Month: October 2016

I’m not saying that Skylarking is the best album in the history of the universe, but I’m not not saying it either. Certainly it’s the finest album XTC have produced. I know precisely when my love affair with XTC began, it was May 3rd, 1987 when MTV played the...

Abbey Road is more or less The Beatles‘ final album1, and it contains some of the group’s strongest work – especially George Harrison, who finally gets his day in the sun. I’m not sure when I got my first copy of Abbey Road. Might have been high school, or...

Here’s where it all began, my lifelong obsession with music. Technically, it was the movie Help! that helped turn me into a music junkie, but we’ll go with the album here. Here’s how it all started. When I was seven, I came home from Sunday school (yes, really) and...

Disintegration is the album that really sold me on The Cure. Yes, I know, I was a bit late to the party. Some of the singles off Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me were too good to ignore, but I wasn’t a big fan of Robert Smith’s voice initially....

A Night at the Opera has some of Queen‘s best-known songs, including “Bohemian Rhapsody.” But what if I told you that “Bohemian Rhapsody” isn’t even the best song on A Night at the Opera, or at least not the most epic? A Night at the Opera has Queen trying...

Fun fact, Aimee Mann is the only musical guest on Buffy to get a speaking part. That has not a lot to do with Lost in Space, except that two songs from the album are played during an episode. There’s a little more to this album than an intersection...

If Robyn Hitchcock hadn’t gone into music, perhaps he’d have become a novelist like his father. His penchant for storytelling shows through heavily in Element of Light. Hitchcock has a pretty solid catalog of music as a solo artist, with his backing bands The Egyptians and The Venus 3,...

Famed Rock critic Robert Christgau called Rubber Soul “when The Beatles began to go arty.” Reductive, perhaps, but also true. Rubber Soul is not as adventurous as Sgt. Pepper or The Beatles, but it brings in elements that the band couldn’t reproduce on stage. And it also deals with...

I had low expectations for New Adventures in Hi-Fi after Monster, but R.E.M. blew it out of the water with this one. From 1983 to 1992, R.E.M. had an unbroken string of fantastic albums, at least by my reckoning. (No pun intended.) To that point, Document was the high-water...

The final album by The Smiths, Strangeways Here We Come is a fitting close to a brief but brilliant career. The Smiths’ star shone brightly and burned out quickly, but they were prolific as Hell for the brief time they were together. Strangeways is their fourth and final album,...