1)Swans, The Great Annihilator: One of their better albums, but still a bit too long and scattershot to really be a classic. I think I’d downgrade it a point from where it used to be. I’d revisited the surging classic “Mind/Body/Light/Sound”–the best track here–a few times over the years, but not the rest of it. I can’t believe I forgot the driving Goth moaner “Killing For Company,” surely one of the ten best Swans songs, but I won’t forget it twice. I had “Mother’s Milk” listed as one of the best songs, but in retrospect I should have picked “Blood Promise” as the third big highlight, an ethereal journey worthy of the best Children Of God material. This actually might be a decent starting point for newcomers to the band–it’s too long, and I only like a little over half of it, sure, but it certainly covers a lot of Swans sub-styles in its 68 minutes. At least you can’t accuse of it being too much of one thing. Other decent tracks: “I Am The Sun” (hammering vocal repetition), “Mother/Father,” “The Great Annihilator,” “Celebrity Lifestyle,” “Out.” Not so good: draggy, overlong slop like “Telepathy” and “She Lives.” When Swans get repetitive, it’s all a matter of whether or not what they’re repeating is good.

2)Van Dyke Parks, Song Cycle: When I first heard this, I sort of thought it as a noble failure–I didn’t like very much of it, but I told people on this and other boards that I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to anyone looking for special, curious 1960s albums. It seemed impressive not only that 24 year old VDP had the capability to make an album like this–it sounds like it evokes movie music for a movie that was never going to be made, and who else did that in 1967?–but that conditions in the industry would have even allowed it to happen to begin with: the concept is a young man trying to evoke a pre-1960s golden era of Los Angeles, it’s full of ornate orchestration and production tricks, all of which cost a pretty penny–$80,000 in 1967 dollars ($750k today!), all of it handed over to a young eccentric singer-songwriter whose credentials were that he played organ on one Byrds song, then wrote weird lyrics to that Beach Boys masterpiece earlier that year that didn’t even get released. Good lord, would this happen today? Hell no, and it didn’t work out in 1967 either–after it flopped, the record label took out weird full-page magazine ads claiming that “we lost $60000 on the ‘record of the year’” encourage people to buy the album and they’d give you an extra copy for free to give to a friend, or something like that. So it seems like this album should be really fascinating. Unfortunately, it has two huge problems, and I don’t think I covered either of them when I first listened to the album 15 years ago. The first is that I’ve realized VDP’s singing voice basically sucks. Not only does he sound like the overeducated, bespectacled twerp on the album cover looks–wimpy and cartoonish–but he sings a lot of this through a Leslie speaker or something to make it sound like he’s at the bottom of a stairwell. It becomes immediately apparent why VDP simply had Brian Wilson sing vocals (and put his name first on the album cover!) the second time he tried to do a California nostalgia album in 1995, with Orange Crate Art (which bombed even worse than Song Cycle), and it wasn’t to make people think of SMiLE, either. The other, bigger problem is that he had some kind of horrible melodic ADHD, with songs bouncing all over the place and refusing to hold onto a steady pattern even though most of them are only two or three minutes long! The result is that I only like two tracks here–“The All Golden” (and even then, only for the evocative harp opening) and “Palm Desert,” which is just sort of cute. The remainder of this album’s scant 32 minutes do not stick in my head afterwards and probably never will. So I’ve gone from viewing this as a noble failure to just a plain old failure. Stick to lyrics, Dyke!

3)The Birthday Party, Prayers On Fire: There are four songs from this 1981 sophomore effort (or junior effort, if you count Door, Door–but Nick Cave would certainly prefer that you didn’t!) that I’ve continued listening to over the years–the tribal “Zoo-Music Girl,” surging psycho-rocker “Cry,” with its bizzare “where no fish can swim, where no fish can swim” backin vocals, and the creepy psychedelic pieces “Capers” and “Ho-Ho.” Those are all in the first half. I was all prepared to write off the second half of the album completely, but by the eighth listen, “Yard,”“ “Blundertown” and the psycho piano track “Kathy’s Kisses” started to compel me maybe a little bit. The young Cave is really going nuts vocally on a lot of these tracks, and the rest of the band isn’t far behind, so there’s a fascination in thinking about how the album would have been received in 1981, but I still think I’d downgrade it a point. I will still continue to listen to those four songs that I really like, but it’s becoming apparent that the only Birthday Party album I ever seriously cared for was Hee-Haw. Did anyone else here besides me and George Starostin ever care for these guys at all?

4)The Strokes, Room On Fire: Lord help me, I still…uh…really like this one a lot. Seriously, this album hasn’t negatively aged a day–I was expecting to write it off, but I probably like it more than when it came out. Hell, it’s probably better than their first album–you all remember that one, right? You know, the one that nobody ever mentions without mentioning the massive wave of hype and backlash the Strokes went through when it came out? Hell, does anyone even mention The Strokes at all in any context whatsoever without mentioning that? Probably not, just like the follow-up album is always called a carbon copy and “diminishing returns.”” Well…it’s actually not quite a carbon copy, there’s a somewhat starrier-eyed, nocturnal vibe to this album than the stuff on Is This It, and I’d forgotten that “12:51” doesn’t just have a cool Cars-sounding synth guitar in it, but a nice verse vocal melody as well. I had remembered “Automatic Stop,” the best song, with its reggae-ish break, and “Meet Me In The Bathroom” and “Under Control” are big highlights too. Don’t know how I forgot “Under Control,” in particular. “Reptilia” has a nice enough break and one could stand to revisit “You Talk Way Too Much” and “The End Has No End” from time to time. I realize that the Strokes didn’t have a hell of a lot of talent–how hard is it to write lots of songs based around guitars playing eighth notes anyway?–but…uh, did I miss something by not checking out their subsequent (let’s see here) four albums? Bleurgh? They’re still going, I take it? They must all be 50 by now.

5)The Mars Volta, De-Loused In The Comatorium: I found this a lot more bearable than Frances The Mute when I finally got around to hearing it, because most people here had been disappointed by Frances when it came out and said this one was better. The slinky, eerie “Televators” and shrieky “Take The Veil Cerpin Taxt” still work really well, regardless of whether they work as great “prog.” But those are the two songs I remembered. There’s also the rather beautiful “Eriatarka” which I had forgotten (is the title a reference to “Tarkus”?) but the 12 minute “Cicatriz ESP” is a mixed bag, parts of it work and other parts don’t. There’s a lot more of the speed-funk explosions here than on Frances, the kind of thing Prindle was talking about when he said that the Mars Volta sounded like “a Rush/Prince/Ricky Martin jam session played at 78 RPM.” I think I’d still be willing to muster up an “okay” rating for this album, though I’m probably only going to revisit the three best songs from it. After Frances didn’t become the new Close To The Edge or whatever, it seems like this band slugged on until 2013, broke up, then quietly reformed and kept putting out “crazy” prog albums from 2019 on, including one this year. I’m guessing there’s about as much chance anybody here has heard them as they’re hearing the new Decemberists albums, or watching whatever new iterations of Aqua Teen Hunger Force there are to watch, if that’s even happening. 2003 is long gone…