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Before they were Cluster, Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius were Kluster, a German experimental band that churned out three albums of noisy, metallic, experimental music full of tape loops and cacophony before the name change. C is inherently more gentle than K, and the new Cluster reflected that, although their first album was still mostly spacey drones and electronic swoops with little resemblance to what most people consider music (they didn't even bother with song titles, simple using the track lengths as identifiers).
By the time they got around to Zuckerzeit, which translates as "Sugar Time", the duo had started leaning more towards traditional song structures and actual melodies. They ditched Krautrock legend Conny Plank as producer and brought on board Michael Rother, another Krautrock legend famous for his work with Neu!, and the difference is immediately apparent.
None of this is to say that Zuckerzeit is in any way normal. The music is still wildly experimental and sounds distinctly homemade, constructed as it is from clunky analogue synthesizers that are charming in their own way, but not exactly built for slick, highly produced pop singles. Still, the gang gives it their best attempt.
The songwriting duties are split evenly here between Moebius and Roedelius, and there is an immediately evident difference in their styles. Roedelius has a gift for melody, and embraces the chugging Motorik rythms Michael Rother is known for. His compositions like Hollywood, Marzipan, and Heisse Lippen sound almost radio-friendly.
By contrast, Moebius is obviously the more experimental of the two. His tracks seem to focus on playing around with loops and rhythms. This makes them less immediately accessible to modern listeners, but I find them a fascinating counterpart to the honey-sweet electro-pop of Roedlius. Although Zuckerzeit is a distinctly electronic record, the Moebius track James is mainly built from guitar loops.
The albums longest track, Rota Riki, is a Moebius composition that I find particularly interesting. It sounds an awful lot like the early sequencer experiments done by Raymond Scott in the 1950s. It's an abstract study in synthesized rhythms and changes in tape speed, and while Scott's work was used for sound effects in advertisements, here the same style of music is presented for active listening.
Zuckerzeit is undeniably crude by today's standards, but that doesn't make it any less fun or charming. Additionally, its influence on later electronic music is pretty clearly felt. I would be hard to imagine modern IDM or ambient electronica without pioneers like Cluster.
Where Iggy Pop's solo debut, The Idiot, was nocturnal, brooding, reserved, experimental, and Germanic, Lust for Life released less than a year later, is almost the complete opposite. And where the Idiot felt like a David Bowie album with Pop on lead vocals, this one feels more true to Iggy's real personality, despite the continued presence of Bowie as major collaborator.
While not exactly sunny, the songs on Lust for Life are certainly more upbeat and energetic. It's a record for the day rather than the night. Starting with the title track opener, it's clear that what we're in for is a celebration, if a somewhat twisted and cynical one.
The record also feels much more American, where the Idiot was decidedly European in its approach. Iggy was born in Michigan, and perhaps this is another sign of his wresting creative control from the very English Bowie. The material here feels a lot more similar to his work with the Stooges than to Bowie's contemporaneous Low or Heroes albums.
This is echoed on the track Success in which Iggy confidently declares "Here comes success!" and on tonight the line "everything will be all right tonight" rather eclipses the rest of the song's lyrics about death. I'm not sure whether the irony is lost, or whether it just exists on multiple levels, but one can't help feeling that every will in fact be all right, in spite of all of life's darkness.
As with the last outing, the lyrics and vocals are handled by Pop, and the instrumental duties are largely left to Bowie and a couple of other musicians. Of particular note is guitarist Ricky Gardiner, who write the music for The Passenger, although he rarely gets acknowledged for it.
The song is, of course, an absolute classic. One of those rare hits like Werewolves of London which manages to sustain its energy over a repeated four-bar chord progression that stays the same during verse and chorus alike. The lyrics are apparently about the drifting, nomadic life style of a rock star, alays on the move, never in the same place for more than a little while. I guess Iggy felt thta in a sense, he was just along for the ride. A little bit sad, I suppose, but you'd never know it from that iconic "la la la" chorus.
At this point in the seventies, Iggy Pop was a total wreck, ravaged by substance abuse and even institutionalized for a while. Maybe it's reading too much into his lyrics, but I feel like Lust for Life, in part, is about his determination to pass through the darkest parts of his life and come out the other side a survivor. Whether it was intended or not, that's what he eventually did, having left behind some great records for the rest of us to enjoy.
I wasn't a Neil Young fan when I started this list. I found his voice too high-pitched and his songs too folky for my liking. But the more I listen to, the more I consider myself a convert. In particular, Young's simple yet inventive approach to guitar solos is inspiring. One of the things I always loved about Keith Richards was his ability to do great things with just a handful of notes. Young takes it a step further, sometimes soloing on just one or two notes, yet managing to wring emotion and creativity out of his guitar nevertheless.
On The Beach achieved something of a mythical status due to two decades of unavailability. For reasons as opaque as his lyrics, Young refused to issue the album on CD until 2003, when a massive petition by fans finally convinced him. Most "lost" albums fail to live up to the imaginations of fans, but it must be admitted thta this one is pretty good. A tight, bluesy seven songs that blend rock, country, and the bitter invective of Young's lyrics. Like Elvis Costello, he manages to be nasty will style sounding pleasant, which is really the trick to this kind of music.
The opener, Walk On, has hit single written all over it, with its catchy chorus and bouncy bass guitar part. The rootsy, banjo-driven For The Turnstiles would sound out of place on most rock albums, but works great here in spite of, or because of, the fact that it sounds like it could have been recorded sometime around the 1920s.
Throughout, the band is excellent, particularly the rhythm section consisting of multiple players on bass and drums. They know how to compliment Young's soloing without overpowering it. Sure, this band is not Crazy Horse, but I'm not sure their aggressive style would have worked well with these songs anyway.
Like the cover art, the title track plays around with the juxtaposition of opposites. It would be easy to think that a record called On The Beach would be a fun-in-the-sun party album. Instead, we get associations that are less frequently made, but no less apt. Words like "windy", "stranded", "exposed" and "bleak" come to mind. The fact that three of the song titles contain the word "blues" is surely no accident. This is not a happy Neil Young
Young originally wanted the two sides of the record reversed, making Vampire Blues the record's closer, and the title track its opener.} I think the running order as released is more powerful, however, as it moves from the almost happy Walk On through various levels of depression, through the mournful harmonica and clip-clop drums of Motion Pictures that sound like an actual farewell.
Finally, the album concludes with the 8-minute dirge of Ambulance Blues. This running order presents a more linear progression that takes the listener on a journey rather than just being a collection of songs. On The Beach is a melancholy album to be sure, but there's something not altogether hopeless about it too. As other reviewers have pointed out, this was Neil Young saying goodbye to despair and choosing to Walk On to more cheerful pastures.
I sometimes think of post-punk as the third stage in the classic "5 Stages of Grieving" paradigm. Punk is anger. Kids with guitars were lashing out at the system, making a lot of noise and having no small amount of fun while they did it. It didn't matter if they couldn't play. It didn't matter if their recordings were coated in a layer of distortion or white noise. That was all part of the honesty of it all.
But as the 70s progressed, that level of anger simply wasn't sustainable, and so punk rockers began to burn out, slipping into the third stage, depression. The aesthetics were still there. The amateur singing/playing, the lo-fi recordings, the simple song structures, but gloom and melancholy were now inescapable. The fact that this album is called "Third" ties into this theory a little bit. What doesn't help is that fact that Third was actually recorded in 1974, before punk proper even had a chance to get going. Like so many of the albums on this list, I guess it was ahead of its time.
Third/Sister Lovers marks the final album from Alex Chilton's Big Star, as well as his own personal breakdown. The recordings were such a mess that they didn't find an official release until years later, and even then no one couldn't agree on an "official" track listing.
There's a lot of tragedy here, which is an odd juxtaposition with the music itself. On song after song, Chilton manages to conjure up lovely, sweet melodies, arranged simply for maximum pop appeal. But there's something wrong. Most bands would be thrilled to come up with songs like "Thank You, Friends", "O, Dana", and "Jesus Christ" but Chilton sounds downright miserable as he sighs and grumbles his way through the lyrics.
Perhaps the inclusion of a Velvet Underground cover, "Femme Fatale", is a clue to how the band was really feeling at the time. The Velvets were always the best at barely cloaking disfunction behind well-crafted, but inexpertly performed pop gems. It seems like Big Star owes a debt to them in more ways than one.
One of the things I like about this, and other albums on the list by Nick Drake and the Modern Lovers, is how raw, honest, and personal the music is. Hemingway once said that, to be a writer, all you had to do was sit down at a typewriter and open a vein. I feel like these albums are embracing that sentiment in musical form.
There were a lot of leftover outtakes from these sessions that didn't make the original release, although subsequent reissues have restored most or all of them. Most fun are covers of "Nature Boy" and the Kinks' "Till the End of the Day." The truth is, little details like the inclusion of extra songs, or even the track order, make little difference. It's a solid album, no matter how you listen to it.
