I really, honestly, seriously cannot find anything else in my old lists to revisit like this. I’m kind of glad I’m not going to be doing them anymore, anyway.

The Stone Roses, Second Coming: This was all about being big and slick and epic-CD-length (opening is 11 pain in the ass minutes long, four of which are ambient jungle noise–berk!!!) and “it’s the mid 90s now and we’re BACK!!!” first, and writing good songs second. I always wondered about this one, giving it a passable rating about ten years ago because it seemed like there was something going on with it, that it couldn’t be so easily dismissed…but now I’m pretty damn sure that there’s maybe four or five songs here I find worth relistening to, tops, meaning that it deserves comparison to 1994’s other slick bloated bellyflop....yeah, The Division Bell. That’s really a better comparison than you’d think, despite the bands being from two different generations, both failed badly at trying to make a mid-90s CD. Oh, okay, this isn’t THAT bad, because at least I like a few songs all the way through (on the Floyd album, I only like parts of about four songs), and…no surprise, they’re the ones that sound like the pretty, dewy-eyed stuff from their debut, with “How Do You Sleep” (shouldn’t they have left the Beatles allusions to Oasis?) coming across the best in its chorus. “Ten Storey Love Song” and “Your Star Will Shine” are okay, but let’s face it, neither is “Waterfall,” or even “This is The One.” The overblown production drowns the band’s identity, and this was pretty much just John Squire’s album anyway. You know what most of the reviews I was able to even find compared this to? LED ZEPPELIN. And yeah, Squire does fill these songs out with a lot of bombastic classic soloing, which is proficient technically but not very memorable–maybe Squire should have tried second rate prog rock if he’s gonna do that? As far as trying to be “danceable,” I guess “Begging You” and “Love Spreads” are sort of good for a laugh. But honestly, me and this album are done.

2)The Rolling Stones, Between The Buttons: (UK Versions) Another album where little over half the album is good…the first half, really. I always loved “Yesterday’s Papers,” one of their best weird songs, with that vibraphone, and I think I’d prefer considering this UK version of the album the “real” album, if only because I can’t stand “Yesterday’s Papers” not being the album opener–it really works well as an opener! (And because I can get “Let’s Spend The Night Together” and “Ruby Tuesday” on Flowers, which I really like a lot, though technically Buttons is better with them.) Cool Calm Collected” is the best of the “Kinks-style” numbers and I’ll never not love “Backstreet Girl.” “Connection” and “My Obsession” are good stompfests. All I really like in the second half is “Something Happened To Me Yesterday” and maybe “Who’s Been Sleeping Here?” “Please Go Home” I kinda don’t get, even with Brian Jones supposedly working in a Mellotron. I’d be willing to buy Aftermath on disc but probably not this one, even if it is still a good album…that the band rejected for some reason pertaining to “losing the sound.” Or at least that’s what Mick said.

3)The 13th Floor Elevators, Easter Everywhere: I used to think this was a better album than The Psychedelic Sounds Of…, but that’s only because I don’t think their first album had any huge highlights and this one has two–“Baby Blue,” their interpretation of a certain Dylan song, and “Dust.” These are both beautiful, spare folky ballads that wouldn’t have fit on the debut to save their life. Sadly, it appears that there’s good reason I forgot most of the rest of this album, which limps to the finish line and puts the album as a whole a notch below the debut. The opening track, “Slip Inside This House,” is eight minutes long and you’ll be getting sick of Tommy Hall’s electric jug well before those eight minutes are up, what a bad song. Nobody To Love” and the lengthy album closer “Postures” have an amiability to them that I kinda liked, and “I Had To Tell You” sticks out a bit too, but I’m probably just going to stick to the two ballads if I revisit anything from this album, which should have shown the band responsible for the world’s first “psychedelic” album entering the world’s best “psychedelic” year, 1967, as triumphant conquerers. They really didn’t, though. The album is padded out with a shit ton of bonus tracks which are just live versions of stuff from the original album, and I didn’t get much out of that either.

4)Bauhaus, In The Flat Field: These guys are okay, but not nearly as “Gothic” as I remember, which is odd because they’re cited as often as Joy Division are as the first “Goth rock” band. What they really are is “post-punk guitar rock that occasionally gets dancey,” fronted by Peter Murphy, perhaps the single most obvious David Bowie impersonator in rock history, which doesn’t always work out in the band’s favor. Fortunately he had the very underrated Daniel Ash on guitar and David J as the obligatory way-up-front post-punk bass player (was there ever a better era for bass players than post-punk?) There’s nothing like “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” here; the only really morose, “Goth” track here is the shitty ballad “Spy In The Cab,” and it’s easily the worst song here, predicting the limp, dead-sad songs the Cure did on Seventeen Seconds and Faith, but the Cure were far better at it. I’m also not a fan of the seven minute mess “Nerves.” However, elsewhere, there’s some pretty good, shrill, dive-bombing post-punkers, like “Dark Entries,” “In The Flat Field,” “A God In An Alcove,” “Dive,” Stigmata Martyr,” “St. Vitus Dance”…well, really most of the rest of the album. Oh, and the butt ugly pummeller “Double Dare.” So it averages out on the whole, if not the prime-era Goth-rock classic I was hoping for it to be (I like it a little less than I originally did, but never revisited anything from it much, having been unable to remember what songs I liked.) Of the bonus tracks, there’s a weird piano tune called “Crowds” that I might revisit.

5)Bauhaus, Mask: Some reviews of this 1981 sophomore effort claim it’s just a diminishing-returns version of In The Flat Field, but that’s not really the case–this time, the Goth ballad is the Arthur Machen-inspired “Hollow Hills,” the one thing from Mask that I’ve ever revisited, probably their second-best song after “Lugosi’s” and easily an improvement over “Spy In The Cab.” Mask is also, to my ears, a lot heavier on the danceable stuff than Flat Field, and also a lot more inconsistent on the danceable stuff. “Hair Of The Dog” and “The Passion Of Lovers” start things out well, but “Kick In The Eye” and “The Man With The X-Ray Eyes” are the only decent songs on Side Two. “In Fear Of Fear,” “Mask,” “Muscle In Plastic” and “In Fear OF Dub” are all pretty bad, one of the weakest stretches on a postpunk album since all the crap between “Dead Pool” and “Einstein’s Day” on Mission Of Burma’s Vs. I like the bonus track “Harry,” but this album’s never going to beat In The Flat Field, and (in large part due to how tired I’m getting of Peter Murphy’s Bowie-isms) I never even bothered to try the other three Bauhaus studio albums. If there’s someone here who’d like to talk me into hearing them, now’s the time–I only remember Derek Sidebottom ever liking them out of all Babblers throughout history!

That’s it!!! How long did I do this, five years?