Top 100 Albums of the 1970s - #67 - Pink Floyd - Meddle (1971)

Psychologists speak of the Primacy Effect and the Recency Effect to describe how our brains tend to remember experience that come first, and come last respectively, with less attention paid to those in between. This may explain why people remember Meddle as being a better album than it is. As an album, it's bookended by two blindingly good tracks, with relatively unremarkable filler sandwiched in the middle.

Meddle is unquestionably a transitional album, bridging the gap between the band's early psychedelic experimentalism and the polished art rock productions of their classic period. Coming just before their breakthrough Dark Side of the Moon, Meddle finds the band pushing boundaries while not quite abandoning their roots just yet. The results are at times awe-inspiring.

Side one opens with One of These Days, a largely instrumental piece that features Roger Waters' bass guitar run through a delay effect and surrounded by wind sound effects and increasingly intense guitar patterns from David Gilmour. As simple as the concept is, it really delivers, playing with rhythmic drive as a vehicle for textural exploration and atmosphere. Towards the end, a distorted vocal proclaims "One of these days, I'm going to tear you into little pieces!" It's not clear where this hostility is coming from or where it's directed, but it's certainly effective. A brilliant start to the record.

Next, A Pillow of Winds is a pastoral psychedelic ballad, leading into Fearless, which follows in the same vein. These songs feel like the remnants of an earlier band being shaken off to make way for the new sound. They are not bad, but they don't really live up to what we would come to expect from Pink Floyd in the near future.

The album then reaches it's nadir, with the two songs, San Tropez and Seamus. The former is a playful, tropical throwaway that really doesn't fit with the otherwise gloomy and watery feeling of the record, and the later is a regrettable, low fidelity twelve-bar blues about a dog, complete with howling and whining sound effects. Besides being actively annoying to listen to, it is beneath the band's talents.

Side two is comprised entirely of the 21-minute epic Echoes, and here we see the strongest hints of what Pink Floyd was about to become. Beginning with a distinctive sonar beep and morphing into an inspired jam session, Echoes showcases how well the individual band members play together, and how inventive they can be. The song's main riff was ripped off by Andrew Lloyd Webber for the title track to Phantom of the Opera, but that does nothing to lessen its power here. Though the track runs for over twenty minutes, I could honestly listen to it for an hour. It's arguably an even more effective use of the long-form piece than even Shine On You Crazy Diamond, and if anything its more primitive nature just adds to its atmosphere.

The lyrics from Echoes state that "everything is green and submarine", and thta would be an apt description of Meddle as a whole, from the cover art to the watery sound of the production. In that respect, it's a success as a quasi-concept album, even though the majority of the individual tracks are not too memorable. While I don't think it lives up to the very best of Pink Floyd, it certainly has its moments, and is notable for the direction it pointed in the band's forard trajectory.

Top 100 Albums of the 1970s - #68 - Herbie Hancock - Head Hunters (1973)

Herbie Hancock's Head Hunters is one of the best selling jazz records of al time, and with good reason. It's catchy, it's fun, it's exciting, and it broke important new ground in updating jazz to fit in with the changing times. Along with Miles Davis, Hancock can be regarded as one of the great innovators, not content to fall back on previous structures and textures that had long since been worn into the ground.

Talking about his inspiration for Head Hunters, Hancock said that he felt like the music his band had been making was getting too lofty and ethereal. He wanted something more down and dirty, more earthbound. With this instinct in hand, it's not surprising that he found his way towards funk, the dirtiest, earthiest music around.

In the early 70s, a lot of Prog groups were inspired by jazz, and were experimenting with working it into a rock context. Their efforts led to a whole genre of jazz/rock fusion, but none of those records approaches what Herbie did in transforming jazz into a truly electric medium. Armed with electric pianos, clavinets, and most importantly, the distinctively searing Arp synthesizer, Hancock and his sextet sank their teeth into funk grooves in a way that was anything but academic, while maintaining the spontaneity and virtuosity of high-octane jazz. Over the course of just four tracks, he crafted an album that remains thrilling more than four decades later.

Side one is dominated by Chameleon, a fifteen minute piece built around a syncopated bass ostinato, with plenty of room for soloing. The way the instruments gradually build up, one on top of the other, is a blueprint for many a funk or electronica tune, and it allows the listener to gradually get used to simple things before moving into the wilder reaches of virtuoso musicianship. 

The second track, Watermelon Man, is a rerecording of a tune first done on Hancock's debut album, but this time arranged in a way that imitates African Pygmy music, with a rhythm section build around blowing air across the top of a beer bottle.

Side two kicks off with Sly, an uptempo workout for the band complete with brain-melting solos. In fact, the final track, Vein Melter, seems like it would have been a better title for this one. Instead, the last nine minutes of the record are taken up by a psychedelic cooldown, perhaps suggesting that the title is alluding to narcotics.

I'm not the biggest fan of jazz in general, but I have to confess that Head Hunters is great. It combines catchy tunes, infectious rhythms, astounding musicianship, and an electric funkiness that I just love. It certainly stands the test of time better than a lot of fusion records from this period.

Top 100 Albums of the 1970s - #69 - Faust - Faust IV (1973)

Ah, Krautrock. That weird, wonderful, and ephemeral genre of experimental rock music from Germany that was big in the 80s, and then suddenly seemed to go away. It takes a certain kind of mindset to appreciate it, but when it's good, it's really really good.

Faust were one of the three major bands of the genre, sharing the limelight with their monosyllabic brethren Can and Neu!. Actually, there were hundreds of Krautrock bands kicking around back then, and lots of good ones, but these are the three that got the most airplay and recognition for being innovative and unique.

With their debut a couple of years earlier, Faust had put together a dense slab of Teutonic sound collage and rock pastiche, focusing on lengthy pieces and abstract structures. Here, on their fourth record, they've mellowed out a bit, and have started writing actual songs, albeit not without the same penchant for experimentalism and a wacky sense of humor. In fact, it's hard to know whether the first track is meant to be a joke.

Simply titled "Krautrock", the album's opener could well be a sarcastic comment on the British perception of the band and its contemporaries. The song is eleven minutes of chugging, droning, rock groove that sounds more like Neu! than anything Faust has done previously. It's repetitive in the extreme, and could be a gentle jibe at the style of their contemporaries. Regardless, it's a fun listen.

"Krautrock" leads abruptly into The Sad Skinhead, which is a bizarre (and  not entirely successful) attempt at reggae, for some reason. Far better as an example of the band's songwriting abilities is Jennifer, which is pretty and dreamy, and would later inspire a similar track by the Eurythmics. (I can't confirm that the two songs are related, but they both have the same name, refer to refer to red hair, and share a slow, hypnotic quality, so I choose to believe it.)

The second half of the album is more abstract, featuring studio experiments, instrumentals, and callbacks to the band's second album. The last track, It's a Bit of a Pain, intentionally interrupts a lovely acoustic melody with an annoying squeak sound, once more showcasing the band's warped sense of humor. 

I'll be honest: although I love Krautrock, Faust IV is far from my favorite album in the genre. I like their first two better, as well as many works by Can, Neu!, Ash Ra Tempel, Floh De Cologne, Cluster, Harmonia, La Dusseldorf, Popol Vuh, early Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk and... well, you get the idea. Faust IV is a fine record, but not what I would have chosen to represent the genre at #69. But never fear! There's still several Krautrock albums that appear later on this list, so stay tuned!

Top 100 Albums of the 1970s - #70 - Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon (1973)

What can one say about Dark Side of the Moon that hasn't already been said? For many people, this album would not only top the list of the best albums of the 1970s, but the best of all time. And here we find it at a lowly #70. Personally, I wouldn't even rank it as my favorite Pink Floyd album. Nevertheless, it is undeniably a great achievement in music and in terms of influence alone is worth celebrating, so let's dive in.

Dark Side of the Moon represents the moment when a somewhat eccentric psychedelic band really got its act together. Previous Pink Floyd albums had moments of brilliance on them, but they tended towards self-indulgence, excessive experimentalism, and the inclusion of filler tracks to round out the running time. With Dark Side, they produced a tightly composed, semi-concept album with no wasted space, as well as some of their most memorable tunes. It would set the stage for the next two albums, Wish You Were Here and Animals, which both surpass this one in my opinion, but we have to award points for coming first.

While it's true that Dark Side sees the band at their sharpest, both in terms of songwriting and performance, I think the lion's share of the credit for the success of the album as a whole is due to engineer Alan Parsons, who would later find fame (albeit on a less extravagant scale) with his own band, The Alan Parsons Project. In this age of digital music editing software and laptop wizardry, it's easy to forget just how difficult it was to perform complex edits back in the day.

It's astonishing to think that the intricate 7/4 rhythm of cash registers and jingling coins at the beginning of money, or the cacophony of chiming clocks in Time, were produced using a razor blade to slice and splice physical tape together with almost superhuman precision. These effects go a long way towards giving the album its unique charm and cohesion, and Parsons is the man responsible for them.

Still, Roger Waters and David Gilmour were no slouches either. Waters' bitterly sarcastic lyrics and memorable bass hooks (particularly in Money) are the work of a master, whereas Gilmour's trademark slow and dreamy guitar solos lend a soaring grandeur to the music, and once again prove that effective guitar playing need not be about speed or technical virtuosity. Gilmour pours more emotion into his playing than any dozen hair metal shredders, and is rightly regarded as a guitar hero for it.

Lyrically, the songs have their fair share of memorable lines. "Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way" manages to be poetic, poignant, and catchy. And while I don't agree with Roger Waters' politics, his vitriolic diatribe against Money is as enjoyable now as it ever was. Even when there are no lyrics at all, as in The Great Gig in the Sky, the epic vocal solo sends the listener on quite a thrill ride.

Dark Side of the Moon may not be the best album of all time or even of the 1970s, but it is certainly a stone cold classic thta belongs in every record collection worthy of the name. And yes, I have lined it up to the Wizard of Oz and it does work. Check it out sometime. It's not just for stoners anymore.

Top 100 Albums of the 1970s - #71 - James Brown - The Payback (1973)

First of all, an apology for abandoning this project for so long. National Novel Writing Month, followed by the December holidays got in my way and I'm only now regaining my momentum. Nevertheless, I'm resolved to complete this project sooner or later, so onward and upward!

To be honest, I never thought I would like James Brown. He just didn't seem like my thing. But then I had the chance to see him live in concert shortly before his death, and it remains one of the best shows I've ever seen. The man knew how to put on a show, and his band is one of the tightest in the business.

But this review is about his 1971 album, The Payback, not the performance I saw in the early 2000s. So how does it stack up? In general, I'd say this record lacks some of the dynamism and energy of the live performance. I know it's regarded as one of his finest, but it lacks immediate crowd pleasers like Living in America or Sex Machine. The tracks here are generally slower in tempo, simpler in their composition, and lacking the melodic hooks that made the aforementioned songs so great.

There's a curious stasis to this kind of music. A funk groove, usually of not more than two bars, repeats over and over again, while James shouts, hollers, screams, grunts, and emotes over the top. Sometimes there's a brief solo or a horn section sting, but that's pretty much it. It almost reminds me of minimalist music in the vein of Philip Glass in that it uses motion to create a sense of stillness. It's weird to think of those two styles of music as related, but focus on groove and repetition is certainly common in both.

Lyrically, the songs lack much of substance. James makes it very clear that he wants revenge on somebody for something, any other details or funny. Elsewhere he apologetically admits that he is just a man, but that he's doing the best he can, in a rre moment of soul vulnerability. 

Towards the end of the album, the songs get longer and the jams get spacier. I'll venture another unlikely comparison in that these tracks start to resemble similarly groove-oriented efforts by Krautrock and space rock artists. Of course, the horns, wah-wah guitars and general funk atmosphere lend the music a totally different feel, but mechanically, a jam is a jam, and the album's closer, Mind Power, is a particularly great one.

The Payback is a double album, which seems a little unnecessary, given that most of the songs contain a small amount of material stretched out into seven, eight, or even twelve minutes. James Brown is certainly a charismatic and talented performer, but I can't help but feel like his abilities are better showcased elsewhere.