Before Oasis battled Blur and Kanye West wrestled 50 Cent, there was this: the ultimate pop-music rivalry. The Beatles represented Northern England, taking up the mantel for all the marginalized country folk whose ways and accents marked them as separate from the cosmopolitan London manifested by bad-boy R&B purists the Rolling Stones. That said, despite the well-publicized differences between the bands, they had a lot in common. Both shared a fondness for some of the same old rock ’n’ roll, employed overlapping session musicians, lost their ’60s catalogs to the same shyster (Allen Klein), worked with the same movie director (Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who was behind the Let It Be movie and the Stones’ ill-conceived Rock And Roll Circus program) and used “hold me, love me” as a lyric. The Stones may have long since allowed their sell-by date to expire while improbably outliving half of the Fab Four, but back in the ’60s, this rivalry resulted in an amazing run of classic albums. Are you ready to rumble?
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band vs. Their Satanic Majesties Request
One of these 1967 albums is a universally acknowledged classic, the other a career hiccup. One features the work of a producer (Sir George Martin) at the apex of professional achievement; the other features inventive arrangements obscured by sub-par material and a band poised on the verge of complete implosion. So this particular contest is pretty much a non-starter, right? Not so fast. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is undoubtedly an amazing accomplishment that signaled the arrival of The Album as a durable artistic format. Its sequencing is impeccable (starting with the fanfare of the title track and concluding with the emotionally devastating “A Day In The Life”), and the artwork established new standards of visual presentation.
But Their Satanic Majesties Request isn’t quite the pale imitation it’s long seemed to be. It contains some of the strongest songs in the Stones’ arsenal and takes a fearless approach to studio technique they’d never attempt again. “She’s A Rainbow” features strings arranged by future Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones, and “2000 Light Years From Home” is a creepy space oddity with some bugged-out Mellotron courtesy of Brian Jones in one of his last lucid creative moments. Unlike the Beatles (who were hanging out with Dylan and embracing LSD and Eastern mysticism while writing some of their most whimsical material), the Stones crafted an album that starts off uneasy and only drifts further into paranoia and uncertainty. The Verdict: Though not quite the one-round knockout it appears to be, Sgt. Pepper wins the bout.
The White Album vs. Exile On Main St.
The battle of two of the finest double albums of the rock ’n’ roll era. These days, 1972’s Exile On Main St. is treated with all the reverence of a holy text. Its grimy textures, timeworn attitude and gritty contours have inspired entire sub-genres of alternative rock; Pussy Galore and Royal Trux probably owed the totality of their careers to the album’s opening cut, “Rocks Off,” while Liz Phair’s crowning artistic achievement can be traced to her supposed desire to respond to the record’s baked-in machismo. Yet, upon its release, Exile was labeled by critics as “ragged” and “fagged out.” Recorded in the basement of Keith Richards’ rented French coastal mansion (his heroin addiction made it more practical for the band to come to him), the album drips with the sweat, grease and blood involved in its creation, tossing off a fistful of classics from the Richards riff-o-matic (“Tumbling Dice,” “Torn And Frayed”) and jump-starting the alt-country revolution nearly two decades before it was recognized as such (“Sweet Virginia,” “Sweet Black Angel”).
1968’s The White Album is even denser and more eclectic, reflecting the four distinct personalities of its makers. Paul McCartney’s ebullient confidence and corresponding bouts of egotism (“Back In The U.S.S.R.,” “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” “Birthday”), John Lennon’s cerebral leanings and penchant for self-examination (“Dear Prudence,” “Julia,” “I’m So Tired”), George Harrison’s increasingly crafty melodicism and sophistication (“While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” “Long, Long, Long”) and even Ringo Starr’s playfulness (country shuffle “Don’t Pass Me By,” his first original composition included on a Beatles album) are all on display. It’s as though the members of the Fab Four had taken separate vacations and recorded their trips for posterity. At 30 songs and more than an hour and a half in length, The White Album (originally titled A Doll’s House) is a dog’s breakfast of a listening experience but a joyously messy feast all the same. The Verdict: Pretty much a coin toss dictated by your personal preferences, although The White Album has more throwaway cuts and less of a group dynamic. Therefore, Exile gets the nod in a controversial split decision.
Let It Be vs. Let It Bleed
For the Beatles, the final year of the ’60s proved to be anything but fab. They bitched their way through the filming of the aforementioned Let It Be, a movie that documented what had become of the carefree, moptopped lads from Liverpool. They had grown into four adults with vastly different opinions about music, relationships and even one another. The album Let It Be, released in 1970, suffers from fussy production and inferior song choices (“Maggie Mae,” “Dig It”), and Phil Spector was brought in after the LP had been recorded and gunked up some of the tracks with unwieldy, swelling strings and heavy-handed reverb more appropriate for a Motown record. Those criticisms aside, Let It Be features some of McCartney’s finest work (the title track, “Get Back”) and a few Lennon/McCartney collaborations worth the price of admission, including “Two Of Us,” perhaps their most emotionally revealing pairing (“You and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead”).
The Stones, on the other hand, had witnessed the drowning death of founding member Jones and were rounding the bend of the decade somewhat the worse for wear, packing along assorted celebrity girlfriends, various drug habits and a new guitarist (Mick Taylor) who was every bit their musical equal but not quite up to their level of bacchanalian entertainment. 1969’s Let It Bleed can be heard as a totem of the Stones’ road/fame weariness and general malaise at the time it was recorded. “Gimme Shelter” features one of the most memorable riffs in rock history and a soul-baring backing vocal from Merry Clayton, which is rumored to have caused her to miscarry. “Midnight Rambler” emerges as the evil-embracing tale that sealed the Stones’ legend as one of rock’s most dangerous acts, and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” is a sort of flip side to “Hey Jude,” a celebration of decadence almost directly opposite McCartney’s “take a sad song and make it better” sentiment. Let It Bleed has its weak moments; it’s difficult to see the countrified version of “Honky Tonk Women” as anything more than self-parody, time-filler or both. The inclusion of an epic version of Robert Johnson’s “Love In Vain,” however, made complete their connection to the man who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for a little more facility on the six-string. The Verdict: Let it cede. It’s the Stones who win this round and ultimately take the rubber match, proving their worth as the best pound-for-pound band of the era.
—Corey duBrowa
We all know self-appointed music snobs who would just as soon be strapped to a chair and force-fed the entire Poison catalog as purchase the lazy man’s way to a diversified music collection: the best-of. But everyone owns at least one greatest-hits collection. Surely you’ve got a well-loved copy of Al Green’s Greatest Hits or The Best Of Blondie bouncing around the glove compartment, right? Well, there’s a reason for that. These guilty pleasures are not only what make the music industry go ’round (some acts have been repackaged more often than they were ever officially recorded; take a bow, Jimi), they’re sometimes the best work an artist will ever release. We’ve surveyed the rock ’n’ roll wastelands to unearth six of the finest, most concise greatest-hits collections unleashed on the masses.
LEONARD COHEN The Best Of Leonard Cohen (Columbia)
A Canadian national treasure, Cohen has led an amazingly full life. A notorious womanizer throughout much of his 72 years, Cohen has never married and spent half of the ’90s living in seclusion on a Southern California mountaintop as an ordained Buddhist monk. He’s issued 15 albums, written at least a dozen volumes of poetry and prose, made a guest appearance on Miami Vice, had two children out of wedlock and was engaged to Risky Business pin-up Rebecca DeMornay. That said, Cohen’s definitive work remains this 1975 best-of, which draws only from his first four albums. A blueprint for life’s beautiful losers, Cohen muses on the intersection of doomed love and uncertain faith (“Suzanne,” “Chelsea Hotel No. 2”) and quiet pleas for forgiveness (“Who By Fire,” “Bird On The Wire”). Kurt Cobain sang longingly of “a Leonard Cohen afterworld,” and it’s clear that without the Bard of Bleak, there could’ve been no Nick Cave or Elliott Smith. The Rest-Of: 1997’s More Best Of Leonard Cohen, which includes four songs from 1988’s essential I’m Your Man and four choices from 1992’s weaker The Future.
CREEDENCE CLEARWATER REVIVAL Chronicle: The 20 Greatest Hits (Fantasy)
For the entirety of two years—1969 and 1970—no one ruled American radio quite like San Francisco’s Creedence Clearwater Revival. Of the 20 songs on 1976’s Chronicle no fewer than 15 were top-10 singles, including eight in a row that went gold: “Proud Mary,” “Bad Moon Rising,” “Fortunate Son” and “Have You Ever Seen The Rain?” among them. For years, CCR’s straightforward blend of faux-swamp stomp and jingle-jangle Americana fell out of critical favor. But as Greil Marcus’ liner notes point out, CCR’s total absence of gimmickry, singer/songwriter John Fogerty’s rock ’n’ roll growl and the band’s three-minute storytelling generated a body of work that stands up far better than most of the music produced by its contemporaries. The Rest-Of: 1972’s Creedence Gold lives up to its name (comprising eight hit singles), but its meager length fails to capture the band’s diversity.
THE GO-BETWEENS 1978-1990 (Capitol)
The recent passing of Go-Betweens co-founder Grant McLennan at the age of 48 only magnifies his band’s legendary run of bad luck, both in life and business. Complete with liner notes penned by McLennan and songwriting partner Robert Forster, this 1990 best-of includes nearly everything that made the Go-Betweens such a compulsive joy, from essential album cuts and criminally overlooked singles (the lush, romantic “Bachelor Kisses,” the wistfully autobiographical “Cattle And Cane”) to a few choice b-sides and Peel Session tracks. One need only listen to Belle And Sebastian’s If You’re Feeling Sinister or any song by the Clientele to understand how quietly influential the Go-Betweens’ drawing-room wordplay and melodies-in-miniature have proven. The Rest-Of: 1999’s Bellavista Terrace, which is more widely available but less comprehensive.
NEW ORDER (The Best Of) New Order (Qwest)
After Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis hanged himself in his kitchen on the eve of the group’s first U.S. tour, the surviving members formed New Order, the thinking-person’s dance band whose icy-cold sound defined an era. On 1995’s (The Best Of) New Order—documenting 1981’s Movement through 1993’s Republic—you can hear Bernard Sumner and Co. creating an image of the modern pop group as a loosely affiliated gang of distant, contract-hire associates. Included are early single “Dreams Never End,” breakout club hits “Bizarre Love Triangle” and “Blue Monday 1988” and underrated ’90s tracks such as the propulsive “Regret.” (The Best Of) New Order goes the 1987 singles compilation Substance—whose terrific “Thieves Like Us” and “Perfect Kiss” go missing here—one better by sampling work from across the spectrum of the band’s full-length releases and remixes. The Rest-Of: 2005’s Singles, noteworthy only for the inclusion of tracks from that year’s mediocre Waiting For The Sirens’ Call.
NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS The Best Of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds (Mute/Reprise)
From his early sex/violence/death-obsessed albums as a member of Aussie noise pioneers the Birthday Party to his later sex/violence/death/salvation-fixated essays with the Bad Seeds, Cave is—like Bob Dylan and Tom Waits—first and foremost an album artist. This makes the task of assembling a best-of that much more difficult. Other than an arbitrary selection of personal favorites from the 10 albums Cave released in the 13 years preceding this 1998 affair, what exactly is “best” about such a collection? It certainly isn’t the sequencing, which practically begs for chronological order but instead scatters Cave’s songs like a game of 52-card pick-up. But this is a mere nitpick considering the range of work surveyed here: soundtrack closet-drama “Red Right Hand,” lovely spirit-quest “Into My Arms” and live staple “The Mercy Seat.” Also present are classic murder-ballad duets “Henry Lee” (with Polly Harvey) and “Where The Wild Roses Grow” (crooned with surprising gravity by Kylie Minogue and the only mainstream hit on this collection). The Rest-Of: 1995’s The Wonderful World Of Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds, which overlaps with this release, albeit in a strangely parsimonious way.
THE KINKS The Ultimate Collection (Sanctuary U.K.)
This 2002 double-disc bonanza is the only Kinks compilation worth owning and illustrates the challenge of compiling a best-of for bands whose work has traveled across multiple record labels. The Ultimate Collection spans the Kinks’ 40-year career, from the proto-metal of early singles “You Really Got Me” and “All Day And All Of The Night” to frontman Ray Davies’ first sparks of wry social commentary on “A Well Respected Man,” its acidly funny follow-up “Dedicated Follower Of Fashion” and the nostalgic “Sunny Afternoon” and “Waterloo Sunset.” Also included are career-defining hit “Lola” and MTV-era smash “Come Dancing,” but the group’s late-’70s arena-rock period is mostly ignored. After luxuriating in these 44 songs, it’s clear the Kinks deserve even more critical and popular reevaluation than what has already been accorded them via the reassessment of albums such as 1968’s The Village Green Preservation Society. The Rest-Of: So many crap compilations (more than five dozen “officially” available in the U.S.), so little time to pick only one.
Drugs, like sex, are inextricably bound to rock ’n’ roll. More than a mere marriage of convenience, the pairing has come to resemble the partnership between remora and shark: It’s hard to imagine rock developing into the shaggy-haired beast it’s become without the influence of chemical compounds. Undoubtedly, other substances have also played a role in shaping popular music. For example, country’s relationship with alcohol is well-documented (see: Hank Sr.’s “There’s A Tear In My Beer”). In the jazz era, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Miles Davis used narcotics. Dance artists have designed specific beats to match the effects of certain types of chemicals, while reggae has tended to view drugs as quasi-spiritual “journey enhancers.” The following albums represent the epitome of what Spacemen 3 once referred to as “taking drugs to make music to take drugs to.”
13TH FLOOR ELEVATORS The Psychedelic Sounds Of The 13th Floor Elevators (Snapper)
In a time otherwise marked by incense and peppermints or strawberry alarm clocks, Austin’s 13th Floor Elevators played a gritty, reverb-dipped brand of guitar-driven garage rock punctuated by Roky Erickson’s berserk vocals and Tommy Hall’s strangely fluttering electric jug (essentially, a porcelain jug with a mic placed near its mouth, which creates a bizarre percussive effect). The Elevators’ 1966 debut LP spotlights loopy, LSD-inspired lyrics (Hall is said to have forced the band to dose on a near-daily basis) and a peculiar mix of sinister-sounding lysergic jams, shimmering ballads and the odd staggering anthem. Erickson’s drug-related arrest in 1969 led to a three-year stint in a state mental hospital, where he was subjected to electroconvulsive therapy and Thorazine treatments that may have damaged his psyche far worse than drugs ever did. Under The Influence: Fellow Texas space traveler Janis Joplin considered joining the Elevators before throwing in her lot with Big Brother And The Holding Company.
DAVID BOWIE Station To Station (Virgin)
By 1976, Bowie had tried on as many personas as musical styles: the post-hippie Man Who Sold The World, the bisexual alien Ziggy Stardust, the faux-soul brotha of Young Americans. But the paranoid, drug-addled Thin White Duke was Bowie’s first creation to come with a distinctly evil edge, and Station To Station unleashed his robotic disco on the world. Bowie was residing in Los Angeles, palling around with John Lennon (then stumbling through the depths of a multi-year “lost weekend”) and, in his cocaine-fueled mania, becoming increasingly reckless and withdrawn. At one point during the recording of Station To Station, Bowie purportedly stopped eating, sleeping and drinking for a full week. The album nevertheless remains one of his best, conjuring streamlined, ice-cold funk on “Stay,” “TVC15” and “Golden Years.” Under The Influence: Bowie’s substance abuse finally caught up with him when he praised Hitler in a Playboy interview and struck a fascist salute for photographers in London.
MOTÖRHEAD Ace Of Spades (Roadrunner)
Once described by Creem magazine as the sound of a “Japanese commuter train ramming headlong into a blackboard factory,” Motörhead is the creation of former Hawkwind bassist (and ex-Hendrix roadie) Lemmy Kilmister. Combining biker-inspired heavy-metal sound and punk’s loud/fast rules, Kilmister forged the speed metal and thrash genres from scratch. 1980’s Ace Of Spades is the apotheosis of his group’s speed-induced mania, featuring a batch of relentlessly intense songs. The title track became a top-15 single in the U.K. and, for a time, elevated the group to the same superstar status as Judas Priest, Def Leppard and Iron Maiden. Under The Influence: “Speed is habit-forming, and I’d been doing it for over 20 years,” wrote Kilmister in the album’s liner notes. “If you have your blood changed, I’d suppose that it’s clean and there’s nothing in it, maybe like when I was a kid. [The doctor] told me to forget it—‘Pure blood will probably kill you!’”
SPACEMEN 3 Perfect Prescription (Taang!)
Rugby, England’s Spacemen 3 was influenced by a variety of drugs, from hash to heroin. Guitarist Pete “Sonic Boom” Kember once went by the nickname “Mainliner,” while an early version of the band’s logo features a crudely drawn syringe. This 1987 sophomore effort seeks to replicate the effects of a drug trip, from the towering highs to the crushing lows. The songs that bookend the album—opening blast “Take Me To The Other Side” and chilled-out closing crash “Call The Doctor”—provide not only a sense of the band’s avant-garde ambitions but also its chemically altered lifestyle. “Walking With Jesus” and “Ode To Street Hassle” pay tribute to smack-addled forebears the Velvet Underground, whose blissed-out, single-chord jams were a huge influence on Spacemen 3. Perfect Prescription provides all the clues that would lead to Kember’s more experimental Spectrum/E.A.R. projects as well as his bandmate Jason “Spaceman” Pierce’s higher-profile Spiritualized. Under The Influence: For proof of Prescription’s inspiration, look no further than Pierce’s lyrical couplet “Put a spike deep into my vein/Things’ll never be the same.”
HAPPY MONDAYS Bummed (Universal)
While 1990’s Pills ’N Thrills And Bellyaches marks the high point of the Madchester movement, everything that made Happy Mondays a train-wreck spectacle is fully present on this 1988 sophomore release. After being discovered by Factory Records boss Tony Wilson during a battle of the bands at Manchester’s infamous Haçienda nightclub, the Mondays set about pioneering their sloppy-yet-brilliant fusion of acid-house beats, rock ’n’ roll attitude and hip hop’s cut-up aesthetic. Frontman Shaun Ryder incoherently blends surreal, Dylanesque word-pictures and menacing sexual deviancy, and his ecstasy-fueled rants (“Henny Penny, Cocky Locky, Goosey Loosey, Turkey Lurkey, Ducky Lucky, Chicken Lickin’” is a line from “Moving In With”) lend the Mondays’ music a wild-eyed charm and a warm, come-feel-me-fuzzy-sweater fluidity inspired by both the Beatles and the beats of the rave scene. Under The Influence: After the Mondays imploded in part due to Ryder’s drug problems, producer (and former Talking Heads bassist) Tina Weymouth wryly noted that she’s “seen a lot of people who live life on the edge, but I’ve never before seen a group of people who had no idea where the edge is.”
DR. DRE The Chronic (Death Row)
Former NWA member Andre “Dr. Dre” Young invented the nihilistic, party-before-we-die vibes known as G-funk: the West Coast’s elastic blend of P-Funk and Bloods-vs.-Crips warfare. 1992’s The Chronic was named for the particularly strong brand of weed Dre and his cronies preferred, and it powers the album’s stoned, drawn-out swing. The lyrics are given voice by then-unknown Long Beach rapper Snoop Doggy Dogg. Snoop’s Southern drawl on “Nuthin’ But A ‘G’ Thang,” “Dre Day” and “Let Me Ride” conveys the sort of impervious-to-it-all attitude that made The Chronic’s homophobia, misogyny and violence that much more shocking to behold while turning him into a pop-culture figure overnight. Part Redd Foxx, part George Clinton, The Chronic is that rare article: the most popular hip-hop album of its time and the creative class of a crowded field of imitators. Under The Influence: Only in a perpetually clouded universe could a game-show skit in which the grand prize is a “$20 sack of Endo and a $35 gift certificate to the Compton Swap Meet” be seen as “hilarious.”
The double album is an artifact of a bygone age in which artists conceived works requiring two vinyl records to contain all the content. Today, most double-length albums can easily fit onto a single CD, which has created some confusion about intent: Is the album simply in need of a judicious edit? The double album also speaks to an era when artistic freedom frequently shook hands with musical excess, from Bob Dylan’s Blonde On Blonde to the Clash’s London Calling. Commencing with the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s At Carnegie Hall in 1963 (widely believed to be the first commercially released double album), artists have embraced the sprawling format. The indie-rock community has chimed in with classics of its own, such as Hüsker Dü’s relentless Zen Arcade and the Minutemen’s ADD-afflicted Double Nickels On The Dime. The following are perhaps the finest examples of the form the underground has authored in MAGNET’s 13-year life span.
LIZ PHAIR Exile In Guyville (Matador)
When she appeared on the Chicago scene, Oberlin art-history grad Liz Phair was an indie nerd’s wet dream. She wrote lacerating songs by the truckload, warbled them as dispassionately as Peppermint Patty on Prozac, could pull the pin on a well-placed f-bomb and skewered the male-dominated geek scene while simultaneously signifying that she was down with all the young dudes. Much was made of how her 1993 debut purportedly forms a song-by-song response to the Stones’ Exile On Main St., but in hindsight, pitting Phair’s cunnilingus anthem “Glory” against Slim Harpo’s “Shake Your Hips” doesn’t make for a very fair fight. Instead, the 18-song Guyville best displays Phair’s encyclopedic knowledge of indiedom’s most hard-baked stereotypes (smashed to bits on the devastating “Divorce Song”) and a triumph of studio smarts over execution (as her pottymouth nod to art rock, “Flower,” makes clear). Before she became suburbia’s trophy MILF, Phair served as scary godmother to a generation of angry grrls-in-waiting such as Alanis Morissette and Fiona Apple. Double Trouble: Some insist Phair doesn’t waste a single note on Exile, but five-minute dronefest “Shatter” doesn’t amount to much more than an opportunity to fiddle with flange.
WILCO Being There (Sire/Reprise)
Having left Uncle Tupelo’s alt-country ghetto miles behind him, Jeff Tweedy found inspiration in the scrap heap of rock ’n’ roll clichés for his new band’s 1996 sophomore release. Borrowing a cup of Neil Young’s woe-is-me confessional sensibility (“Red-Eyed And Blue,” with its indelible tour snapshot of “alcohol and cotton balls and some drugs we can’t afford”) and a dollop of the Stones’ bluesy swagger (“Monday” and “Kingpin” could easily pass for Sticky Fingers outtakes), Being There is a straight-up celebration of the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle. The album is so relentlessly self-referential that Tweedy even designed the CD with twin-sleeve gatefold packaging, ensuring recognition as a proper double album. Double Trouble: Goofy hayseed pastiche “Forget The Flowers” might’ve pleased the alt-country crowd but does little to extend the LP’s bleak, brittle narrative.
OLIVIA TREMOR CONTROL Music From The Unrealized Film Script: Dusk At Cubist Castle (Cloud)
Released at the apex of this Athens, Ga., collective’s obsession with the Beatles, this 1996 double LP has been characterized as the Olivia Tremor Control’s version of the White Album. But this soundtrack to an unmade film (originally titled Orange Twin) actually shares more DNA with Revolver in terms of sheer brain-bending, lost-at-the-boundaries-of-pop experimentalism. OTC songwriters Will Cullen Hart and Bill Doss make like a Southern-fried Lennon and McCartney throughout the album’s 27 tracks, culling the best of the reported 200 unrecorded songs they had at the time. Dusk lays the tape-loop goop on extra-thick and tops it off with a syrupy, low-frequency hum. Even the album’s artwork—acid-gobbling illustrations seemingly cut from the back of a high-school chemistry textbook—evokes Revolver in a way meant to ensure that we’ll turn off our minds, relax and float downstream. Double Trouble: The “Green Typewriters” intermission—10 tracks running more than 22 minutes—forms a charmingly lo-fi but ultimately inconsequential detour.
GODSPEED YOU BLACK EMPEROR! Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven (Kranky)
Tales from the topographic tundra? While no one is likely to confuse the cacophony of Godspeed You Black Emperor! with the prog-fog wanderings of Yes, this art-damaged Montreal nine-piece nevertheless manages to evoke pomp rock’s heyday on its 2000 sophomore release. Like Yes, GYBE! possesses the self-belief—or perhaps the arrogance—to spread four compositions over four individual LP sides, each clocking in around 20 minutes. Unlike Yes, GYBE! dispenses with vocals and lyrics altogether, preferring to allow bits of film dialogue and field recordings to provide what little language is required outside of its layered guitars, manipulated tape effects and percussion. This renders the tracks as vast sonic murals that build into furious crescendos where tension is released in a shower of sparkling sound. Double Trouble: The spoken-word intro to “Sleep” (a wistful monologue from an elderly New Yorker lamenting the changes that have reshaped his beloved Coney Island) adds more minutes than insight.
STEVE WYNN Here Come The Miracles (Blue Rose/Innerstate)
Two decades after creating the Dream Syndicate’s untoppable The Days Of Wine And Roses debut, Steve Wynn spent 10 days in a Tucson, Ariz., garage (aided by members of Giant Sand and Calexico) and emerged with this 2001 double disc. In much the same way that Led Zeppelin used every inch of Physical Graffiti to explore the promise of its earlier stylistic detours, Wynn stretches out with raw, raging riff-rockers of the Neil Young school (“Crawling Misanthropic Blues,” “Watch Your Step”), psychedelic talking blues that owes as much to young Dylan as Lou Reed (“Strange New World,” “Topanga Canyon Freaks”) and a lazy, heat-sapped form of blue-eyed soul (“Morningside Heights,” “Charity”). In keeping with the language of Wynn’s chosen landscape (the black-and-white world of L.A.’s seamy underside), he sounds as though he’s finally comfortable steering the night train on a collision course with the Big Adios. Double Trouble: Although Wynn’s table scraps exceed even the best work of wannabe grit-rockers such as Matchbox 20, “There Will Come A Day” translates into mere rock-by-numbers.
LCD Soundsystem LCD Soundsystem (DFA/Capitol)
If you didn’t know better, you’d swear that LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy is a smug, self-contained character from Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. Murphy’s Brooklyn dance/rock collective produced an insanely ear-grabbing single, 2002’s “Losing My Edge,” that name-drops every record-clerk obsession since the British Invasion: “I was there in 1968, at the first Can show in Cologne”; “I was there in 1974 at the first Suicide practices, in a loft, in New York City”; “I was the first guy playing Daft Punk to the rock kids ... I’ve never been wrong.” Murphy’s album works for the same reasons that Prince’s double-disc Sign O’ The Times does: This is a one-man walking jukebox with a lifetime’s worth of records in his head (the Fall, ESG, Liquid Liquid) and a unique ability to get asses moving and brains thinking. Murphy’s running theme is the death of pop-culture irony, and while he doesn’t totally succeed, 2005’s LCD Soundsystem nevertheless goes down valiantly swinging for the fences. Double Trouble: Did the world really need two mixes of “Yeah”?
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