy groove, but it’s heavily playing off the sample of Jackie Stoudemire’s “Don’t Stop Dancin’” with a Daft Punk style production (think “Harder Better Faster Stronger” and its relationship to “Cola Bottle Baby.”) What makes “How We Met, The Long Version” a Jens Lekman song is the lyrics, which tell the story of the start of a romantic relationship – dating back to the Big Bang. It comes across as a maybe tongue-in-cheek observation in isolation, to romanticize a love story that starts with borrowing a bass guitar by syncing about trilobites and crustaceans evolving to the point where love is possible – but, I think, to assume that it’s in anyway less than genuine is to misunderstand Lekman’s lyrical project.
Life Will See You Now is, by and large, a series of relatively mundane anecdotal story-songs set to disco and new wave pop. In “Our First Fight,” a song with a tripping samba rhythm, Lekman’s conversational baritone delivers “I love you” and “No, I haven’t finished Season 3” in the same beautiful, neutral vocal tone, though that doesn’t stop a playful “Woo-hoo!” from taking center stage in the song’s climax. On “To Know Your Mission,” Lekman tells a story of meeting a Mormon missionary and telling him that he knows his mission – that “in a world of mouths, I want to be an ear” – that writing these songs and sharing these stories is the highest purpose. I think, for that reason, Lekman generally removes drama from the music and his singing, instead allowing the lyrics to build narrative momentum over music that remains playful and agile.
That’s not to say there’s no musical build-up, though. The way “Evening Prayer” or “Hotwire the Ferris Wheel” (in my book, the two best songs on the album) build from humbler sonic beginnings to their final harmonies overwhelms me to the point of tears. “Evening Prayer” tells the story of two men meeting for beers after a successful cancer treatment, melts me. It chooses the friend instead of the cancer survivor Babak as its perspective character, who sits in deep anxiety about whether or not he and Babak are actually close enough friends for it to not be weird how deeply he worried for his sick friend. The eventual resolution is a tearjerker, and Loulou Lamotte’s harmonies in the final chorus send it home swinging for the fences.
“Hotwire the Ferris Wheel” sounds, more than anything else, like the Wii Sports theme song, and tells the story of comforting a struggling friend by literally breaking into the carnival. It slowly builds up to the title, a chorus which soars as an anthem, and then reaches its real confessional. Feature singer Tracey Thorn comes in to beg Jens, “If you’re gonna write a song about this, please, don’t make it a sad song.” Whether or not this is entirely fictional or, to any degree autobiographical, I think Lekman is once again returning to the confessional of “To Know Your Mission” – whether the stories are true, the feeling of what it means to listen and share stories is intimate, at times uncomfortable.
One of my other favorite moments on the album comes in “Wedding in Finistère” (I should mention, Lekman is Swedish, occasionally apparent from pronunciation more than from the lyrics.) The song tells the story of a somewhat sardonic exchange at a wedding, joking that it feels like getting married is where life ends when it’s supposed to be where it begins. But, then, suddenly, in the chorus, the sense of perspective zooms out, to generations watching the generation prior disappear into reverie.
Five-year-old watching the ten-year-olds shoplifting Ten-year-old watching the fifteen-year-olds French kissing Fifteen-year-old watching the twenty-year-olds chain-smoking Twenty-year-old watching the thirty-year-olds vanishing
This section is sung at almost double-tempo of the rest of the song (hell, the rest of the album,) flying into a propulsive hand clap game. Lekman claims he wrote this the day after a longtime friend told him she was pregnant, which made him feel the weight of time and his own sense of immaturity compared to where she was at in life. This moment reminds me so much of a moment in Genzaburo Yashino’s “How Do You Live?” in which our protagonist, a boy named Copper, realizes for the first time that the hundreds of cars driving back into Tokyo are, in fact, people, who all have their own lives and their own families and their own uncles. That when he and his uncle drove to the building he’s watching from, they may have been watched by someone from that very building, and this sudden sense that he is a part of the world and not its center makes him feel like a droplet in the tide. In the world of drama, the world of music, these are small revelations.
KEY TRACKS: “Evening Prayer,” “Hotwire the Ferris Wheel,” “Our First Fight,” “Wedding in Finistère”
Not one of the eight Flaming Lips albums before The Soft Bulletin is a bad album. They’re all very solid indie rock. The base pleasures of Wayne’s singing and their riff-writing maintain a solid development period. But the best Flaming Lips songs prior to The Soft Bulletin are fun diversions, often intentionally so. “She Don’t Use Jelly,”“This Here Giraffe,”“Turn It On,” these are fun songs (and in fact, I miss some of that Primus-adjacent spirit of “Turn It On” in their later years!) but they aren’t anthems.
The Flaming Lips ascend to the mainstream with The Soft Bulletin, its more complex musicality rivaling the intricacy of Radiohead’s OK Computer in a format more accessible than the four-LP experiment of Zaireeka. But, really, I think it’s less the complexity that attracted the mass attention that would allow them to blossom into one of America’s great rock bands with Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots and instead the escalation of stakes in their music. This happens lyrically, but it also happens sonically – the melodies are soar, and those new instrumental layers and drum machines arrive in sequence across each track’s runtime. This is not the maximalism of the 70s brought back directly – it’s repeatedly stripped back across the album down to the sound they mastered as indies.
I get that some people will never enjoy Wayne Coyne’s voice. It’s almost impossible to express how inescapable “Do You Realize??” was when I was a teenager. In the time right after Limp Bizkit and alongside James Blunt and Mika, I got very used to his thin, often pitchy lead vocals. I think it never sounds better than on The Soft Bulletin, where on a song like “The Spiderbite Song,” it disarms the Queen-like piano and drum arrangement and keeps a sense of humor around the lyrics. It makes him sound small enough that these near-misses with death could have destroyed him. That his final verse avoids talking about his own father’s death feels like he understands the character he’s built on The Soft Bulletin.
It’s this juxtaposition of soft-and-strong that makes The Flaming Lips a perfect anthem band for 1999. It lends a sincerity that the adult contemporary bands of the early 2000s like Coldplay and Train never bridged. Stripping back to the quietude of “What is The Light?”’s piano and bass drum intro or allowing nearly two full minutes of “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate” to pass before allowing any percussion to re-enter lends indie cred that kept The Flaming Lips cool. Well – sure, critics and audiences thought they were cool, but I just mean that I think they’re cool too.
IN THE COURT OF THE CRIMSON KING King Crimson 1969
I’ve been trying to be cool enough to enjoy King Crimson since hearing the iconic “21st Century Schizoid Man” sample in Kanye West’s “Power.” As a teenager, I wasn’t ever able to access the split between that track and the remaining four. The instrumental groove on “Moonchild (The Illusion)” is the kind of thing I used to get impatient with – now, I appreciate being peppered with small, fragmentary sounds. I’m more attracted to songs like “I Talk To The Wind” and “Epitaph,” adoring their sweet sadness. In the Court of the Crimson King’s loose, relaxed songs primarily anchor themselves on Greg Lake’s plaintive vocals and gorgeous, low-key instrumentals.
You can hear in “21st Century Schizoid Man” and “In The Court of the Crimson King” the germ of progressive rock’s experimentation with major tempo shifts and extended jazz instrumental breakdowns. But the titles there betray a semi-mythical status the songs don’t necessarily employ – the lyrics throughout the album are closer to the poetics of folk music than the arcane mythology of Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s later “Karn Evil 9” or the rock opera of Rush’s 2112. The “21st Century Schizoid Man” is a survivor of war. The title track has medieval themes, but is in line with Dylan’s “All Along The Watchtower.”
The later evolution of the Tolkienesque and science fiction in progressive rock is what I anticipated hearing that future blast through that opening riff, that vocal distortion effect, the absolute chaotic ramp into high tempo chaos. I was really into Stephen King, Mass Effect, and Dungeons & Dragons at the time. I don’t blame that kid for not enjoying the pleasures of Ian MacDonald’s woodwind solos – now, I really adore them. This being the inaugural album for this birthday project, it feels apropos that it’s one that had to grow on me over thirteen years.
KEY TRACKS: “21st Century Schizoid Man,” “I Talk to the Wind”
All My Friends 