1)Rush, Vapor Trails: I probably should have seen this coming a mile away, since the only song from this I’ve ever felt like revisiting in the 23 years since this album’s release was “How It Is,” a lovely major-key “ballad-rocker” that combines Rush’s energy with a beautiful lilting chorus. Having relistened to the full album ten times, that’s still the only great song. Although I remembered this album getting a positive reception in 2002, it’s become apparent over the years just how many people hated the infamously clippy production; however, I listened to both the original mix and the remix side-by-side five times apiece, and while the remix does sound a bit better, that’s not the real problem with Vapor Trails–the real problem is the other plague of latter-day CDs, which is that the album is 67 fucking minutes long, double-LP length on vinyl, even though nobody thinks of it that way. And it’s all RRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAWKKKKKKKKK. Oh, don’t get me wrong–the band didn’t sound old or out of touch at all, rocking as hard and with as much skill as guys less than half their age. But it’s a fuckin’ sea of RRRRRRRAWWWWWWWWWWK, and the songwriting isn’t better than guys half their age. It all blends together (and I guess it’s here that the production actually starts to be a real problem.) Alright, I suppose “One Little Victory,” “Ceiling Unlimited,” “The Stars Look Down,” “Ghost Rider,” “Vapor Trail,” “Secret Touch”…yes, that’s a lot of okayish songs, but only one great one. And after “Secret Touch,” there’s almost nothing left–maybe “Out Of The Cradle” verges on okay, but it’s just more enrgy. “Freeze” is frankly excruciating–someone bring back the synths, Alex’s guitar is so annoying! (Note: it wasn’t until reading reviews that I realized that Alex plays almost no solos on the album; that’s one more strike against it.) I never got why “Earthshine” was considered a standout either. This gets a less than favorable rating now; I once thought it was one of their best albums, but maybe I’m just too old anymore.

2)The Move, Shazam!: This holds distinct honors for being the only album I know of where the bonus tracks would make a better album than the actual album. Don’t get me wrong–Shazam! is a good album, but its main six songs are mostly songs I kind of admire historically without being into them all that much. “Hello Suzie” is a good enough hard-rocking start and “Beautiful Daughter” has a nice mincey hook, but the “epic” songs are stretched out to “prog” lengths throguh dubious, jokey means, like something Frank Zappa would think up. I mean, I can admire the band for trying to find a sort of triangulation point between “60s pop,” “art-rock epics” and “heavy rock,” and with a sense of humor to boot, but…but…see, “Fields Of People” has this great astral chorus hook, but the last four minutes of the song are (probably) Roy Wood fucking around with a sitar followed by an interview. “Cherry Blossom Clinic” takes a Move classic, pumps it up, then wastes lots of time on a jokey “guys whistling Bach” section that isn’t funny or entertaining at all. I guess “The Last Thing On My Mind” is somewhat better, but like I said, I sort of “respect” these songs more than I like listening to them. Then the bonus tracks…”Blackberry Way,” “Omnibus,” “Curly,” “This Time Tomorrow,” “Wild Tiger Woman,” “A Certain Something”…THEY ALL RULE. GREAT FUCKING POP TUNES FROM THE FUCKING MOVE. GARRGGGHGHH. I probably won’t ever buy this album, but this must be a record for best bonus tracks ever! The album proper gets a B, with the bonus tracks it’d be an A-, but I don’t count bonus tracks, so it’s a fuckin’ B! (NOTE: Roy Wood doesn’t like this album very much, as the band was going through a miserable pseudo-breakup in 1969-70, so the idea of it being their most acclaimed work is pretty amusing, especially since so much of it is covers and remakes.)

3)Andromeda, Andromeda: This 1969 obscurity features John Du Cann who later joined Atomic Rooster, but I haven’t heard Atomic Rooster. I found this album on a Youtube channel, the name of which I forget, but it had loads of complete 60s-70s rarities. The album plays like the nextus between early hard rock, 60s psych, and art-rock suites–the best of which is “Turn To Dust,” a three-part, 7 minute epic that starts with a wonderful, driving section suggesting a hard-rocking, no-keyboards Moody Blues, then moves to a lovely guitar instrumental that hits the exact vibe (albeit with a different tempo) that R. E. M. would nail 14 years later with “Sitting Still.” It’s beautiful, and would make my top 500 songs list without any hesitation, and I’ve returned to it many times. I kind of forgot the rest of the album though, which back in the day I would have puffed up into being better than it was because of “Turn To Dust.” Still, if you like that, there’s a few other solid songs, like “Now The Sun Shines” (ballad), “The Day Of The Change,” “I Can Stop The Sun” and parts of the 8 minute closer “When To Stop.” I was probably patting myself on the back to much for “discovering” a rarity, but this album is still worth hearing for those who think they’ve exhausted the late 1960s.

4)Pere Ubu, Cloudland: Can Pere Ubu write slickly produced, catchy pop songs for a 1980s audience? Sure–for about half an album, David Thomas and company do a stellar job at exactly that, and they were trying to, just to see if they could. I always loved the happy, energetic “Bus Called Happiness” and the “MTV hit” “Waiting For Mary,” but how could I froget “Ice Cream Man,” “Race The Sun,” the chugging “Love Love Love,” “Why Go It Alone,” “Breath”…yeah, that’s a lot of catchy, cartoony Pere Ubu popsterpieces, perfect stuff that calls up a late-80s/early-90s Golden Age of They Might Be Giants, Pee Wee’s Playhouse the Pixies, Salute Your Shorts and “Shiny Happy People.” BUT…the rest of the album is completely forgettable, boring junk. Seriously, not a ONE of the songs I didn’t list sticks in my head when the album is over. It’s split RIGHT down the middle–for every wonderful song on this album, there’s a bad one. So it’s only a half successful experiment–when I began hearing those pop classics, I began to think I’d re-stumbled upon a lost Ubu classic, but now I’d give it pretty much the same grade I gave it the first time. Still, picking up the CD, on the one in a zillion chance I ever see it used nowadays, would be nice to have “Bus Called Happiness” blaring in my car…

5)Love, Da Capo: Five out of seven ain’t bad, I guess. This would get about the same score it got the first time, but it’s inferior to the debut, despite being far more “important” to the 1960s. “Oue Vida!,” “Orange Skies” and “She Comes In Colors” are all still great California sunshine pop songs, replete with a flutey jazz influence (they had a flute guy on this album, Tjay Cantrelli), and that’s what I’ve revisited from the album over the years, those three. “Stephanie Knows Who” isn’t bad, though, and I can at least respect the hit “7 And 7 Is” for being the single nastiest, hard-rocking song of 1965-66, making The Who or whoever look like pussballs by comparison! “The Castle” isn’t memorable though, and as we all sadly know, including the band members themselves who roundly hated the song, the 18 minute “Revelation” is historic for being rock’s first side-long track and also for being its first terrible side-long track. It hasn’t gotten one bit better, either, making me wonder if I hadn’t actually been dead wrong about Pink Floyd’s “Atom Heart Mother Suite.” But I’m not, and this is still worse than that. Or maybe it doesn’t matter–18 minutes of boring blues rock jamming versus 23 mintues of boring orhcestral spacey slop. You tell me, bruh.

20TH ANNIVERSARY RELISTENS:

6)The Decemberists, The Tain EP: I’m guessing most of you won’t go anywhere near the Decemberists anymore, a cutesy band that built up a lot of steam between about 2003 and 2009 before torpedoing their career with a big gushy rock opera that I’ll bet nobody will admit to liking anymore. This EP contains a single 18-minute “prog” suite composition that you’ve probably all forgotten entirely about–I pretty much had, remembering only the muttered vocals near the beginning where Colin Meloy uses the word “pisser.” After that part, the song goes into a bunch of ironic, mopey sections of varying quality, one of which seems to sound like a female band member murmuring over the electric pianos from the middle of Genesis’ “Supper’s Ready.” At least none of it draws from sea shanties. I can’t quite call this shit–something I’ve been wondering if any classic-era Decemberists will ever actually make me do, because I still like at least one of their full albums and assorted other songs, too. It’ll probably be 20 years before I listen to this again, anyway–it’s rather mediocre on the whole. Or maybe I’ll just forget it entirely again…

7)The Mars Volta, Frances The Mute: Oh look, it’s Music Babble’s all-time favorite album, which sent shivers of prog-rock fever up all of our spines in that baleful summer of 2005! Oh, how we all raced to this board to excitedly spill our many, many golden thoughts on the deep themes and meanings proffered forth by this amazing new “prog” album which would surely make our beloved little nerd genre “mainstream cool” again!!! Wouldn’t it??....err…well, no, actually, I don’t think any big cult formed around this time at all in the two decades since. Prindle was the biggest hater, calling it “rank” and saying it sounded like a “Rush/Prince/Ricky Martin uam session played at 78 RPM”…but that only describes three or four big moments on that album (mostly in the opening and closing tracks.) In retrospect, this album, whatever one thinks of it, simply isn’t very good at being “proggy.” Here’s a track by track breakdown of what is used to stretch this album out to 5 songs, 77 minutes:
1)”Cygnus…Vismund Cygnus”: After an evocative acoustic opening and a kind of give-or-take between softer sections and loud Latin-funk-prog-metal explosions, this would have made a nice 8 minute song, but is stretched out to 13:03 by…a burbling synth note repeated over and over with snippets of crowd noise underneath it!
2)”The Widow” Weepy song stretched out to 6 minutes by weird backwards-calliope-sounding squelchy noises.
3)”L’Via L’Viaquez”: Hard rocking Latin funk-metal rocker with a strong hammering guitar riff for a few minutes, then stretches out to 12 minutes with boring atmospheric jamming.
4)”Miranda That Ghost Just Isn’t Holy Anymore”: The worst offender–a weepy, funereal, bleak-sounding number, but it takes like four or five minutes to even get to the actual song, then collapses for several more minutes after that with go-nowhere sad New Orleans horn noises and atmosphere left over from The Afghan Whigs’ “Omerta” and “The Vampire Lanois.” I really kind of hate this song.
5)”Cassandra Gemini” - An 8 part 30 minute prog monster divided up into separate tracks. The first two parts roll along pretty explosively–there’s a chorus riff in the first part that I’m REALLY sorry to have forgotten–and thankfully take up about a third of the whole running time. The third part is okay for a couple of minutes. Then the whole thing collapses into a bunch of dull Pink Floyd jamming, the kind of one-note crap that was annoyingly used to pad out stuff like “Pigs…Three Different Ones” and “Echoes,” and The Mars Volta are NOT Pink Floyd. There are a couple of reprises at the end.
SO!!!!!!! All in all, that leaves two songs that have more good parts than bad (“Cygnus” and “L’Viaquez”), and about 10-12 good minutes of a 30 minute behemoth! 77 minutes long,and maybe…25 minutes of it are salvageable? I wonder who all from this board is even still listening to this one. I’d give it a C.