I’ve found it incredibly hard to write this list. When I narrow it all down to the albums that I feel are genuinely deserving of being called classic (not in some daft cultural canon sense, but Seth’s classics) there are some important omissions because there are some albums that don’t fit my contrary and idiotic criteria…
Firstly, and always most importantly, the Wu-Tang Clan. Perhaps controversially, there have been no Wu-Tang albums released so far this decade that I’d call classic, because one of my daft criteria is that for something to be classic it has to have some indefinable stamp of being almost, ugh, revolutionary in some way (I’m rolling my eyes at myself). Now from 1993 to 1996 the Clan fit that bill perfectly for me. And I’ve been amazed at their longevity. They’re continuing to put out near-classic albums and now have probably the my favourite glorious mess of a back catalogue of any group.
Ghostface scores Man of the Match for the decade so far. Between Supreme Clientele, The Pretty Toney Album and Theodore Unit’s 718 he’s lapped everyone else. RZA’s Birth of a Prince was easily as good as each of these three, The W and Iron Flag were both excellent and even Masta Killa’s put out a solid record. But despite all that I can’t quite make myself call any single one of those records a classic. Taken together they’re dizzying; individually I can’t quite put them up there.
The same holds true for A Silver Mount Zion. He Has Left Us Alone But Shafts of Light Sometimes Grace the Corner of Our Rooms, Born into Trouble as the Sparks Fly Upward, ”This is Our Punk-Rock,” Thee Rusted Satellites Gather + Sing, The Pretty Little Lightning Paw EP and Horses in the Sky are all fabulous. Taken together they make the list, otherwise no single album quite stands out enough.
I can’t quite believe I’m not putting in a Flaming Lips album. I’d love to include Yoshimi, but compared to Clouds Taste Metallic, The Soft Bulletin, In a Priest Driven Ambulance and Hit to Death in the Future Head… well, it’s not even classic by the Lip’s standards. Don’t get me wrong, I love it dearly. It’s just they’ve set the bar so high already, amazed me at what music is capable of doing so many times, that Yoshimi was just further confirmation rather than something that turned my silly little world upside-down.
At the Drive-In would have made it with Relationship of Command if the lyrics weren’t so god-awful. It’s the only album I’ve ever heard that still manages to be a masterpiece despite having such shite on the inlay: it really is that good. This album is the reason why so many people find the Mars Volta so laughable.
I was tempted to put Jay-Z on here with The Black Album, but it doesn’t have the longevity for me. I played the shit out of it for months after I first got it, but I think it’s only been on my stereo a few times in the last year. Joanna Newsom’s Milk Eyed Mender and MIA’s Arular might end up here, though. Too early to say, I haven’t lived with them long enough.
So my list is shorter than I’d have thought, although you wouldn’t have thought it from this War and Peaceish post.
My aim is to write about music in a way that makes people want to experience it themselves. I think these albums are pretty fucking cool and I think you might too…
The Postal Service – Give Up
They will see us waving from such great heights/”come down now,” they’ll say/but everything looks perfect from far away/”come down now,” but we’ll stay
The soundtrack to my summer of 2004 while I worked at the pub. I was listening to Such Great Heights for months on the Goblets jukebox without knowing who it was or indeed anything more about the song. It became my theme song while I worked in the pub, and it always got better with each successive listen. I owe unending thanks to Imaginary Mice for playing me the album; I remember asking if we could listen to it again as soon as it had finished.
It’s hard to define the magic here. I’ve not listened to much Death Cab for Cutie, so I can’t place it in the context of Ben Gibbard’s other work. It seems to be about the deceptive naivety of his voice combined with the deceptive simplicity of the programming. All the sounds seem processed and fairly cheaply casio based, but if you listen closely you’ll hear an attention to detail, structure and tone that’s lacking from a lot of supposedly “genius” glitch stuff. I defy you to listen to how Tamborello constructs the build throughout The District Sleeps Alone Tonight, it reminds me of Björk’s Hyperballad
Then you start to notice the string sections that seem lifted from old black and white romance movies, hugely evocative and melodramatic. Nothing Better has the best example, a male/female duet about the break up of a relationship. Gibbard sets up his idealistic dreams of getting back together, before Jen Wood delivers the heart breaking, “I feel I must interject here” and the full orchestra swells to give the piece far more resonance and depth. The song is almost Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind condensed into a four minute pop tune: …so let me help you remember/I’ve made charts and graphs that should finally make it clear/I’ve prepared a lecture on why I had to leave.
There’s such a deft touch to everything on here. The programming leaves space for every melody to breathe, it’s done with a gentle touch that you rarely hear in electronic music. The singing is simple, unadorned and honest. Everything has been done in service of the song, which is again a rarity with electronic music. If you’ve heard Khonnor’s Handwriting you’ll be aware of a similar approach, although he tends to layer elements of random noise while The Postal Service are about leaving space in the mix.
The lyrics are some of the most tender, thoughtful and romantic I’ve heard in a long time, and Gibbard pulls off every line that might seem twee from any other vocalist (an ability he has in common with Wayne Coyne: I’ll be your platform shoes and undo what heredity’s done to you/you won’t have to strain to look into my eyes… I want to take you far from the cynics in this town/and kiss you on the mouth/we’ll cut our bodies free from the tethers of this scene/start a brand new colony where everything will change/we’ll give ourselves new names/identities erased. Someone on this board described We Will Become Silhouettes as the most touching song about a potential nuclear holocaust they’d ever heard. And the album is not all dreamy eyed love, there are songs that contain an almost unbearable sadness. The aforementioned Nothing Better, for example, or The District Sleeps Alone Tonight with its deft handling of urban loneliness and repreated, I am finally seeing/why I was the one worth leaving. The morose This Place is a Prison captures the mood of wasted weekends and wasted lives with economy and bitterness: This place is a prison and these people aren’t your friends/I know that it’s not a party if it happens every night.
A pure pop album, then. It’s easily my favourite since The Flaming Lips’ Soft Bulletin, which is some of the highest praise I can give to a record.
Godspeed You Black Emperor! – Levez Vos Skinny Fists Comme Antennas to Heaven!
It’s rare that an album’s character is defined in part by the smell of its packaging. This record stank of vomit as soon as I removed it from the cellophane, a side effect of the recycled card packaging, the first sign of the potency of the music within. Only once before (the Manics’ Holy Bible) have I experience a punk album that was so immediately capable of evoking utter disgust. The second sign came when I opened the gatefold only to recoil at the nightmarish album artwork. A twisted, disproportionate figure regretfully signs away their power (symbolised by their severed hands) to a death-masked authority figure (the mismatched head of whom seems to be taken from a dollar bill). Out of context this would appear to be a retread of the doomed Book of Revelation/Judgement from On-High themes of their previous work…
…only the disembodied hands are somehow alive on the cover, fingers in strange arcane shapes, working unknown and powerful magicks. This is not an album made by a bunch of brainless and morose “The End of the World Has Come” types. This is spirited music, and it’s very, very angry. It’s also an utter mystery made by a band shrouded in myth and conjecture, which you’ll fascinating and/or frustrating. If it helps, the sister group A Silver Mount Zion are the missing human and fragile side of Godspeed. I reckon the two groups are supposed to be heard the context of one another.
Godspeed’s third release is their masterpiece. Four pieces (Storm, Static, Sleep and Antennas to Heaven) cover a range of tones wider than anything they’ve done before or since. Storm begins orchestral, full of hope and beauty, rising until the drums and horns turn it into a glorious uplifting fanfare. Then the piece falls back into an ambience that sounds like a string section tuning up, before a single guitar subtly references Amazing Grace and the piece builds steam until a jarring held chord announces a brutal drone-rock march into a collapsed ending of desolate piano over a distorted field recording. Static begins with extended droning, all beautifully recorded, before a field recording of an apparently insane Old-Testament style prophet begins one of the most achingly melancholic pieces I’ve ever heard, which then turns into some kind of eerie and twisted funeral march. The first CD ends with the finest speed up-crescendo ever committed to tape, complete with a terrifying howling guitar that somehow builds further than you think is possible and even then has room to go stratospheric. Then cymbal drones and scrapes until the disc stops.
Listen to it loud, late at night with the lights off, and know that by this point you’re exhausted, frightened, mesmerised and still only halfway through the album! Sleep is about memories of lost innocence and freedom, but it’s the final track that’s broader tone that anything they’ve attempted before, mixing numerous field and found recordings into a piece of startling depth and cohesion. If only this had hinted at further experiments to come on future releases. This album is the real thing in that it somehow sounds more painfully present and alive than most other albums. It’s colossal in scope, bruised yet brave, and it makes an excellent and similar sounding band like Mogwai seem like pop music by comparison (that’s is no insult, just an observation of relative scale). Reference points can be found in Glen Branca, some modern classical and musique concrete, but the power and gravity of what’s on this set is unlike anything before or since.
There’s something strange happening here in the way Godspeed take Judeo-Christian ideas and imagery and deliver them straight, with no commentary, all their power left intact. There’s no punch line, no contemptuous sneer, no attempt to satirise. The sense of an enraged God raining down punishment from heaven is could be a metaphor for America, or it could be what members of Godspeed wish would happen to America, or it could be both, or neither. Crucially they never see themselves as exempt from wrath, song titles like She Dreamt She Was a Bulldozer, She Dreamed She Was Alone in an Empty Field place the artist as both victim and perpetrator of the problems of the world. The only overtly political punk that’s worth shit mirrors the pain, confusion, guilt and anger within the person with the suffering and injustice in the world around them.
And to anyone who thinks this band is all doom, listen! Listen to the final act of the album, Antennas to Heaven, a guitar beamed out into the universe as a message of hope or a prayer, one final transmission before we hear the tape stopped and all goes silent.
Lightning Bolt – Wonderful Rainbow
Lightning Bolt are two blokes called Brian that make one dirty happy hurtload of a racket. One fairly normal looking bloke pounds out an insane wall of preposterously distorted bass riffs and Eddie Van Halen histrionics while a nutter wearing a homemade gimp mask drums like Stewart Copeland on speed and steroids.
He’s got a microphone in that mask. Sometimes you can hear him shouting indecipherable stuff about monsters under all the overdriven lunacy.
I love everything about this album. I love the daft song titles about Dracula and Duels in the Deep and THOUSANDS OF MONKIES EVERYWHERE! I love the way the opening feedback of Hello Morning seems to reference Morning from Peer Gynt (indeed it’s not the only reference to classical composition on the album: the build up of Dracula Mountain - named after an imaginary theme park ride? - sounds like The Hall of the Mountain King in some ways). I love the way Towers on Fire opens like an incendiary firework display of bass and drum technique without ever once feeling like cold showing off before locking into a two note riff that lasts for nearly five fucking minutes. I love the way that this is rock and roll stripped to its essence and played by the ultimate party band using structures adapted from dance and classical music. It’s brilliantly executed and breathlessly paced.
I wish I’d had a band like this when I was fifteen. I would have dedicated my whole life to them. With Lightning Bolt and Sunn O))) occupying opposite ends of the spectrum all mid-tempo heavy music seems utterly redundant.
I once wrote about Melt Banana that they embody the condition that so much music aspires to yet falls short. The same is true of Lightning Bolt.
Melt Banana – Cell Scape
I’m struggling to find anything to write about this album that I haven’t already written elsewhere. So I’m going to cut and paste what everyone wrote about it in The “best records of 2003” thread.
Rizla: What can possibly be communicated with words to sum up the best Melt Banana album yet? I’m still quite fond of my “they are to other rock bands as giant shape-shifting robots are to cavemen” quote, but aside from that, I dunno..
Uncle retrospective: Can any one see the 'Lith influence on me? Again I only started listening to it lately but holy shit! Grindcore, Drum N' Bass, J Pop. Wow.
Math is for suckers: I think everything that can be said about it has already been said, but i still love it, love it, love it.
. (stoopid full stop fictionsuit): My three heroes of the year have to be Kid606, Melt Banana and Max Tundra... Once upon a time no-one would have even known who I was talking about, but it looks like Melt Banana are top of the 'lith pops…
Seth: Stick a nuke up your ass and detonate the fucker. This is the condition that so much music aspires to yet falls short: fierce, fast, joyful and unique. Listening to Agata is probably the closest our generation will get to experiencing Eddie Van Halen for the first time back in '78; Rika and Witte contort and hammer like a punkfuck Peart and Lifeson or a sanity-destroying Sumner and Copeland (in fact Witte's performance is deserving of deification); YaKo rides the maelstrom with grace, precision and more pure pop hooks than your poor addled brain can handle. Melt Banana strip their sound down, jettisoning any extra instrumentation and sparing too many overdubs, revealing the world's best four-piece punk band at the top of their game. Ejaculatory… Now is it fair to say that Cell Scape has officially won the Barbelith Fictionsuit's Choice Award for 2003? It's certainly gained more mentions on this thread than anything else.
Now a few choice quotes from the Cell Scape thread:
Seth: OMfuckingG.
It's going to take a little while to process this album, due to the usual overdose of ideas. They make most other bands look impotent.
First thoughts are that it's a progression from Teeny Shiny, still fairly rabid, but much more pop oriented. Every band member is phenomenal, some of the riffs, rhythms and arrangements are both brilliantly conceived and ferociously executed. They're one of the few bands that can marry ideas, technique and energy.
at the scarwash: It's an incredible progression from everything they have ever done. For the first time, a Melt Banana record is something more than a concert souvenir. It's actually almost as good as they are live. Agata's use of effects is on my list as the most interesting since Kevin Shield, especially in the digital delay department. While the lyrics are nonsense, there is something very compelling about YaSuKo's delivery, as if she feels it's very important that we grasp these concepts. It fucking rocks.
seth: All the arrangements are perfectly judged, and the tunes are magnificent - catchy as fuck record.
Rizla: Listening to Cell Scape for the first time right now.
Oh. My. God.
This is amazing!! It's like.. Melt Banana go POP! .. well, not really I guess, but it's got like.. huge great rythyms and weird snappy disco-ish melodies flying out of nowhere.. it's got all the mental genius of previous Melt Banana, but it MAKES ME WANT TO DANCE!
THIS IS THE BEST RECORD EVER!
Illmatic: Had the marvellous experience of listening to this at 4 o'clock this morning with a hangover. Still reeling pretty much. All the lovely weirdness and crazy spazjazzing of the earlier stuff but with more groovy rhythms and melodic bit. I second Riz's comments.
THis is, indeed, THE BEST RECORD EVER!
Seth (related, but not about the album itself): Fuck me the fuck sideways. I've just listened to half an hour of Melt Banana live at the Concorde II, on John Peel.
If you live in London and you're not coming to the gig on the Eighth you're a fucking prick pariah who deserves nothing but hatred and misery and pain until you die puking and screaming and bleeding.
That’s all you need to know. If you don’t own this album already then you’ll probably never be my friend.
If anyone’s wondering why I compare everything that’s Good and Holy to Eddie Van Halen and Stewart Copeland… well, it’s because they’re the epitome of everything that’s Good and Holy. Duh…
Lift to Experience – The Texas/Jerusalem Crossroads
To all you haircut bands doing headstands/thinking you’ll turn he world upside down/put your guitars up over your shoulder/a new Sword of the Experience is taking over/because we’re simply the best damn band in the whole damned land/and Texas is the reason… the city is ours for the taking…
I find it impossible to listen to this record without crying my eyes out. I’m listening to it now, because I’ve decided that in order to write about any of these albums I have to be listening as I type. Anything else would be sacrilegious.
The last time I listened to this…
Oh God, now there’s a story. You see, this is no ordinary album, written by no ordinary person. Josh Pearson is a cowboy, which instantly places his triumphs and tragedies above those of ordinary men and women. He used to work on a ranch in Texas and he communed with the Lord through his guitar. He’s a lot like King David in that respect. He wears t-shirts that say, “My State is Bigger than your Country.”
Josh’s spiritual life is characterised by bereavement, in many ways similar to Nick Cave: his father was an itinerant preacher who was absent for long stretches of his life. When he was nine years old the presence of God – something he’d felt close and intimate and personal throughout his whole life – suddenly deserted him. He could only attain this connection again through singing and playing with the band. He was just a stupid ranch hand in a Texas rock band/trying to understand God's master plan
We sing these songs because we have to, not because we want to
It became his reason for being. He developed a guitar sound to match the enormous tones of a church organ (I’ve always loved the idea that in order to play music that comes close to being descriptive of the Majesty of the Lord you need an instrument the size of an entire fucking Church wall). He was on a Mission from God. He found Andy (The Boy) Young and Josh (The Bear) Browning to play drums and bass respectively and share in his unhinged vision…
The Lord said, “Son: tell the World before it explodes the Glory of the Texas Jerusalem Crossroads.”
I said, “Lord I’ll make you a deal. I will if you give me smash hit so I can build a City on a Hill.”
And He said, “Son I will if you will.”
… I said, “My Sweet Lord… it’s a deal.”
You see, we’re living in the End Times. Revelation is Now. Any minute thousands of the faithful will start disappearing in the Rapture. Texas is the New Jerusalem: indeed the USA is the centre of Jerusalem. And there’s one lone rock and roll band on the side of the Lord in these times of Judgement, one band that can stand against the tides of darkness and corruption and bring the world back to the light. That band is Lift to Experience, and this album is the double concept album masterpiece telling the tale in all its broken glory.
Lift to Experience saved the world, but you were probably too lost in your own filthy sin to realise.
If you make it over the Jordan, you still have to make it through the night/And if you reach the Holy City, it won't be without a fight
That the execution is up to the task of supporting such a concept beggars belief. This album sounds like one piece of music from start to finish. It’s immense, compared by some reviewers to Jeff Buckley fronting Godspeed. It drifts between maelstroms of sound to gentle passages, from referencing hymns to impassioned calls to arms. Its conviction is without question, pain and triumph in every chord.
Death, where is thy sting? Grave, where is thy victory? For my Saviour will come and rescue me, and redeem this treasure at the bottom of the sea.
It’s about.., Jesus. It’s about the loss of your father and the loss of the presence of God. It’s about the religious experience. It’s about a preincarnate Jesus meeting Joshua on the road to Jericho and giving the battle plans to march around the city seven times. It’s about praying for the sun to stay in the sky for another twenty-four hours so that you can slaughter every last one of your enemies on the battlefield. It’s about hope and despair and insanity and grief and the awesome and terrible Lord of Hosts.
And eerily it can be read as a prophetic satire on the current state of the USA and how they figure in world politics.
These are the days marching toward us with vengeance in their eyes/These are the days racing toward us with blood on their teeth and lips… These are the days that must happen to you.
The last time I heard those lyrics the floodgates in me opened. I cried for about two hours, weeping uncontrollably. My Dad’s a prophet; I grew up with Charismatic Christianity and all the attendant weirdness and bizarre experiences and on-the-edge beliefs. This album could have been written about me. I wanted to write music like this for years. Dad moved to America, my parents broke up last year – listening to this tore all the pent up grief out of my chest and broke through to me where nothing else could.
I needed to cry those tears. This album found them within me. And when you hear how the album ends you’ll be in tears too.
Flyboy once posted to this board that if I were any band I’d be Lift to Experience. It’s always been one of the greatest compliments I’ve ever received.
Just as was told, justice will unfold/Just as was told, justice will unfold/Just as was told, justice will unfold/The truth be told, it will unfold
Josh Pearson lives in a nowhere town in Texas now. I think he cleans toilets for a living. He had a massive crisis of confidence and sacked the other two band members. These days he doesn’t believe that what he accomplished has affected anyone. He doesn’t communicate with the outside world. He’s recorded a demo of songs that are supposed to be as good as anything on this album, but he’s terrified of playing them to anyone or seeing them released.
I’ve got a contact email address for someone associated with him. I want to be his drummer.
I’d write to him if I thought he’d believe me.
We shall be free/we shall be free/we shall be free/we shall be free/we shall be free…
Rise again, Josh.
El-Producto - Fantastic Damage
this is the third installment of a prequel that was never written right/filmed with that classic Brooklyn magic, without Lucasarts graphics/rendered cuddly comic relief creatures or terrible child actors
Fucking class from start to finish. This is a pure hip hop record that wears its influences proudly (Bomb Squad, EPMD, Wu-Tang) and yet still doesn’t sound like anything else from any genre. It epitomises a kind of filthily abrasive futuristic funk I’ve wanted to hear for years (I’m kinda of the opinion that my own band tries to do something similarish from a rock’n’roll angle). While RZA’s sound has always been about fucking up the whole world’s past, all cultures, all styles, El-P’s production is about the kind of lived-in gritty sci-fi that uses all that mashed-up history as the basis for projecting forwards. In his own words: I took a name too, and so it begun/And wrote raps in my room, sipping Capri suns/In fact, studied the cadences of Kool Moe Dee and Rick/Put my name into their rhymes and then practiced it/Put my brain pattern on fly and I mastered it/Daddy played jazz when he drank, it's no accident/Hands on the piano and make my foot tap to it/Different path, same love, Dad, thanks for passing it., compared against: Call it off beat, jagged, ragged, form the pattern/The mere thought of sounding like those who you revere fills me with sadness.
Quite simply, hip-hop can do anything that you’d care to find in any other form of music. It just usually does it better. That’s how it conquered the world. And hip-hop talks about subject matter that’s universal to all other music. It just usually does it faster, funnier, more honestly and with more of a spark in its eye. This album is to most hip hop what hip hop is to most other music (not that it’s better than hip hop, it’s just up there alongside any of the all-time best full-length albums hip hop has to offer). El-P’s flow changes from bounce-along anthemic to a mile-a-minute dwarf-star of ultra compressed references. His stream of consciousness is sometimes mind-bogglingly opaque (all the best hip hop has an element of learning a new language), sometimes all-too clear (the man who raped my sister won’t sleep right tonight). Stepfather Factory has a lyric sheet that reads like Brian Aldiss meets Eminem, while elsewhere Quantum Leap, 1984 and Back to the Future get a look in while we’re treated some positively filthy sex (Dr. Hellno) and a history of how the last squeegee man in New York City got gunned down by the cops. Time travel is the major preoccupation: taking all the Fantastic Damage from the past, all the distorted and altered memories of pain and play, and trying to use it to cause Fantastic Damage in the future, attacking mediocrity and hypocrisy with imagination and resilience. In my humble opinion it’s a contender for the best hip hop album ever made, period.
Don’t take my word for it, though. Listen to it. El-P has a clear message for many on Barbelith:
This is for kids worried about the apocalypse: do something, prepare yourself and stop talking shit.
Johnny Cash – American III: Solitary Man – American IV: The Man Comes Around – Unearthed Boxed Set
A while back Nick Cave was interviewed on the subject of the passing from this world of Johnny Cash. He remarked that he felt that we’re losing legendary vocalists at an alarming rate, and that there’s no-one to take their place. I had a mixed response to that. On the one hand it’s likely that Cave has quite conservative tastes these days, and probably doesn’t realise that people like RZA have as much personality and instant personal mythology as his older heroes. On the other hand it’s totally justifiable to overstate your grief and turn it into a lamentation that the world has lost something irreplaceable.
In many ways I don’t feel qualified to talk about this music. I’m just a bloke writing at a laptop, trying to communicate some of my love of music, some of what it means to me. I have no words in me to describe this voice and this man. So I guess I’ll just try to do this straight without gurning and gushing like I usually do.
Johnny Cash became friends with Rick Rubin in 1993 when Rick asked if he could record his songs. In his Cash’ own words, from the inlay of the Unearthed boxed set, “Rick said, ‘I think if you let me record you singing the songs you love, that you want to sing, that we’re going to find some that the people are going to like and are going to want to buy.’ And I said, ‘How would we go about this?’ and he said, ‘You would take your guitar, sit down in front of a microphone and sing me the songs you love. Just sing me everything you want to record.’”
And that’s it. Most of the songs that came out on American were just Cash and a guitar, recorded simply and without any fuss. It signalled the revitalisation of his career both financially and artistically. Cash was ecstatic to see kids at his shows again, he won awards, he ended his life on a high point having proven himself one last time in the face of all the fuckers. He covered songs by Beck, Will Oldham, Sting, Nick Cave, Nine Inch Nails, Soundgarden, Danzig, U2. He recorded new versions of his older songs, hymns and spirituals from a book his mother used to sing from when he was a child, covers of classics that have become so ingrained into popular culture that we have to be reminded of their worth for all that over-familiarity.
Yesterday morning I tried to compile my favourite songs from his period on American onto my Pocket PC so I could play them in the van. I had space for about a CD and a half, and it was painful trying to cull them down to the amount of memory I had available. In the end I chose the songs that my friends would be most likely to recognise, so that they could marvel, “Cash played this?” as we make our way on whatever journey. I thought being as inclusive as possible would probably be the best way to go.
When Johnny Cash plays a song he plays it best. That’s all you really need to know. There are only a few instances here where the song merely equals the original. Listing the treasure from these sessions would be an exercise in copying the tracklistings of eight CDs.
These CDs make up the last definitive statement of a truly great man, leaving the world at the top of his game.
One last word. I wholeheartedly mean it when I say I’m appalled at the lacklustre contributions to this thread. We’re talking about the moments that will define a decade in music here! Where the fuck is your passion and your enthusiasm?
This is music, and it’s happening right fucking now. This is fucking important. I can’t believe that people on this board are lacking a visceral, vital connection to what they’re listening. I can’t believe that people have posted here with no discernable joy or spirit or depth of relationship to a record.
Talented and brilliant people are continually making music that should shake you to your very core. They put effort and sweat and blood into what they do, apparently just so that it can be purchased by a bunch of bland little fuckers.
Shame on you. |
