82: The Campfire Headphease, Boards of Canada

The Campfire Headphase

In relation to the music press and, from what I’ve heard, fans of the band, I’m going against the grain here in choosing The Campfire Headphase over albums such as Music Has The Right To Children. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy pretty much everything this band releases including Music Has The Right… but there’s no question that this is their guitar album and, as such, my favourite.

From the point that “Chromakey Dreamcoat” blips into my ears, this album is like some kind of chilled-out bliss for me. It’s more relaxed in pace, to my ears, than its predecessors but the use of guitars – albeit heavily treated and often barely recognisable – makes it perfect to my own tastes.

The Campfire Headphase is focused, more determined to find that distillation of ideas and sounds that had been flirted with on their previous albums. Having come to this band a few years after the album’s release (it’s now four years old) and via the stop-gap ep Trans Canada Highway, I find it strange that listening to it always makes me feel nostalgic. There’s a warmth and sense of things past in the sounds here yet hints that there’s positive on the way are never far.

This isn’t an album that will change your life. It’s not an album that will stop war but, it is one that could bring people together, and evokes that laid back, campfire-like vibe of a laid back, time of fun. There’s no negativity or darkness here, there’s a whole new world of melody and an even larger universe of sounds than previously tapped into.The beats aren’t as head pounding as you can get but each listen will reveal more.

Those that turn to Music Has The Right.. and Geogaddi will say that The Campfire Headphase brings nothing new to Boards Of Canada’s sound. They’re right, it doesn’t. It doesn’t need to, it takes the best elements of things previous and distills them into something that represesnts a relaxed look back at all things great. And adds guitar.

If I’m driving home after a gruelling one at the office, you can guarantee that it will be “Chromakey Dreamcoat” I flick the iPod to and by the time that flows into “Satellite Anthem Icarus” I’ll be in a much better frame of mind and the rest of the album becomes like a dream. What more can you really ask of an album?

Chromakey Dreamcoat

Dayvan Cowboy

83: Without You I’m Nothing, Placebo

Without You I'm Nothing

Placebo are a strange band. They’ve gone from crafting impressive, underground-indie music with insectoid like guitar lines and nasal vocals that have never seemed so fitting  as on their debut(with songs like Nancy Boy, Teenage Angst and Bruise Pristine) to a making more synthetic sounds with jagged guitars and near stadium-rock like leanings with a couple of dodgy albums in between (Sleeping With Ghosts and Black Market Music both had their moments though).

To my ears, though, they were never better than they are on Without You I’m Nothing. While lead-single “Pure Morning” suggested a similar sound to their first offering it’s not typical of the album as a whole. The album runs the gauntlet from heavy-hitting, riff-driven belters like “Brick Shithouse” to the slower, more intricate tracks like the majestic “Burger Queen,” the tender “My Sweet Prince” and “Ask The Sea for Answers” which appropriately flows into the title track and album standout “Without You I’m Nothing.”

All the tracks are crafted (especially so in the slower numbers) in a way that suggests each note was achingly gently lowered into place yet somehow still sound natural – all underpinned with Molko’s ever-so-slightly off-key voice that has never sounded better. It ranges from warm butter on silk smoothness to angst-filled edge all the while slightly left of centre to remind you that you’re listening to a band that are still cult-like in their appeal no matter how well tailored the songs.

On a personal level, I had to rediscover this album a couple of years after first listen. I’d traded my original for a copy of Nirvana’s masterpiece In Utero. It wasn’t until later when seeing the elegaic “Without You I’m Nothing” late at night on MTV2 that I got another copy and it’s always the Placebo I album I reach for.

It shocks me when I read the band denying their work before Meds because they never got anywhere near as close to making such a complete and consistently good album as Without You I’m Nothing.

Without You I’m Nothing

My Sweet Prince

84: Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

Wish You Were Here

My first knowledge of anything to do with this album wasn’t a great way to hear it: a local air show with two jet-fighters performing a synchronised display as Shine On You Crazy Diamond played through tinny speakers mounted between souvenir tents selling army surplus and aircraft prints. I was, if memory serves, 12. I don’t remember hearing the music or, I’m sorry to say, it having an impression. I wasn’t even paying attention to the planes, it was one of those days you just want to be somewhere else.

It was probably 5 or more years before I did pay attention to this album and I came to it was most of the world: after Dark Side… It was obviously going to be tough to follow an album like Wish You Were Here had to but, to my mind, this is still an excellent slab of music. Though, I admit, I was torn between seeing this album on my list and placing Meddle on here.

So what makes this album appear here and not another Pink Floyd great that doesn’t have a prism on the cover? Well while there’s only 5 actual tracks on here, and two of them are Shine On.. so only 3 songs, each track represents a move forward for the band. None of them could really be on their previous album(s) and the title track alone should warrant this albums place on may a list.

Welcome To The Machine is suitably dark and forboding. Whirring sounds, buzzes, strained static lead into an acoustic guitar as almost sci-fi keyboards swirl behind and Gilmour sings the first words on the album: “Welcome my son, welcome to the machine.” The song itself, supposedly capturing the theme of the whole project, is a strange and heady mix of whirring, thumping and chugging rhythms that sound like machines (appropriately enough) that run day and night, always going – perhaps a nod to the pressures of constant touring – with space-opera like keyboards and effects with Gilmours crisp, clean and often delicate acoustic guitar work.

Have A Cigar is almost jazz-like in contrast. Rolling bass and electric guitars in what was then a scathing dig at the music industy. While at first it’s nothing special I found myself singing “and by the way, which one’s Pink?” enough to listen to this song a few times and hear all the little joys in the mix. Gilmours guitar squeels low in the mix, for example. It is certainly more straightfoward than anything they’d done before and is almost funk-rock in it’s style and then… well, the rewarding twist is at the end. A finger-blister of a guitar solo that gets cut off, suddenly dropping out into a tinny sound before being lost in radio static and then….

After the radio static and sample, the tv orchestra flourish there’s that unmistakable riff and what has to be one of the greatest songs ever written arrives. Wish You Here (the song) has the lot: David Gilmours simple acoustic duet with himself, harmonies with Roger Waters and a build up to an early example of the type of guitar solo that would later fill (and often ruin) every late Pink Floyd song though here manages to remain on the right side of decency. 

While the album is short on the song-side the long, winding sound-scapes of Shine On You Crazy Diamond (I won’t mention the parts) are always a delight. Written as a tribute to Syd Barrett – who’d shown up briefly during the recording of the album – Shine On You Crazy Diamond bookends the album perfectly. A deligtful melody that expands dreamlike with a leisurely pace, picking up momentum only to loose it again as it drifts through the headphones (best way to listen to it in my mind). I sound like I’m either dropping cliches or smoking a joint, one of the two I’m sure was being done in the making of this one.

A great album and an example of how to follow something as huge as Dark Side Of The Moon and still move forwards. From here Waters would take his battling the music industry imagery further until it reached a head with The Wall but it was never so perfectly balanced with the music as it is on Wish You Were Here.

Have a listen:

Wish You Were Here

Welcome To The Machine

85: Revolver, The Beatles

Revolver

You know, I’ve mentioned before in my New Adventures In Hi-Fi post that I didn’t care for the more mainstream R.E.M and the same applies to my taste in The Beatles. I don’t like, nay, cannot stand the pop fluff that dominated their early stages. While I understand the reasons why it made them huge, songs like “Love Me Do” and the like turn me bored. Accordingly I wasn’t too bothered when a vinyl of this started rotating on my Dad’s stereo one day, expecting more of the same. Instead I found myself listening to a far superior album than what I had associated with the mop-tops and one that would find me digging for more and appreciating them in a whole new light.

While the previous album, Rubber Soul, showed more serious songs such as Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) – which may well appear in my Top 100 songs – and In My Life, Revolver is, to my ears, the idea of the band becoming just that: a band. And a serious one too. This album contained songs of serious stuff. Look at Taxman, George Harrison pouring out his scorn over the then ridiculous rates of tax enforced on their funds. This was The Beatles, only 4 years after their debut, singing lines such as “Should five percent appear too small / be thanful I don’t take it all” over jagged and jarring guitar played by McCartney.

Following Taxman is the gem of harmonies that is Eleanor Rigby and the elegant beauty of I’m Only Sleeping.  “Please don’t spoil my day, I’m miles away, and after all I’m only sleeping;” simply one of the best songs to come on the stereo as you leave for work. Then there’s Love You To, another of the great George Harrison (more on him later in the run down) songs to grace this album, and the first Beatles song to show the influence of Indian music after Harrison’s sitar lessons from the Ravi Shankar.

The use of the Indian music is one of the things that points to this albums defining greatness. Not only was this the point that a band emerged as serious, it was also the point where the Beatles began exploring new sonic possibilities for their sound. Multi-tracked guitars on And Your Bird Can Sing, the nightmare like sound of John Lennon’s vocals on Tomorrow Never Knows and

If you ask me, Revolver lays the groundwork for the likes of Sgt. Pepper and the White Album and their experimentation in sound. If they’d carried on with the pop stuff they would likely continue to be popular but would they have had such a lasting impact and critical impression. They certainly wouldn’t have been a band that I’d listen to and compile so happily, or put in this list. Or would they have had such an impact on, say, Brian Wilson? Everybody knows the legend; that on hearing this album he gets the Beach Boys together to make Pet Sounds, arguably one of the best records ever made.

This album finds the band getting stronger and stronger, Lennon and Harrison taking leaps and bounds in experimental songwriting and McCartney becoming a master songwriter in more traditional, though nonetheless astonishing for it, forms. Listen to Here, There and Everywhere and you’ll realise you’ve heard it at so many romantic junctions and weddings before because it’s a near perfect love song. It’s also one of George Martin’s favourite McCartney songs and those are a pair of ears that know.

There’s only one song on this album I don’t appreciate. Still. Yellow Submarine; I know it’s an easy target for derision, I know it’s a ‘great drug song’ but I still don’t like it. On an album that established the group as a force to be contended with on songwriting terms, I feel this is too silly. It is just my view but then, this is my list.

In the years to follow, though there would only be a few more for The Beatles in terms of a band, albums such as Sgt Pepper and The Beatles (you know, the white one) would be heralded as their best. To me, though, and increasingly growing critics, this is better than them all and is an outright GREAT record and one I’m happy to continually hear on vinyl in it’s original and intended format.

Check out:

Taxman

I’m Only Sleeping

86: Let It Bleed, The Rolling Stones

Let It Bleed

It’s appropriate that this record should follow Pump as for the largest part of their career Aerosmith were often accused of imitating The Rolling Stones.

With the exception of Can’t You Hear Me Knocking, Let It Bleed contains what to my mind are the greatest songs The Rolling Stones ever crafted.

Opening with the force of nature that is the often covered but never bettered Gimme Shelter (or Gimmie Shelter on the original pressings), Let It Bleed swaggers in gently, with what is the aural equivalent of squeaking boots before blowing the doors off. Howling winds, murder, rape and that nagging refrain of “it’s just a shot away” with undoubtedly the very best song the band had and would ever make.

Gimme Shelter itself would warrant an album a high rating but it’s not alone, after the magnificence of the first track the ‘Stones show the blues chops that got them started with a re-tooling of Robert Johnson’s Love In Vain that renders it a near ballad and doubles its length before the band show that Keith Richards’ hanging out with Gram Parsons was infectious with the countrified Honky Tonk Women rebirth Country Tonk.

Then there’s Live With Me which shoots through with a blast of saxophone (that I still think was perfected with Can’t You Hear…) and flows nicely into the more-than-suggestive Let It Bleed where Mick philosphises that “we all need someone we can cream on, and if you want to, you can cream on me.” Charming.
But, then again, this was the ‘Stones of the sixties when they were at their best: sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll sleaze as the rough and gritty alternative to the Beatles rather than the pensioners that still dance on stages around the world today.

The time of this album’s recording is as important to it’s creation as anything else. The end of the sixties, the end of free-love, Vietnam raging and, importantly, The Rolling Stones themselves in turmoil. Brian Jones played on only two tracks and neither of those – Midnight Rambler and You Got the Silver – featured any of his guitar work and he would die before it was released in November(recording work having begun in February). With the decade and the band falling apart and near collapse, the record reflects this perfectly with more than a hint at the dark underbelly of the sixties and numerous songs sounding like they’re about to fall apart.

Monkey Man, for example. Just after the two minute part sounds ready to collapse but is pulled back in with a delightful bit of slide guitar and cascading piano before a near primal strained-vocal from Mick: “I’m a monkeeeeeeeey.”

There are few better ways to close an album or, indeed, a decade that has been one of the most important in music than You Can’t Always Get What You Want. There’s zero chance you haven’t heard this song yet, somehow, it never loses its appeal. Fifty seconds of choir before a soft strumming and lamenting horn usher in Jagger’s alleged answer to the Beatles’ Hey Jude. Love, politics, drugs; they’re all addressed in this one and they’ve never been better so and in such a strangely uplifting way. Surely if you don’t find yourself smiling along at three and a half minute mark as the music struts and swings, there’s something wrong with your mouth, and that’s before the final surge.

The Rolling Stones as philosophers? Perhaps:

” But if you try sometimes you just might find
You just might find
You get what you need, ah yes…”

Here: