I’ve decided to do two more of these, but it’s because I legitimately found 10 more albums I want to revisit. I swear to God, I’ll stop doing these someday, and then you can all get on with your lives.

1)Swans, The Burning World: From 1989, a “folk”-flavored load of the Swans’ usual epic moaning agony. The only song I remembered from it was “God Damn The Sun” and while there’s a few others that are admittedly okay (like “Let It Come Down” and the Blind Faith cover “Can’t Find My Way Home”), that’s likely how things will stay post-relisten. The fact that I forgot the whole thing and had relistened to a few other Swans albums (a lot of which I don’t really like anymore, sadly) recently are the only two factors that would prompt me to even do a relisten. It’s okay; anyone researching this album will immediately find out that Michael Gira hates it. But hey, “God Damn The Sun” really is one of their best.

2)Ride, Carnival Of Light: There’s one (1) really great song on this overlong 1994 album, which was the band’s third–the shoegaze track “Only Now,” which could have fit on the wonderful Nowhere LP with ease. I mention that as a “shoegaze” song even though Ride were known for being among the genre’s highlights because by now they were really just doing Britpop with shoegaze parmesan notes rather than actual shoegaze. Hey, they weren’t entirely bad at Britpop–“I Don’t Know Where It Comes From” is actually better than anything on the same year’s Definitely Maybe, which makes it all the more ironic that Andy Bell, Ride’s frontman, ended up in a lame supporting role in Oasis some years later. You can save “1000 Miles,” “From Time To Time,” “How Does It Feel To Feel” and “Endless Road” too, but for the most part, this is overlong, second rate, and shows a band not really transitioning out of its roots very well. Ride’s fourth album, Tarantula, was such a forgettable piece of fourth-rate Britpop shit that I’m not going to bother with a relisten; that one can stay forgotten. If you didn’t know, the band broke up after that and is almost exclusively known for Nowhere nowadays for a legacy. But if you like Nowhere, hear “Only Now” at least…

3)The Move, Message From The Country: Relistened because the two albums the band did in 1970 were fresh in my mind, even though I’ve actually revisited this one quite a bit more due to the wonderfully electric, raving title track and the elegiac pop-rocker “No Time.” Most of the rest of this album–awkwardly slapped together by Roy Wood, Jeff Lynne and Bev Bevan at the same time they were doing the first ELO album (and after which Roy Wood would drop both projects) admittedly doesn’t measure up to those two, though “The Minister,” “Until Your Mama’s Gone” and “It Wasn’t My Idea To Dance” are alright…but this is the THIRD straight Move album where the bonus tracks–proto-powerpop like “Do Ya,” “California Man,” “Tonight” and “Chinatown” are better than most of the actual album tracks, like Bev Bevan’s silly Johnny Cash parody “Ben Crawley Steel Company.” Despite what an awkward recording it is, I think I might take it over the two 1970 albums, but the whole bonus track situation makes it hard for me to really care which of these three albums is the “best,” and hell, I’d still pick the 1968 Move debut over any of them.

4)The White Stripes, Elephant: Opinions didn’t change here much, though I once thought “Ball And Biscuit” was one of the highlights and now it strikes me as an obnoxious seven-minute Zeppelin pastiche. I actually still love “Seven Nation Army,” overplayed as it is–I somehow never got sick of it the way I did, say, “Beautiful Day” or “The Scientist” or any of the other songs from the 00s that have been beaten to death in the last two decades. The rest? Oh…”The Hardest Button To Button,” “There’s No Home For You Here,” “I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself,” “You’ve Got Her In Your Pocket,” “Girl, You Have No Faith In Medicine” and the novelty at the end with the British girl singing. But I’m not really attached to any of these songs, and I’m not sure the Stripes ever managed a great album, just a handful of songs to make me forget how obnoxious the Rolling Stone hype around them at the time was; overall, this, supposedly their masterpiece, isn’t mathematically better than Icky Thump or De Stijl. Furthermore, none of the old reviews I dredged up cared to mention that the band were already doing rewrites–one song here, the name of which I forget, is obviously just “Let’s Build A Home” redone, and another song seems to be trying to rip off “Rape Me” and “Wild Thing” at the same time. The Stripes have three albums that I never got around to hearing, and I bet you anything I forget to ever listen to them.

5)Sly & The Family Stone, There’s A Riot Goin’ On: It is with a sad, heavy heart that my obliged eight full relistens to this album have thoroughly convinced me that it’s more interesting to read about than to listen to, perhaps one of the biggest examples of that in my history of listening to rock albums. I think at the time I was ashamed to admit that I didn’t really like it very much and I may have said back whenever I first reviewed it that I still found it sort of fascinating. Well…okay, yes, it IS fascinating to read about, and to think of Clive Davis or whoever listening to goofy shit like “Spaced Cowboy” and wondering what in God’s name was going on with Sly Stone, but there were really only two songs I ever remembered from this much-talked-about, much-acclaimed LP: “Just Like A Baby” and “Family Affair,” and that’s because those two are easily the saddest songs on the album…and that’s what we’re all looking for when we listen to/watch/read these “death of the 60s” albums/movies/books, right? Alright, yes, “Spaced Cowboy” is sort of funny and “Time” struck me as interestingly pathetic, and I suppose “Running Away” has a childishness to it that caught my ear…but the rest of these? They don’t seem like some fascinating depiction of breakdown, they just seem like barely-finished skeletons of funk grooves. I tried hard to like it, I really did…but I just can’t. I swear, this isn’t like the musical equivalent of me watching L’Avventura and hating it, or whatever, because I don’t hate it…but I’m honestly not going to revisit very much of it in the future. I also didn’t listen to any Family Stone albums that came after it.