I GOT THE FUCKING INVINCIBILITY CHEAT ON FUCKING GOLDENEYE 007!!!!!!!!! GOOD LORD!!! HOW DID I EVER GET THIS THE FIRST TIME?!?!?!?!?

1)Swans, My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky: It was The Seer that got me back into Swans about a decade ago, convincing me that I should do their whole discography (I started with the early stuff and initially hated it completely, before getting back into some of that later on after doing the rest of it.) I listened to this, their first “comeback” album, sometime after that and pretty much forgot every single note of it. (Note: I am well aware that Michael Gira did not disappear between the initial 1997 Swans breakup and the 2010 return.) This will likely happen a second time. The album is stylistically motivated and not at all geezer-y or out of touch, but it’s very scattershot, not cohesive at all. A lot of battering, repetitive stuff (like the boring nine minute opener “No Words/No Thoughts,” singled out as a huge highlight by most reviews), but barely any of it sticks in my mind afterwards. The gentle “Reeling The Liars In,” the bitter “Jim” and “You Fucking People Make Me Sick,” featuring Gira’s three year old daughter on vocals, are all I really cared for this time around. It’s like they were saving far better stuff for the two-hour-long Seer.

2)Sly & The Family Stone - Life: Full disclosure: I respect this band and am not bothered about how utterly beloved they are, but after digging through their 1967-71 discography some years ago, I don’t think I’ve ever once listened to a single Sly & The Family Stone song of my own volition. This is sad and pathetic of me, but at least it means these albums will be fresh when I listen to them. I mean, I’m not an R&B/soul connoisseur to begin with, so it’s the “rock” aspects of these albums that a, er, rockist like me would concentrate on anyway. This is still a pretty good album nonetheless– “Dynamite!,” “Life,” “M’Lady,” “Love City,” “Into My Own Thing,” “I’m An Animal” and the one big favorite, “Jane Is A Groupee” are all worth hearing again, and I’m kinda sorry I forgot about this album as much as I did. Still, it’s just something I admire in passing, due to my not being a connoissuer of the genre. Who knows how much I will listen in the future? Maybe my opinion just doesn’t mean shit. It’s the next two albums everyone adores the most anyway…

3)The Flaming Lips, At War With The Mystics: This didn’t go down as a classic in most people’s eyes, and it definitely had some easy-to-hate stuff–I still loathe “Free Radicals” completely and couldn’t get into “The W.A.N.D,” and while I like some of “The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song,” I’d never tell anyone else to like it. I know that a lot of critics were sneering at Wayne Coyne by 2006 as well that his wide-eyed la-la-la-we’re-all-gonna-die lyricism was getting old, though I don’t know how many people were yet aware that Steven Drozd was writing 70-90 percent of the music (when reviewers mentioned him, it was usually to mention the heroin-shooting scene in the documentary.) Then there’s all the big gooey Yes-vibe 1970s-softy stuff in the middle of the album–“The Sound Of Failure,” “Vein Of Stars,” “My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion” and “Mr. Ambulance Driver,” the last of which I still think is one of their five or six best songs. I still love all of that, even though it all hits the same vibe and it’s occurred to me that “The Sound Of Failure” and “Mr. Ambulance Driver” have virtually the same chorus trick (shifting into a big dramatic 1970s chord sequence with synth string flourishes over a driving beat). So yeah, this album should be a big pile of shit, but it’s a tribute to how much I like the Lips that I don’t care and enjoyed it anyway, flaws be damned–it’s really no less an album than Yoshimi, which I think has now gone down in the mind of critics as their second best album. I forgot “It Overtakes Me” and the last two songs, which fill things out nicely. Still it’s that big ball in the middle that I’m going to continue to revisit.

4)The Jesus Lizard, Goat: I was considering doing some of the other albums in this band’s discography, but several of the glowing reviews for this that I found claimed that if you don’t like it, the band is not for you. Then they aren’t for me. I always liked the whomping “Then Comes Dudley” and “Monkey Trick,” with its eerie little querulous guitar riff, but forgot the rest of it, and didn’t like it any of it much at all this time. Reminiscent of a 90s update of the 1981-82 Birthday Party stuff–screamy crazy-guy vocals, noisy guitars, lurid lyrical matter that you can’t make out anyway, but not even as good as that, and people who read my review posts (all none of you) know that stuff doesn’t work on me anymore anyway, and come to think of it, barely any of it ever did.

5)The Chameleons, What Does Anything Mean? Basically: That sounds like a slacker Gen-X album title, but the album is from 1985. This shouldn’t be a good album at all–it’s a retread of the previous Chameleons album, Script Of The Bridge, and that’s a good album, but one that definitely wore out its welcome in its second half, pounding on your ears with 4/4 drums and Goth bitterness for 57 minutes. Nevertheless, I can’t entirely write this one off–“Singing Rule Britannia,” the bitter anti-Thatcher song, beats out both Killing Joke’s rebellious “Eighties” and the Chameleons’ own “Up The Down Escalator,” which it’s very similar to, with its wide eyed shimmeriness. That’s really the only big classic here–I have to stick up for “Perfume Garden,” “Return Of The Roughnecks,” the spacey “Home Is Where The Heart Is,” and the wistful closer, “P. S. Goodbye.” That being said, it IS a retread, and retreads don’t get written about much, so unless you ADORE Script Of The Bridge, you probably don’t really need to hear this.

NP: The Stranglers - “North Winds Blowing”