ITT: /mu/ in 1974
"Well, why do you need new bands for? Everyone knows rock attained perfection in 1974. It's a scientific fact."
Nothing good's gonna come out of an album with that cover art.
Such transubstantiations. In which "Bye Bye Love" becomes "Maya Love," in which "window-pane" becomes "window brain." Can this mean that pain (pane, get it?) is the same as brain? For all this hoarse dork knows . . . C-
Goodnight, sweet prince.
>>131279688yeah, George sucks. we know.
>>131279688No one cares about 60s AJ McLean's gay Indian religion bullshit albums.
>>131279619the weakest year of the decade without much notable going on
>>131279801Fuck off already.
>>131279801how much longer are you gonna keep doing this?
I don't know vy she's moaning about unved virgins and vether to betray her hate, and I don't vant to know. The Manzanera-Eno-Cale settings, which I believe is what one calls this sort of elevated sound effect, are suitably morbid and exotic. But funereal irony aside, her parlay of the Doors' "The End" and the Fuehrer's "Das Lied Der Deutschens" contextualizes both tunes more pejoratively than is intended. Nico is what happens when the bloodless wager their minds on the wisdom of the blood and the suicidal make something of their lives. If this be romanticism, give me Matthew Arnold--and gimme shelter. C
"Welp, I'm outta here. Cya."
>>131279974>white boy in charge of deciding who is funk
The Who, slightly plodding, is turned over to reveal. . .Black Sabbath, that's who, without the horseshit necromancy. And I'm loving every stolen riff, if not every original one. B
>>131280027not a bad album per se but disappointing after The Marble Index and Desertshore
>>131280147where does he get that from? BTO don't sound at all like Sabbath riffs
>>131280058don't let the door hit you on your way out, Tricky Dick
There's something that's easy to dislike about his relentless self-examination and even the whiny thinness of his voice. But even "Ambulance Blues", an eight-minute throwaway, is studded with great lines, one of which goes "It's hard to know the meaning of this song." And I can hum it for you if you like. A
>>131279829a lot of record industry cost cutting from the OPEC recession
This album is rather boring. Looks like Judas Priest are just another group of Led Zeppelin imitators who'll never make it big.
Old soldiers never die, they just rediscover the redneck in them.
>>131280407honestly this thing sold about 100 copies in the Birmingham area so next-to nobody knew about it
These prognatheous New Englanders demonstrate the old adage that if a band is going to be dumb, it may as well be American dumb and here they provide a real treat for the hearing-impaired on side one. Pretty good sense of humor, too, assuming "Lord of the Thighs" is intended as a joke. With dumb bands it's always hard to tell. B-
>>131280147BTO sucks ass though.
A/k/a Shoogity-boogity. B
What is this garbage? New band or something. Dumb painted clowns who have nothing to say and can't play for shit.
The first side is good straight hard funk, with some surprising social consciousness from labelmates Gloria Jones and Pam Sawyer (they complain that girls are banned from football and boys from sensitivity). The second side is acceptable straight hard funk. But you know something else? I like my hard funk a little bit crooked. B
>>131280625rock is dead if it's come to this
>>131280669>>131280625and so ends the protest era and begins the polyester and Star Wars part of the 70s
>>131279701Ellington died, unfortunately he went out in the most horrible possible way he could have gone out.
Part 2
...wot
EVERYBODY WAS KUNG FU FIGHTING
Now this really is an American band--healthy, confident, schlocky, with all manner of murky contradictions beneath. Myself, I prefer the title cut, which bursts forth with a, you shall pardon the expression?--raw power they've never managed before (Mark Farner sounds shaky on "The Loco-Motion"). But how many bands get to record a ninth LP, much less make it their best?
>>131280901>critics hated Grand Funk until they sold out and became boogie buttrockFigures.
>>131280625We got Raw Power at home
>>131280962that and Americanized Slade/10cc
More shoogity-boogity. B
>>131280187Listen to Second Hand
>>131280850>>131280869Great records
It seems somehow fitting that EP's best collection of new material in years looks like a sorry Camden reissue. B-
>>131280992that's a bit racist take, innit Bob?
>>131280836https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgatF1bpFiUThis is bullshit.
This is measurably stronger than Goat's Head Soup and when I listen closely I hear enough audacious jokes, outrageous licks, and arresting bass runs for two LPs. I also hear lazy rhyming, indolent phrasing, two sides that start off at a peak and wind down from there, and a song about dancing with Father Time that appears to mean more than it does, or do I mean more than I mean? B
>>131280992aw hell yeah this slaps
>>131279619I don't browse /mu/ basically ever. How do you guys feel about L Zeppelin? I suppose you find most of it boring dadrock? Do you think Jimmy Page is a good songwriter? What do you think about JPJ and Bonham?
It's always darkest before the dawn?
>>131281118nice bell bottoms
I wanted to call this the most readable album since Quadrophenia, but it's only the wordiest--two inner sleeves covered with lyrics and a double-fold that's all small-type libretto. The apparent subject is the symbolic quest of a Puerto Rican hood/street kid/graffiti artist named Rael, but the songs neither shine by themselves nor suggest any thematic insight I'm eager to pursue. For art-rock, though, it's listenable, from Eno treatments to a hook that goes (I'm humming) "on Braw-aw-aw-aw-aw-aw-dway." B-
>>131281166>I don't browse /mu/ basically ever. How do you guys feel about L Zeppelin?do not have an album out in 74
>>131281232>"on Braw-aw-aw-aw-aw-aw-dway."Bob confirmed tone-deaf.
Back after three years.
>>131281053twenty years of recording this year. looking forward to the next 20.
I would describe the performances here as spirited rather than inspired, but they're definitely not compromised, which makes this collaboration of genius an automatic collector's item. I suspect I won't play it as much as I do the Joe Turner/Otis Spann/T-Bone Walker session that Bob Thiele set up five years ago. But then, I never figured I'd play that one as much as I do. A-
>>131281142idk why critics all hated Fingerprint File so much
>>131281187all grown up and now fully cuntree
>>131280901For more information on the band Grand Funk, consult your local library!
The hot poop is that after nine albums they finally have a frontman who can sing and write songs. The cold turkey is that the music remains the same as it ever was--as campy and ominous and Yurrupean as a vampire movie. C+
In which a man who has always gained traction through his talent for image manipulation decides to cash in on his dubious literary and theatrical gifts. Despite two good songs and some decent (if unhummable) rock sonorics, this is Doomsday purviewed from a pleasure dome. Message: Eat, snort, and be pervy, for tomorrow we be peopleoids, but tonight how about buying this piece of plastic? Say nay. C
>>131281575fuck you Bob, what do you know about anything?
The Burton Cummings side of this band always wanted it to be Jimi Hendrix, Carlos Santana, and Gary Puckett and the Union Gap all rolled into one. This rather monstrous goal has finally been realized. Me, I preferred the part that wanted to be Bachman-Turner Overdrive. C
Switched-on Herbie jazzes it up one more time for all the Con Edison fans. C+
>>131281700figures he would like the plebian buttrock band better
>>131281483Hhhhold up there. Ddddid you say Bob Thiele?
The single almost made number one on the billboard until its radar ran out of love down the stretch and it got knocked off by Grand Funk's "The Loco-Motion." Yah, yah, our stupid-rock is better than your stupid-rock. Especially when yours comes from Holland. C
>>131281841Why are you so obsessed with Teresa?
>>131281864Nobody remembers these guys if it wasn't for the Simpsons.
>>131280427>>131280885Old soldiers never die? No they don't.
The first album she's ever made that doesn't sound like a musical departure--it's almost standard rock, For the Roses gone mainstream. But the relative smoothness is a respite rather than a copout, the cover version of "Twisted" suggests a brave future, and she's the best singer-songwriter there is right now. Even the decrease in verbal daring--the lyrics are quite personal and literal--makes for a winning directness in songs like "Help Me" and "Raised on Robbery." Now all I want to know is whether "Free Man in Paris" is about David Geffen. A
>>131279619woah man fuck disco or something
>>131281980Disco is just in its infancy in 74 lol.
Boy, these piano boys--on "Root Beer Rag" and "The Mexican Connection" Joel abandons Irving Berlin for George Gershwin, or do I mean Roger Williams? Granted, "The Entertainer" is so nasty it's witty--so nasty it may be about Joel himself. But why does it include a Rick Wakeman imitation? C
>>131281934That is a ghastly cover to say the least.
>>131281987What, you think it'll grow bigger?
>>131282000Another album where just like Man of Miracles the cover tells you nothing good is going to come out of it.
>>131281993Billy Joel honestly really sucks.
No ZZ Top album this year.
>>131281934Nope.
>>131281338right, but they were big in the 70s. anyway, just curious.
In a time when all the most prestigious music, even what passes for funk, is coated with silicone grease, Dylan is telling us to take that grease and jam it. Sure he's domestic, but his version of conjugal love is anything but smug, and this comes through in both the lyrics and the sound of the record itself. Blissful, sometimes, but sometimes it sounds like stray cat music--scrawny, cocky, and yowling up the stairs. A-
Despite my immense misgivings--Newman's political sensitivity, a useful attribute in one conceptualizing about the South, has never impressed me--I'm convinced that this is Newman's second-best album. It also rights a career that was threatening to wind down into cheap sarcasm. Contrary to published report, the white Southerners Newman sings about/from are never objects of contempt. Even Newman's psychotic and exhibitionist and moron show dignity and imagination, and the rednecks of the album's most notorious songs are imbued by the smart-ass Los Angeles Jew who created them with ironic distance, a smart-ass's kindest cut of all. There is, natcherly, a darker irony: no matter how smart they are about how dumb they are, they still can't think of anything better to do than keep the n-----s down. A
>*shitty RJR-funded circus music starts playing*>*shitty boomer guitar solo*>*shitty ten minute keyboard solo*>wait, there are vocals on this?>*song ends*wow, truly the GOAT band. Thank you Andrew Latimer for your truly groundbreaking """music"""
>>131282278>>131282000prog is pretty much near the end of the road by this point anyway
Seger is one of those hard rock legends I've never quite believed in, and "Get Out of Denver" followed by "Long Song Comin'" tells me why. Vocally he's still stuck at the adolescent outrage stage, somewhere between a shriek and a scream. Very unbecoming of such a grizzled veteran. C
The idea of this record--top of the pops from quasi-dadaist British synth wizard--may put you off, but the actuality is quite engaging in a vaguely Velvet Underground kind of way. Minimally differentiated variations on the same melody recur and recur, but it's a great melody, and not the only one, and chances are he meant it that way, as a statement, which I agree with. What's more, words take over when the music falters, and on "Cindy Tells Me" they combine for the best song ever written about middle-class feminism, a rock and roll subject if ever there was one. My major complaint is that at times the artist uses a filter that puts dust on my needle. A
The critic in me has no doubt that this is their best album, although he notes that the male-bonding songs (which articulate an affirmative ethos) have more to say than the female-separation songs (which rationalize hostility into pity/contempt). And when the critic plays the record, the listener enjoys the Gram Parsons tribute "My Man," the MOR-oriented "Best of My Love," the vaguely anti-authoritarian "On the Border," the permanently star-struck "James Dean," and several others. But the listener is too turned off by what the band represents ever to put the thing on voluntarily. B+
>>131282359I fuckin' hate the Eagles, man.
>>131282220>OH GOD YES, RANDY, THAT'S IT. FUCK MY TIGHT LITTLE ASSHOLE. YES, THAT'S IT, RANDY. FASTER, FASTER, FASTEEERRR!!!!
Nuts to you, Ford for pardoning Tricky Dick. He belongs in prison, maaaan.
The great journeyman English blues-cum-heavy group, of whom it has been said "When they step out onstage and wield their guitars, it is as though they are brandishing swords", until they start digging in and you realize it's more like shovels. D+
>>131280058would barely be a news story in 2026
This album sums up their chewy perversity as aptly as its title--all I could ask is a lyric sheet. "Rikki Don't Lose That Number" blends into AM radio with an intro appropriated from Horace Silver, while the other side-opener builds a joyous melody of Bird riffs underneath a lyric that invites one and all to "take a piece of Mr. Parker's band." The solos are functional rather than personal or expressive, locked into the workings of the music. And even when Donald Fagen's voice dominates as it comes out of the speakers it tends to sink into the mix in the mind's ear--recollected in tranquility, the vocals seem like the golden mean of pop ensemble singing, stripped of histrionics and displays of technique, almost . . . sincere, modest. Yeah, sure. A+
>>131282562anyone have Steve Albini's quote on Steely Dan? lol.
>>131282350this one and pic related are literally the only good albums released this year. I guess the first KISS record is cool but it's not particularly significant like these other two are.
By opening the first side with "Motherless Children" and closing it with "I Shot the Sheriff," Clapton puts the rural repose of his laid-back-with-Leon music into a context of deprivation and conflict, adding bite to soft-spoken professions of need and faith that might otherwise smell faintly of the most rural of laid-back commodities, bullshit. And his honesty has its reward: better sex. The casual assurance you can hear now in his singing goes with the hip-twitching syncopation he brings to Robert Johnson's "Steady Rolling Man" and Elmore James's "I Can't Hold Out," and though the covers are what make this record memorable it's on "Get Ready," written and sung with Yvonne Elliman, that his voice takes on a mellow, seductive intimacy he's never come close to before. A
>>131282624What's the difference between Eric Clapton's baby and a bag of coke? He'd never let the latter fall out of a window.
Welcome Tom and Jerry (Dowd and Wexler) back--this isn't great Aretha, but it rocks steady even on the ballads. If she doesn't get away with "The Masquerade Is Over," she does renew "A Song for You" with a fresh electric piano part and a good helping of indiscreet interpretation. Guided indiscretion, that's the key--her great gift is her voice, but her genius is her bad taste. B+
At its best, Reed's live music brings the Velvets into the arena in a clean redefinition of heavy, thrilling without threatening to stupefy. "Lady Day," the slow one here, would pass for uptempo at many concerts, the made-in-Detroit guitars of Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner mesh naturally with the unnatural rhythms, and Reed shouts with no sacrifice of wit. I could do without Hunter's showboating "Introduction," and I've always had my reservations about "Heroin," but this is a live album with a reason for living. A-
>>131280427https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZJJ6qjjSb4Her "Your Cheatin' Heart" seemingly isn't on Youtube. Nonetheless at 52 she hasn't lost a step here and her voice sounds pretty much as it always did.
Although the musical concept-theme that pops up here and there is unnecessarily explicit, the songs more than justify it. On the woman's side of the breakup, try "Washing the Dishes" (soap gets in your eyes) or "Sister's Coming Home"/"Down at the Corner Beer Joint" (going home to mother as non-joke); on the man's, "It's Not Supposed to Be That Way" (but it is) and "Pick Up the Tempo" (on the rebound). What's more, Nelson's combination of soft-spoken off-key and battered honky-tonk matches the bare, responsive country music Jerry Wexler has gotten out of the Muscle Shoals regulars. Payoff: the two Mike Lewis string arrangements are actually climactic. A-
>>131282278It gets worse.
Great formula here. When it rocks, three guitarists and a keyboard player pile elementary riffs and feedback noises into dense combinations broken by preplanned solos, while at quieter moments the spare vocabulary of the best Southern folk music is evoked or just plain duplicated. And any suspicions that this substantial, tasteful band blew their best stuff on the first platter should fall in the wake of the first state song ever to make top ten, which will expose you to their infectious putdowns of rock businessmen, rock journalists, and heroin. A-
>>131282952ugh, the worst
The title's as phony as the rest of the album, which in spite of the bought-and-paid-for goodies--an intro here, a harmony there, even a song someplace or another--is mostly a tame collection of reshuffled platitudes. Especially enervating is "Oh, Camile," in which Graham lets us know he is morally superior to a doubt-ridden Vietnam vet. C-
>>131279619I cant wait for punk rock
That miraculously intimate voice has become more expressive and confident over the years without losing its beguiling flat amateurishness. Some of the new songs are less than memorable, but the settings, by John Lissauer, have the bizarre feel of John Simon's "overproduction" on Cohen's first album, which I always believed suited his studied vulgarity perfectly. A-
>>131283359Ahem. Nobody in America ever cared about Cohen, only some Euros.
Only two of the six "short" tracks--they total about an hour--are more than good background. "Maiyisha," which recalled his most lyrical early-60s stuff, and "Honky Tonk," a snazzy blues. Even the rocking "Red China Blues" is marred by a Wade Marcus horn chart, and "Rated X" is an experiment in organ noise that's not so great in the background either. But the two long ones--they total over an hour--are brilliant: "He Loved Him Madly," a tribute to Duke Ellington as elegant African internationalist, and "Calypso Frelimo," a Caribbean dance broken into sections that seem to follow with preordained emotional logic. Not necessarily music to fill the mind--just the room. A-
Yes, prog is dead and this is just the gas escaping from the corpse.
Keyboard player (and now vocalist) H.W. Casey and bassman Richard Finch made so much moolah for T.K. prexy Henry Stone that he told them they could spend as much as $3150 on their own LP. What they come up with is the real Miami sound--the sensual Latin accents that really are sensual in New Orleans sound altogether more hyped-up here. "Queen of Clubs" was a smash in the Queen's clubs, while "Sound Your Funky Horn" and "I'm a Pushover" have creased America's soul charts, which makes three hooks right here. A weirdo and a sleeper. B+
>>131282278Camel rules
This is the first year since 1961 without a Beach Boys LP.
Nineteen seventy four...Nineteen seventy four...Oh no. OH NO!!!!!
Wimpoid royaloid heavoid android void. C
>>131283648took that long to get to it?
Sure, "(You're Having) My Baby" is kind of cute. But the rest of the album is the usual abortion. C-
>>131283636Oh right, I forgot the thing that happens to her this year.
>>131281187Same cover artist?
>>131281558also only Euros care about Deep Purple
>>131282220Who better to host tonight's edition (9/27/74) of the Midnight Specialhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=466BHzcJVco
